Her Nightly Embrace Read online

  “Those Achari boys are mean little bastards,” Mrs. Dhewan said. “I think I’m going to set some new rules around the neighborhood for our Tamil neighbors.”

  “Is it really necessary to exacerbate the ethnic tensions in the area?”

  “Do not question how I keep the peace on my patch, Ravi.”

  “Understood.”

  Then it was off to dinner with my parents. My mother had confessed her situation to Dad and my taking on her debt. She seemed to time the drama for our weekly dinners for maximum effect.

  “What have you done?” my father bellowed. “You’ve sold our son into indentured slavery to that—that woman!”

  “Dad, calm down. It’s fine.”

  “Fine? That woman is a criminal! What has she got you doing?”

  “Why, my skills as a private investigator, of course. I helped rescue her lost cat the other day.”

  Sanjita suppressed a giggle. Vivek stuffed roti in his mouth.

  “It was Mrs. Achari’s boys. They wanted to hold it for ransom.”

  “Clueless teenagers. As if tension with the Tamils wasn’t bad enough,” Sanjita said.

  “How do you know all that?” Vivek asked.

  “Ravi debriefs me.”

  “So I kept a situation in Mrs. Dhewan’s backyard from escalating,” I said. “In return, she extended the period for paying her back.”

  Dad harrumphed.

  “You see?” Mum said. “Nothing to worry about. Ravi knows what he’s doing.”

  “That doesn’t free him from the debt that you incurred,” Dad said.

  “Well, I did look up her and her family members online, found their social media group page, and discovered that Francis, Mrs. Dhewan’s nephew, was trying to get a loan to buy a house.”

  “Did you do something illegal?” Dad asked, his back up.

  “Not at all. A few months ago, my agency investigated a data breach at United Allied Bank and stopped a hacker from stealing money out of their accounts. United Allied were very grateful, so I called in a favor and helped Francis secure a loan. Mrs. Dhewan was so pleased that she agreed to charge me no interest in the repayment of the loan.”

  “Nice one,” Sanjita said.

  “You see,” Mum said to Dad. “One step at a time.”

  Dad harrumphed.

  The conversation inevitably turned to my job again. I told them about helping Delia McCarthy with her cyberbullying and harassment problem, how it was a fairly mundane and perfectly legal task of sorting through Internet posts and printouts to help her gather evidence to identify the culprits. Mum approved and even Dad didn’t object. Vivek loved the story. Sanjita looked skeptical, like she was expecting the other shoe to drop. I insisted this was a perfectly straightforward case. I’d done my job, and that was that. I suppose I was still seeking my parents’ approval, give me a reality check on my moral compass. Here I was telling them that I was still a good person and doing nothing wrong, that I was helping people so Mum and Dad wouldn’t be disappointed or worried. All in all, I was in a pretty good place by the end of the evening.

  Unfortunately, that changed two days later when Delia McCarthy decided to unleash hell.

  SEVEN

  On my way into Golden Sentinels, I made a call to my GP about getting a new prescription for pills. I didn’t want to see gods, signs, and portents all the time. It was bad enough that my dad being sick was weighing on me, and that seemed to be what had triggered the new visions.

  The first time this happened was when I told Dad and Mum I was giving up my degree in religious studies. I chalked it up to a breakdown. I would see gods on and off ever since. The last time was nearly a year ago when I lost my teaching job. Every time my life turned upside down, this happened. This job, my dad’s illness, my mum’s debts—stess, stress, stress. It all added up. The deeper I got into this job, the more fucked-up situations I was getting involved in, the more the gods were showing up. I should have known, but I was stuck well in now. I needed this job, I needed the money to pay off my own debts and the money Mum owed to Mrs. Dhewan. I’d actually put myself in a position where the gods would pop up in my life, and I was trapped now.

