Her Fugitive Heart Read online

  “Sorry,” he said. “So then, we waited for al-Hassah to leave the flat and tailed him in the car. It was after two a.m. when he walked out. You know an operation of this type usually takes months to plan, yeah? Months of surveillance and psychological profiling, months of field-testing alternate scenarios and backup plans, months of mapping the target’s movements and habits, months of debating over the best method of liquidation, whether by guns, knives, poisons, or faked ‘natural causes,’ months to choose the best location in which to carry out the mission—”

  “Benjamin!”

  “Okay! Okay! Here we were with an opportunity brought on totally by sheer dumb luck, an opportunity we would probably never get again if we let it pass, and we were going to have to improvise. We are good at improvising.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir here, Benjamin,” I said. “But the more you say that, the more doubtful I’m getting, and I already know you’re good at it.”

  “All right, we watched the street outside the flat to see if there was anyone else watching it. It looked clear. Ken got out of the car and walked across the street to scan the vicinity for any potential hostiles. Clive and I stayed in the car and looked out for any cars that might have pulled up to the building or circled the block more than once. The coast was clear. Could-be al-Hassah really was on his own tonight, which continued to make me doubt it was actually him.

  “I started up the car and drove slowly behind Maybe al-Hassah. Ken walked around the corner so that he would end up walkin’ towards the man as he came down the street. I had to time my speed for what we were about to pull off.

  “Ken shambled up in his suit and tie, looking like some businessman who’d had a bit too much to drink, so our target wouldn’t consider him a threat. At least, not till Ken broke into a smile, threw out his arms, and greeted him like an old friend he hadn’t seen for a while. Of course, the target was completely taken by surprise, and Ken kept him off-balance by ranting about how long it had been since they last met, how about going for a drink and all that, closing in on him as he did, lookin’ like he was about to give the guy a hug. That was when I pulled up alongside them.

  “As al-Hassah started to back away from him, Ken delivered a quick punch to his throat, which cut off his air supply and doubled him over, in time for Clive to throw the back door open and for Ken to shove him into the car without any resistance.

  “If any cameras caught this, it would’ve looked like Ken and Clive were meetin’ a drunken friend and helping him into a car. Thank fuck I made it a point to use fake license plates so there wouldn’t be any way to trace the car if the police ever bothered to. And we were off.”

  EIGHT

  “So we were speedin’ off,” Benjamin said. “And al-Hassah was asking the usual questions like ‘Who are you?’ and ‘What do you want with me?’ before settling into the usual ‘I have money’ and so on. I watched him via the rearview mirror as I drove. Ken and Clive were practically on top of the guy in the backseat of the car, smiling and laughing like it was all one big joke. I was startin’ to get suspicious because he wasn’t frightened enough. There just wasn’t the right amount of fear and panic in his eyes, which is what you would expect if someone were suddenly abducted off the street by two complete strangers, especially if they were large, built like brick shithouses, and bearing down on you like a couple of lions over a gazelle.

  “Then Clive said something to him in Arabic that made him freeze. It was a secret code name al-Hassah’s network used to refer to him, which Clive knew about when he was in the army. Suddenly, the bastard’s mask dropped. The panicked civilian façade fell away and his face became hard and tried to assume an air of authority.

  “Fuck me, it was really him!

  “I’d never been up close to a terrorist mastermind before, and I have to say he didn’t look any different or special than anyone else. No buggy, bloodshot eyes, no foaming at the mouth, no furry white cat to stroke provocatively.”

  “He’s not a stereotype anime villain, Benjamin,” I said.

  “Instead, we had here what looked like a dapper businessman in his fifties with good taste in suits and spoilt young blondes. He was so ordinary it was almost blinding. Imagine my disappointment. Pop culture has a lot to answer for, I can tell you.”

  “Too right,” Clive said.

  “Anyway,” Benjamin said. “Al-Hassah’s demeanor relaxed as he believed he was back in a situation he understood and had some control over. He was a Saudi prince, after all, with all the arrogance and entitlement you would expect, and he looked at Ken and Clive with the same contempt and disdain he would give to any hired help that accidentally spilled a drink on his lap.

