Her Fugitive Heart Read online

  “That was at Mom’s behest.”

  “Vanessa managed to out-diva nearly all the other supermodels on the scene,” Marcie said.

  I remembered the magazine articles: copious plastic surgery (apparently, someone had started a website detailing which body part and when), shoplifting, trashing hotel rooms with rock star boyfriends, catfights at Bergdorf’s, screaming matches with rivals at restaurants, and a contract she was rumored to have tried to take out on a fashion designer who failed to ask her to model his fall line (no charges were filed against her. All actual charges were settled out of court with financial payouts from Daddy and nondisclosure agreements). Vanessa certainly supplied Marcie with a steady stream of gossip.

  “I’m turning over a new leaf here in London,” Vanessa said. “Dad’s lawyers kept a lot of unsubstantiated stories about me off of the front pages of the tabloids.”

  She still got up to her usual antics whenever she spent a weekend in New York, but overall, the city party scene became a little more sedate with her away in London. That she’d made it to grad school was a kind of testament to her academic abilities, but then nobody ever said she was stupid, just batshit-insane. Maybe it was a matter of her finding something to which she could apply herself.

  “What can I say?” Vanessa said. “I’m used to people doing shit for me, answering my beck and call.”

  “It’s not really her fault,” Marcie said.

  “As Philip Larkin wrote,” I said, “your mum and dad, they fuck you up. They don’t mean to but they do.”

  “That is soooo right!” Vanessa said.

  Here she was, the boozy, druggy debutante abroad, motivated solely by hedonism. How much of this was an act? She was putting on a show for Marcie and me to cover up the fact that she had been fucking a wanted terrorist. Not even one mention of her joining the Socialist Workers Party or talk of politics at all this evening.

  I talked a bit about my short-lived career in academia when I did religious studies, then my years teaching secondary school before I lost that job. She talked about liking London since people still took books and reading seriously here. She wanted to pitch to the editor of one of her father’s more prestigious magazines to write some feature article on Americans in London and the shifting attitudes of the British towards them since World War II. Funny how everything was getting a little incestuous in the usual way.

  “Yeah,” she said and laughed. “Our worlds get awfully small, right? Funny how everybody knows everybody here.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  We continued the small talk for a little while longer, with Marcie playing my wingman.

  I asked her how her classes were. It felt like uni all over again, when you met someone new and the first thing you asked them was what they were majoring in. She talked about the year abroad program she was doing at the London School of Economics, hence her easy access to the bars of Soho after class. I did the usual “I did international relations, too” routine to establish commonality and rapport. Her eyes seemed to light up, and we chatted about the books we read and that the European newspapers had a more interesting perspective than even the Washington Post or the New York Times, and she had a bit of a moan about which of her professors were the most pompous, and how British academics could be even more snobby than American ones were.

  Bagalamukhi sat with us and listened closely to my act of social engineering. She would just call it deception.

  I was doing my best to keep her preoccupied and entertained while Ken and Clive were breaking into her apartment. It would not be a good idea for her to get back to find them rummaging through the place and probably grappling with al-Hassah 2.0. I really hoped they wouldn’t end up killing this one. I prayed that they wouldn’t be performing any more neck-snapping or whatever other method of human disposal for the foreseeable future, or at least the rest of this evening.

  As the evening wore on, the mood between us started to wind down, but I kept up the conversation as long as I could.

  “Gotta run,” Marcie said. “Meeting in the morning.”

  She said a quick good-bye and left me alone with Vanessa.

  “Wanna go back to my place for a drink?” she said, finally.

  “I should be heading back as well,” I said.

  I hoped I’d given Ken and Clive enough time to get in and out of her flat by now.

  “Whoa,” Vanessa said. “I think I drank maybe a little too much. Do you mind sharing a cab with me to get home?”

  SIXTEEN

  We took a black cab back to Earl’s Court.

  “Your heart’s beating real fast,” she said as she leaned into me.

  My brain was racing as I pondered my options. I hoped I wasn’t going to have to sleep with her to maintain my cover. Sex was her way of appraising someone who didn’t bore her. It was almost a formality, so she’d know something about you when you next met up. I was going to have to make up some excuse to get out of it and leave. I had a wedding coming up, to a woman I loved, and I really, really did not fancy having it off with someone who loved another man so much she was hiding his dismembered parts around her flat.

  I looked around the street when we got out of the cab and waited for her to unlock the front door.

  We walked up the stairs arm-in-arm like it was a first date. I prayed our people were out of her apartment by now. Then we noticed the door to her flat was ajar. She tensed up.

  “Get behind me,” I said as I slowly pushed the door open.

  There were no sounds from the inside, so I hoped no one was there.

  What we walked into was what you’d expect. It was the least I was expecting.

  “Oh my Gaaaaahhhh!” she squealed. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

  Her apartment looked like a hurricane had hit it.

  And I knew the name of that hurricane: Ken and Clive.

  The furniture and papers had been tossed, breakable things like vases had been broken—everything you’d want in a break-in scenario. No one was in the flat.