  Marcie was making her presentation to our team. Delia McCarthy was an A-list client, so of course Cheryl gave her the floor. Roger and David were off to South Africa, something about setting up Golden Securities Limited, a South African branch of the firm, but with some fiddling with the paperwork so Roger wouldn’t have to pay extra tax, even though in spirit it would be the South African branch of this firm the same way there was a New York branch, a Chicago branch, a Mumbai branch, a Hong Kong branch, and a Los Angeles Branch. Marcie waited for Benjamin to finish his daily sweep of the office for bugs while everyone else read my report on the cyberbullying campaign against Delia McCarthy.

  Olivia and I didn’t need to because we were the ones who compiled it, after all.

  “We identified a hundred and two individuals who were responsible for over ten thousand posts directed at Delia,” I said. “Many of them created up to five sock-puppet accounts just to make it look like there were more of them ganging up on her. The worst offenders are the six we narrowed down. They actively organized and coordinated the flash mob, so we want to work out who they are. The other key target is a guy who started the whole thing off in the first place: George Rexton.”

  “The author?” Ken and Clive perked up.

  “The very same.”

  George Rexton was a bestselling author of macho thrillers featuring manly ex-army mercenary Van Stark and his ongoing personal war against environmentalist terrorists, homosexual rich kids financing them, and damsels in distress who melted in his arms and onto his dick. The books sold around one hundred thousand copies each, despite hardly ever getting reviewed by the papers. He was a major earner for his publisher despite the lack of mainstream respect for him. Rexton liked to present himself as a hardscrabble, pulled-up-by-the-bootstraps, self-made author, and Delia McCarthy, with her higher public profile, red-carpet lifestyle, and higher book sales, got under his skin by her sheer existence.

  “You can see that he started out arguing with Delia about feminism. That went on for months. He would belittle, defame, tease her. He even wrote about her on his blog. And then you can see that he created three other sock-puppet blogs under other names just to attack her in language he claimed he was too polite to use. The domain names of those blogs were registered to his private company, same as his official blog. Just about all the hundred harassers followed him on Facebook and Twitter. We can tie it all directly and indirectly to him.”

  Julia was reading the report keenly. Cheryl had already read it the night before, since she always reviewed copies along with David to watch for anything that might be incriminating, and the two of them had already apprised Roger of it before I arrived.

  Marcie took over now.

  “So I went over the intel Ravi and Olivia gathered with the client. She was very, very pleased, guys. She’s now fully informed and armed for her next move. We are going, to quote our client, to ‘get the motherfuckers.’ ”

  Well, that was fair enough. We’d gathered enough evidence for Delia to present to the police. She was high profile, and the file was thick enough for them to take action. The UK did have adequate laws against harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech, and there had been enough prosecutions of Internet trolls in the last few years to set a legal precedent. Unlike the United States, we’d sent Internet trolls to jail. It wasn’t going to stop other unhappy and psychopathic dickheads from cyberbullying people, and not all of them would get caught, but it did send the message to society at large that this was not acceptable.

  “We still don’t know exactly who put together and incited the flash mob, though,” I interjected. “It’s one of the other five names on the Most Active list. That’s what we need to find out.”

  “Did you know Delia McCarthy had a degree in psychology before she went into the media?” Marcie said. “We had a lo
ng talk over drinks. She walked me through the personality profiles of the types of people who would troll and harass her online. When they band together, they become a tribe with their own echo chamber, convinced there are no consequences to their actions because they can hide behind their keyboards and anonymity.

  “It’s mostly men, some of them are women. Really fucked-up women. They’re antifeminist and misogynist. Some of them are just dumb teenagers with keyboards. Any female public figure is a target for them, and they chose Delia because she’s on TV almost every day, so they get to ignore the problems of their own little lives and focus all their frustrations and hate on her. As a feminist, Delia has been thinking about this for a long time. She wants to take a stand, not lie back and passively get fucked.”

  Made sense. Delia McCarthy had been an advocate of women’s rights since her music journo days, so she now had a bigger platform than ever to set an example. Good on her.