  “ ‘You don’t know what you are getting into,’ said al-Hassah in perfect English. ‘For that, I pity you.’

  “ ‘Oh yeah?’ said Clive.

  “ ‘You obviously have not been properly briefed,’ the bastard said. ‘I am to be let free, to go about my business. This is not the time. For the sake of you and your country, I urge you to let me go. It is bigger than both of you.’

  ‘ “That’s what they all say,’ said Ken. ‘I got news for you, sunshine. This is the end of the line for you.’

  “ ‘You are making a terrible mistake,’ said al-Hassah. ‘You are disobeying your orders. If you do anything to me, you will be severely punished.’

  “ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Ken and Clive, just rollin’ their eyes.

  “I might have been tempted to say somethin’, but I was too busy doin’ the drivin’ and watchin’ to make sure we weren’t being tailed. I did wonder about the way he was talkin’ to us, and I probably should’ve asked him a couple of questions, but I was a little preoccupied at the time.

  “Meanwhile, Ken and Clive were really gettin’ into it.”

  “Getting into what?” I asked.

  “ ‘You think you’re so smart, don’t ya? Well, there’s no one to help you now,’ they were sayin’. ‘We can do anything the fuck we want to ya. Nobody knows where you are, nobody knows who you’re with. We can keep you alive for days, do you over like all those poor buggers you killed, eh?’

  “I saw al-Hassah’s eyes in the mirror. He had the kind of panic setting in for people who know they’re screwed. That was when he made a lunge for the door. Ken and Clive anticipated this and grabbed him before he opened the door and punched him twice in the face before pullin’ out the duct tape. The next ten minutes was mostly the sound of tape ripping as they secured al-Hassah from head to toe, with a tape over his mouth to shut him up and his arms strapped to his side, his knees and ankles together, and the rest of the drive proceeded in silence.

  “When we reached the secluded part of the wooded area, I turned the engine off.”

  NINE

  “ ‘Ken, Clive, we need to talk. In private.’

  “ ‘Excuse us, we’ll be right back,’ they said to al-Hassah, who, with his mouth all taped up, was in no position to object.

  “We walked out of the car and stood a few feet away. I reminded Ken and Clive that we hadn’t quite thought this through, like where we were going to hold the fucker before we turned him in, and how we were going to get the authorities to believe us. Because, you know, it just looked like we’d kidnapped a Middle Eastern man, and it would look like a race-related hate crime. And who the fuck were we supposed to hand him over to anyway?”

  “We wasted fuckin’ time arguin’,” Ken said.

  “We were tryin’ to tell Benjamin we had it all under control,” Clive said. “This was not the first scumbag we kidnapped and disappeared—”

  “We don’t need to know that!” I said.

  “But we had to convince little nervous nelly Benjamin here that Ken and I always have contingencies for doin’ this sort of thing, so we could hold him until we sorted out where to take him.”

  “And just when we got Benjamin calmed down, we turned back to the car to find bloody al-Hassah had managed to jump out,” Ken said.

>   “Somehow,” Benjamin said, “al-Hassah, even taped up in the car as he was, must’ve managed to wriggle his hand over and gotten the door open and was now hopping away in the darkness. Ken and Clive were all ‘Shit! Oy! Come back here!’ ”

  “Al-Hassah turned and saw us coming, panicked, and tried to hop faster, which made him lose his balance and fall over,” Ken said.

  “So there we were,” Clive said. “Scramblin’ after our quarry, who was rolling horizontally down a steep slope like a runaway log. Most of it was forward momentum and I don’t think he was in control, given that his arms and ankles were taped up.”

  “Ken was callin’ ‘Bad boy! Bad boy!’ like he was a naughty dog runnin’ off,” Benjamin said.

  “How high was that slope anyway?” Clive said.

  “Pretty fuckin’ high,” Ken said. “We got our answer when I tripped, fell into Clive, knocked him over, and the two of us ended up rolling down the hill after al-Hassah.”