  “Eewww!” she said. “They even took a shit on the carpet!”

  Knowing Ken and Clive, that was probably a dog turd they’d picked up rather than one that either of them produced. They’d faked countless burglaries before on various cases and knew that a forensics team could extract DNA for a positive ID from shit. Ken and Clive always said that leaving a turd made a burglary look more horribly authentic. They knew all kinds of ways to fake forensic evidence from their days as coppers.

  “It’s a control thing,” I said. “It’s their way of asserting dominance over the territory.”

  “That’s so gross!” she said. “Ew! Ew! Ew!”

  “I think the police will want you to leave things be, preserve the crime scene and all that.”

  “I’m not gonna sit around with a fresh dump in the middle of my living room.”

  “Can’t say I blame you.”

  She started pacing around the flat, looking over the place—into and out of the kitchen, into and out of the bedroom. I realized that al-Hassah 2.0 wasn’t in the apartment. That set off a whole avalanche of questions in my head over where he could have gone, whether Ken and Clive could had taken him, whether he was still breathing. I really hoped they didn’t commit another murder.

  “God damn it,” Vanessa shouted as she stormed out of the bedroom. “It’s gone!”

  “What’s gone?”

  “Something personal! Motherfucker took it! The most personal thing in my whole fucking life!”

  “We better call the police.”

  “Yeah, guess we should.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to be here,” I said. “We can go someplace and call from there.”

  “Fuck that. I’m staying right here.”

  “Okay.”

  She switched on her cellphone and walked into her bedroom to talk. When she came out, she was different. A kind of steely determination had come over her, rather than the kind of shock and anxiety you’d expect from somebo
dy who’d just been broken into and felt violated.

  “They’ll be here in about fifteen minutes.”

  She planted herself down on the sofa and sat with her back rigid and straight. I sat down next to her and thought about putting an arm around her to comfort her, but I didn’t get the feeling she wanted to be touched or comforted. I felt sorry for her, that she should be caught up in the middle of this.

  “Do you have someplace else to stay?” I asked.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “You might be in shock.”

  Her lips curled into a smile, like what I’d said was the most inane thing in the world. It probably was. She just sat there and contemplated the dog turd as if it were an art installation that had somehow popped up in the middle of her living room. We sat together in silence, staring at it, since there was nothing else to do at that time.

  The buzzer went off.

  “Finally,” she said, and got up to let the cops in.

  She stood by the door as we listened to the footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “C’mon in, guys,” she said.

  Only it wasn’t cops who came in, but three large and surly men in jeans and hoodies who looked like a rejected Asianbeat hip-hop group.

  “That’s him,” she said, pointing at me.

  I was too shocked to move, just sat there as my brain did backflips to revise all the questions in my head. She must have been on to me all along. Al-Hassah 2.0 either ran or Ken and Clive had taken him. Judging from the mess around the living room, there was some sort of struggle. What did she mean when she mentioned the “most personal thing in her life”? The body?

  Ken and Clive had finally, well and truly, landed me in the shit. They had all the cards at this point: the al-Hassah Assembly Kit and al-Hassah 2.0. They could easily call up Marcie and throw themselves at her mercy, with these offerings to deal their way out of trouble. Unless they stuck to the plan.

  “Who are you?” Vanessa said. “MI5? Or are you a CIA asset?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I made you the moment I laid eyes on you, motherfucker. You think I don’t know the way you were subtly interrogating me? Marcie knows you, so you must be a spook like her. Now it’s my turn.”

  I had to endure a short beating before a hood was put over my head.

  SEVENTEEN

  We British have a very apt euphemism for when things go horribly wrong: “gone pear-shaped.”

  It not only makes you think of the fruit in question, but also conjures an image of a situation succumbing to gravity in the worst way. Things going south. Shit going down.

  I think “pear-shaped” was an apt description for the situation I was in at that moment. It should’ve been so simple: blah blah blah get bad guy, blah blah blah rescue girl, blah blah blah collect money, blah blah blah go home. Somehow, none of these goals had been met, and none were very likely to be realized at this point.

  By the time I was bundled into a car, driven around for God knows how long, dragged out into a building, then tied to a chair and the hood removed from my head, I was in a badly heated space I thought was either a garage or a backroom someplace. There was no way of telling where I was, if I was even still in London. I could feel the bruises forming around my face and my jaw where they’d hit me. They’d taken my phone, but when they tried to unlock it, it bricked itself, one of the security measures Benjamin and Olivia had concocted to keep out anyone trying to get the information off our phones. That also meant I had no way to call for help.

  This was the perfect time to start feeling sorry for myself, and naturally, I seized the moment. I wished I had another life, cooped up at home writing reviews of boring novels about middle-class English people and their midlife crises. I wished I’d never gotten into the private investigations business. I wished I’d never followed the course I’d chosen in my ridiculous life. I wished I didn’t have the mental issues I had. I wished I was in a cushy, dull teaching job in academia, worrying about cutbacks and tenure while still working on my religious studies PhD thesis examining different faiths and mythologies. I wished I was in an amusing but trivial academic feud with a professor just because I had said something sarky about him in print, because that kind of war was fought with keyboards and long-winded arguments, maybe even on social media, and not with fists or blunt instruments.