  “So you all have the troll list. We’re going to hunt them down and fuck them up.”

  Wait, what?

  “This is a surgical strike,” Marcie said.

  “Surgical,” Clive said. “We like that.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that Ken and Clive were taking the meaning literally.

  “Mark, Ravi, here’s where you get to do as little work as possible. You have the minors list.”

  “Shall I put the fear of God into the nasty little kiddies, then?” Mark asked.

  “Start out by texting their phones to let them know you’re onto them and we know who they really are. You phone their homes and talk to their moms. Then contact their schools. Go ahead and release their posts with their names and fake handles attached.”

  “Like demonic telemarketers, we shall venture forth!” Mark declared.

  “What about George Rexton?” I asked.

  “Oh, Delia has something special planned for him,” said Marcie. “Julia, you up for some undercover work, hon?”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Julia hasn’t been properly trained on procedures yet.”

  “Chill, dude,” Marcie said. “This will be low-maintenance. It’s not like we’re sending her to the Middle East. We just want eyes-on confirmation of his computer and domestic setup.”

  Julia shot me a look. She did not want me to rescue her.

  Marcie called in a favor with a friend at Rexton’s publisher to take Julia as an intern, where she would be assigned to help Rexton with getting his new novel ready. The aim here was to get close to Rexton. Julia was very game.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said to her when we had a quiet moment.

  “I’m just there to be a secretary and get information on him,” she said. “It’s not like he’s a serial killer or a murder suspect.”

  This was a classic honeytrap op. Rexton was one of those dysfunctional, pompous writers who drank too much and had a roving eye for the ladies. He’d already been through three marriages, and much of his book earnings were spent on alimony. All of this was on record in the various interviews he had given to newspapers and magazines at the peak of his fame. His novels were steady sellers, and he was a regular fixture at literary festivals and readings. He was adept at using social media to promote his books, which pushed the sales despite the lack of mainstream reviews in the last few years. Julia, with her English Rose looks and long legs, was like crack cocaine to someone like him.

  “I’m fitting a microphone to the button on your blouse and a camera to your pendant,” Benjamin said. “When you get into his office, Olivia will send an email that downloads a virus to his computer.”

  “We’re going to own his computer,” Marcie said.

  “You know,” I said, “given how we’re going to get the evidence of his fuckery, none of it will be admissible in court.”

  “Who says this is going to court?” Marcie said.

  “Is this why you waited till David was out of town to launch this operation?” I said.

  “He didn’t need to hear this.” She shrugged.

  “So the only part of this case that’s investigation is finding the people who organized the flash mob,” I said. “The rest is, what, vigilantism?”

  “That’s a nice way of putting it,” Marcie said, amused as ever.

  “I don’t mean to be the wet blanket here, but Delia McCarthy isn’t really planning to go to the police with this, is she?”

  “Only if she absolutely has to, but no, that’s not part of her plan. She’s a tough Glaswegian chick. They fight their own battles.”

  “So what exactly is her plan again?”

  “What do you do when you go to war? You gather your army, plan your strategy, use every advantage you have at your disposal, which in Delia’s case is her money and us, and attack your enemies until you destroy them utterly. Fairness has nothing to do with it. You totally want to have an unfair advantage over your enemy. Delia is a big fan of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.”

  “But isn’t it a bit too soon to send Julia in undercover? She hasn’t been trained in procedure, dos and don’ts.”

  “I can follow direction, Ravi.”

  “Aren’t you being a bit protective about your girlfriend, mate?” asked Benjamin.

  I hadn’t told anyone at the office Julia was a sex addict. That was her secret, not mine to pass around. My fear was that she might be substituting thrill-seeking for sex, and there was the possibility that she might bonk Rexton. He was exactly the kind of horrible arsehole she would fuck in a moment of self-loathing and compulsion. It would be her way of trying to sabotage our relationship, to prove herself unworthy, and drive me away. I couldn’t promise I would stay with her if she slept with someone else, no matter how much we were getting closer to each other.