  “We shouldn’t have worried so much,” Clive said. “Since al-Hassah finally stopped when he crashed into a tree and we crashed into him. The next thing I recalled was a flurry of flailing limps and frenzied strugglin’.”

  “I was still at the top of the slope,” Benjamin said. “So I couldn’t see anything down there. All I heard was Ken and Clive effin’ and blindin’, goin’ ‘Grab his legs!’ ‘He’s squirmin’!’ ‘Fuck! He’s slippery!’ ‘He’s kickin’!’ ”

  “We had ’im,” Ken said.

  “Yeah,” Clive said. “It was like wrestling with an eel.”

  “All right,” I said. “So you got him. What’s the problem?”

  Ken and Clive suddenly looked sheepish.

  “What?” I said.

  “Just tell him,” Benjamin said.

  “We were just carryin’ him back up to the car, yeah?” Clive said.

  “It should have been easy,” Ken said.

  “But he was bloody squirmin’,” Clive said. “And he made the three of us go tumblin’ down the slope again. Ken and I were strugglin’ to keep a hold on ’im. To get a better grip on ’im, I tried to wrap me arms around him and sort of got his neck and head in a chokehold.”

  “You didn’t . . .” I said.

  “I didn’t bloody do it on purpose,” Clive said. “But . . .”

  “I heard it at the top of the slope,” Benjamin said. “It was that fuckin’ loud.”

  “Just like that,” Ken said. “Snap!”

  “You broke his neck,” I said, barely believing the words coming out of my mouth.

  “Arms like Clive’s around your neck,” Benjamin said. “Would have been like twistin’ the cap off a beer bottle.”

  “He was gettin’ right on my tits,” said Clive.

  “You killed him in anger?” I said, keeping my voice as low as possible.

  “I was just trying to hold onto ’im,” Clive said.

  “We sat on top of him for another fifteen minutes,” Ken said. “Just to be sure he’d really snuffed it. We listened for the death rattle, which came in due course. There was the usual smell of bowels giving out. Murder is dirty, ugly, poopy business, Ravi. I can tell ya.”

  “I wandered over to a tree and threw up,” Benjamin said. “Then walked back to the car. Ken and Clive carried the body back up and put it in the boot. Then they lit up a fuckin’ cigarette like it was postcoital or something.”

  “Look,” Ken said, “it was tirin’ work.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered.

  “We had to stash the body,” Clive said. “We couldn’t very well leave it in a clearing or bury it, since there was always a chance of some jogger stumbling on it or a dog digging it up. We have a storage garage in West London not far from our flat, so we drove down there, wrapped al-Hassah in plastic, and stuck him into the freezer.”

  “This was strictly a short-term measure,” Ken said. “Since we knew we would probably need access to it later.”

  “I took a few hair samples off the head and put them in a small Baggie for the DNA testing and confirmation,” Benjamin said.

  “ ’Ere, we saved the fuckin’ world and no one knows it was us,” Clive said. “Yeah, typical, but I can live with that.”

  “But in the end, you were there for me, mate. We did it! Come here!” Ken said.

  Ken and Clive hugged Benjamin right there.

  Kali, Shiva, and Bagalamukhi applauded behind me. I think I was in shock. Julia just sat there, eyes rapt.

  “Not to break up this very emotional moment, chaps,” I said, “but why are you fucking telling me all this? Why do I need to know?”

  “Er, well,” Ken said. “We were hopin’ you might talk to Marcie for us.”

  “For what?”

  “Do you know how fuckin’ scary she can be?” Benjamin said. “Especially if you piss her off?”

  “What makes you think she’ll be pissed off” I asked.

  “The CIA wants al-Hassah alive, remember?” Clive said. “And we fucking killed him.”

  “This means whatever they wanted from him, whatever intel they can get from debriefing him is lost,” Benjamin said.

  “She might decide to have us sent to bloody Guantánamo Bay,” Ken said.

  “Technically,” Julia said, “it’ll probably be a black site in Romania or something.”

  “Or just have us bumped off,” Clive said.