  I’d caught my abductors’ names by then: Baz, Amir, and Zeb. Zeb was actually white, looked English. They were barely out of their teens, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous. Great. I was a prisoner of the chav homegrown wannabes. Whichever group they were from, I was about to have a really crappy time.

  Vanessa van Hooten came in and looked at me.

  “Is he ready?” she asked.

  They nodded as she shrugged off her winter coat.

  “Oh, good God,” I said. “Are you cosplaying Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS?”

  Vanessa van Hooten was dressed all in black leather. She was playing a role as much to put on a show for these lads as for me. She was using her sexuality to keep the lads hooked, but she herself was living out a kind of fantasy here. She was utterly mad. I had the feeling she had taken a leave of absence from reality. Or maybe she’d done so a long time ago.

  “Is this something you’re into? I’m really sort of vanilla in my tastes . . .”

  “Shut up,” she snarled.

  “You know, there are men who would pay good money for this sort of treatment, but I’m not one of them.”

  “Well, you’re getting it for free, and for real.”

  “Nothing’s free, Vanessa.”

  “You’re right. You’re going to give it up for us in return.”

  “Give what up?”

  She slapped me in the face.

  The gods weren’t here. That was odd. Or perhaps that was how it should be. They were just in my head all along, and now that reality had overtaken the most outrageous thoughts in my head, they had gone away. Which meant that I was doomed.

  “You son of a bitch. You didn’t think I might have stuck my head out the window and seen your buddies grab Hassan off the street last night? You didn’t think I could’ve jumped in my car and followed you to where you took him?”

  “Who’s Hassan?”

  Slap!

  “Can you stop that? This is going to get old pretty fast.”

  Slap!

  “Where are they?”

  “Where are who?”

  Slap!

  “You know who!”

  “Do me a favor!”

  Slap!

  “I know you’re MI5!”

  “You what, love?!”

  This wasn’t exactly Standard Operating Procedure in Basic Interrogation. There was no real attempt to manipulate me or soften me up with coercion, nor did any of these guys try playing Good Cop to Vanessa’s Dominatrix Bad Cop. In fact, she should’ve been playing Good Cop, since she was clearly the leader, and had them play Bad Cop, as she was more likely to gain my trust than they were.

  Which meant this lot was a bunch of amateurs.

  Which meant I was in really deep shit.

  Amateurs were not well trained. Amateurs were not good at gauging the tolerance levels of their subjects. Amateurs make mistakes, such as accidentally killing the target during interrogation.

  “Who do you work for?” she asked.

  “I’m a freelancer.”

  “Bullshit! Freelancers don’t do high-profile extraction or wetwork!”

  “What are you talking about!”

  “Yeah, right!” she snorted. “It wasn’t you who killed the only man I ever loved. It was your buddy, and you’re all just following orders. It’s nothing personal. Well, it’s fucking personal to me!”

  “Where did you find these guys anyway?” I said. “On the Internet? Did they get radicalized from all those websites?”

  “They’re local boys, hiding in plain sight. They were more than happy to join up after they learned all about the war on Islam and how the
West is targeting them for extinction.”

  “Yeah, bruv!” Amir said. “Kill or be killed.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not what the Koran teaches,” I said.

  “What do you know about the Koran?” Baz said. “You’re an infidel.”

  “Have you actually read the Koran?” I said. “I have.”

  “You’re wasting your breath,” Vanessa said. “All they’ve seen are the torture photos from the black-site prisons that the CIA inflicted on their fellow Muslims, and they’re totally up for a little payback.”

  “So, what, these local lads just answered a recruitment ad on the Dark Web?” I said.

  My plan here was to keep them all talking, because then at least they’d be busy listening to me instead of torturing me.

  “You’re not in a position to ask questions here, motherfucker,” she said. “And you haven’t answered any of ours.”

  “Look, if you want to ask me about comparative religion, fire away. Otherwise, I don’t know shit.”

  Slap!

  “Listen, honey, these guys are pretty pissed off about you and your buddies messing my shit up, and they want him back, so you better cut the bullshit.”

  So they didn’t know he was dead. She didn’t tell them. She merely activated them and told them they were needed for a mission.

  “Is this being videotaped for an Internet fetish porn site? ’Cause if it is, aren’t you supposed to get me to sign a waiver? And give me a safe word? And pay me?”

  Slap!

  “You know and I know you’re a fucking spook, so stop playing being an asshole and spill already!” she snarled.

  “Spook?” I was still drawing it out.

  “She means spy, bruv,” Zeb said.

  “He’s just playing for time,” Vanessa said, irritated that she had to spell out everything to them.

  “How would you know that? Unless you’re a spook yourself,” I said.

  “Cut the bullshit,” she said.

  “Really,” I said. “Who are you really working for?”

  “That’d be telling. Why don’t you take a wild fucking guess?”

  I took a wild fucking guess and arrived at only one place.