  “Are you going to talk me out of it?” Julia asked.

  “Every cell in my body wants to.”

  “I’ll be fine, Ravi.”

  I could feel chaos swirling and bubbling up from this case. At the far wall of the office, I could see Yama, the god of punishment, judgment, and death, leaning on one of the desks, watching us. He tapped his mace on his hand, looking like a headmaster ready to administer a thrashing. I hoped this wasn’t a sign of where this case was going.

  I went back to my desk and popped a pill.

  EIGHT

  My doctor’s office hadn’t called me back about my prescription, so I turned to Mark.

  “No problem, mate.” Of course he happened to have what I needed in his desk, which was a stash of all kinds of psychoactive medication. I gave him fifty quid for it. He didn’t judge, handed me a fresh bottle of mood stabilizers.

  Of course the gods were popping up to watch now. They had a front seat to my increasingly surreal and nasty reality show. After all, I wasn’t just a soap opera of family illness and drama. With these recent cases, I was now swimming in waters most punters didn’t get to see: the lifestyle of the rich, imperiled, and vengeful. Maybe the gods were always there, but it was in my moments of distress that they could manifest rather than stay in the shadows.

  Benjamin gave Mark and me burner phones to call the people on the list. Even Olivia chipped in for a laugh. It went as well as you might expect.

  “Hello, Mrs. Lewis, I’m calling about your son Matthew. Are you aware that he’s been sending rape threats to Delia McCarthy? Yes, her on the television.”

  This usually resulted in profound embarrassment and apologies, a shamed teenager, and solemn promise not to do it again. It reminded me of my days as a teacher.

  “Ms. McCarthy felt you might want to have a serious chat with your son,” Mark purred in his most official-sounding voice. “Rather than bring in the authorities. We thought we’d spare you the grief, and you’d like to take care of it yourself.”

  “I have a little boy myself,” Olivia said, though she did not have any children and wouldn’t for years, if she could help it. “So I know how much of a handful they can be. . . .”

  Between Mark, Olivia, and me, we crossed off the f
irst thirty on the Teenage Shithead List by lunchtime.

  We didn’t always contact the mothers. We also texted the trolls themselves, addressing them by their real names and repeating what they had posted on Delia’s timeline. This was often enough to have them pissing their pants, especially after we let them know we knew where they lived. These were usually fourteen- or sixteen-year-olds, so the threat of exposing them to their parents and the world at large was usually enough.

  As for the adults, the truly obnoxious, the unrepentant and hateful, Olivia went hard-core. She had already gotten their basic information before, so it wasn’t hard to send them viruses and worms that nuked their computers. All it took was a file attachment and a bit of social engineering, and she effectively owned their lives. Emails, photos, videos, credit cards, bank account information—Olivia saw it all. She held their computers hostage, froze their whole system, and put up a window on the screen that told them if they wanted control of their computers back, they had to upload a photo of themselves holding up a sign apologizing for threatening Delia McCarthy with their phones. She made them think it was the Russian Mafia that was fucking with them. Their fear was palpable even in their texts to Olivia’s burner phone. It was quite gratifying. Once she saw proof they’d sent their apology photos, she released their computers. She found child porn on two of the computers, and anonymously forwarded the information to the police.

  I had no problem being an instrument of retribution and karmic payback. For Mark, this was a nice diversion before his next spliff. Olivia took to playing Nemesis with particular relish.

  It was probably just as well Delia was only well-known in the UK, so her harassment had all been from British scumbags. If she had been American, it would probably have encompassed the whole of the United States as well, racking up hundreds of trolls across two continents. Being confined to the UK kept the numbers relatively small. What still worried me was the rest of our campaign. Ken and Clive had been given a list of addresses—and had been allowed to run amok.