  “Oh, come off it,” I said.

  “We’re not kidding,” Benjamin said. “We are up shit creek because we just blew the CIA’s plans. They’re not very forgiving about that sort of thing.”

  “Maybe we should buy the first ticket to Mexico or somethin’ . . .” Ken said.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “The Agency has people in Mexico, and besides, it puts you closer to Guantánamo Bay.”

  “Oh yeah, right. We’re fucked, aren’t we?” Clive said.

  I thought for a moment.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. You’re going to have to bluff it out somehow.”

  “What are you on about?” Ken said.

  “Here’s the easiest solution: Drag the body out, leave it somewhere, make it look like he died in some accident or mugging or something. Call Roger and tell him you got a tip about the body. Get paid. End of story,” I said.

  “But what about the reward?” Benjamin said.

  “Unless you’re able to bring the poor bastard back to life and march him through the doors of the US Embassy, I don’t see a lot of other options for collecting it right now,” I said.

  “What if, you know, we give ’em what he had on ’im at the time?” Ken said.

  “Like what? I don’t remember him carryin’ any computer when we nabbed ’im,” Benjamin said.

  “Then you’ll just have to settle for reporting the body,” I said.

  “Or retrace his steps and see if he dropped his laptop somewhere,” Julia said.

  “That’s not going to work,” Ken said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “There’s another problem,” Benjamin said.

  TEN

  I’ll let Benjamin tell the rest of the story, since I was already getting a headache:

  After Roger made the announcement this morning, we drove the work car back to Ken and Clive’s lockup in West London. The place was huge, used to be owned by one of London’s crime families through a shell company, but since the family got nicked, the ownership had been tied up in paperwork for the last few years. Ken and Clive knew all about the dodgy paperwork and swung it so they came to pretty much own the place under a shell company, something Roger taught them how to do. They reckoned it was a useful place to stash dead people during an emergency. That’s right, this wasn’t the first time they’d hidden a stiff, let alone in this place. Even in the daytime, the place was amazingly quiet and secluded, considering it was only a few blocks away from the swankier parts of Notting Hill, where the media mafia and glitterati hang out. We parked the car and Clive unlocked the front door.

  “There
’s something I should tell you first,” he said.

  “Look,” I said. “We all know what we have to do, and we can pretty much kiss our chances of claiming that twenty million good-bye.”

  “Yeah,” he said, subdued.

  “Okay,” I said. “First thing we should do is—Fuck me!”

  “What’s wrong?” Ken said.

  “What’s—? Where do I start?”

  The far end of the lockup, where the metal worktable was, had been smeared with blood, like Jack the Ripper had taken up finger painting while on a cocaine jag. If I hadn’t been shitting myself by then, I might have thought there was a kind of abstract expressionist beauty to the way the crimson was smeared and spattered all over the wall and the floor, and if we had decided to submit the tableau as an art installation, it would probably have qualified for a Turner Prize. But no, at that moment, all I could think about was how much deeper in the shit we were than I had originally thought.

  “Ken? Clive?” I said very calmly. “What the fuck did you do?”

  “Stay calm, mate,” Ken said.

  “What happened here?” I was still perfectly calm.

  “Well, after you left, we were still awake from all the adrenaline, yeah? So we decided to, well, take the initiative a bit and . . . cut up the body with a chainsaw,” Clive said.

  “I see,” I said, still very calm. “Were you bored already? After everything else we went through last night?”

  “We just thought he’d be easier to transport, if he was, you know, in more conveniently transportable pieces . . .” Ken said.

  “Listen, lads,” I said, very calmly. “I’m up for a chainsaw massacre as much as the next bloke, but how do you suppose we’re going to explain that?”

  “Weren’t we going to say he met with some trouble or had an accident or somethin’?”

  “Oh,” I said, calmly, “you mean like he went for a walk in the middle of the night and ran into a bunch of muggers who happened to be armed with chainsaws?”

  “Stop yelling at us, Ben,” Clive said.

  “I’m not yellin’,” I said, totally not yellin’.