Her Fugitive Heart Read online

  “Oh, Christ,” I said. “But didn’t you, like, join the Socialist Workers Party a couple of months ago and wear burkas in sympathy with Muslim women and all that stuff?”

  “Totally. What better cover than joining the most incompetent, irrelevant, and worthless left-wing political party around? You’ll be completely under everyone’s radar.”

  “But you were recruited by the CIA, weren’t you?” I said. “As an asset. Do these guys know they’re really working for a CIA asset here?”

  “Nah, bruv,” Amir said. “This is the beauty part, yeah? She turn double-agent-like, yeah? She’s workin’ for the cause now. The leader vouched for her.”

  Ah. They must have met the double.

  “I’ve proven myself to them,” Vanessa said. “We’re bonded.”

  “She proved herself and everything, yeah,” Baz said.

  Christ, his tone meant she’d had sex with them. That was how she’d gotten them doing her bidding. They were already pliable idiots, and sex made them even more stupid.

  “I have one more question,” I said.

  “Shoot,” she said.

  “Isn’t this a school night?”

  “Yeah, I have class in the morning. In fact, I have to hand in a paper, but I already cribbed one off the Internet. Anyway, I need my beauty sleep, which is why I’m leaving you in the capable hands of Zeb, Amir, and Baz here.”

  She turned to leave.

  “Hey!” I cried.

  “What?”

  “Come back here.”

  I indicated I wanted a private word. She ordered the men to stand in the corner and turn away from us, then tilted her ear to my mouth.

  “Did you follow my mates to the garage?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I knew it,” I said. “Then you’re the one who took the body after they left, aren’t you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “These guys don’t know the real al-Hassah’s dead, do they?” I asked. “You went in and collected the body parts yourself before you called up the Junior Jihad Brigade and got the double to order them to ambush my colleagues in the lockup, didn’t you?”

  I could see her face go red.

  “These guys think the double’s the real one, but he’s just going to be a figurehead, isn’t he? You’re juggling too many grenades here, Vanessa.”

  “I had practice. I used to be a model in New York and Paris. So where is he?”

  “Which one?”

  “Both. But the dead one. I want the head. Just the head.”

  I suddenly had a vision of Ken and Clive waltzing back to the office with al-Hassah’s head in a shopping bag. Somehow, I did not find this the most comforting image in the world.

  “What do you want it for?”

  “I LOVE HIM, MOTHERFUCKER!” Her shriek made even the men jump. “AND NOW HE’S DEAD! I AM GOING TO FUCK YOUR FUCKING CITY UP FOR THAT!”

  “Yeah!” the three stooges cried in unison.

  “Wait, you’re going to bomb London?” I said.

  She didn’t need to say yes. The look on her face was the answer.

  “Al-Hassah didn’t tell you to do this,” I said. “This is your idea. And you convinced these geniuses to go along with you?”

  “They’re into it.”

  “Even though it has nothing to do with Jihad or martyrdom? This is just stupid,” I said.

  “They’re not gonna listen no matter what you say. They just wanna torture you. Payback for Western foreign policy declaring war on Islam. This is what you British intelligence fucks have been up to. They know. I’m going to have fun watching you die, after I finish blowing up London.”

  “By the time you get back, I’ll already be dead.”

  “I’ll just watch the video. You can bet they’ll circulate it on the Web.”

  As she put on her coat, a thought occurred to her that she just had to share with me.

  “You know, they’ll probably cut your head off. Muslims believe that your body has to be intact for you to enter Heaven. A beheading is considered the ultimate defilement, since it condemns you to Hell or Purgatory. Consider it karmic payback.”

  “I know far too much about karma.”

  “Well, I am going to be London’s karma, and karma’s a bitch,” she said. “We’re going to give them the payback they deserve.”

  She turned and walked out.

  Now it was time for Amir, Baz, and Zeb to advance towards me.

  “You know, all this isn’t really necessary,” I said. “I’ll tell you what you need to know, which isn’t much, actually.”

  They didn’t look like they cared.

  “Okay, okay, do you really want to perpetuate this cycle?” I said. “The thing is, the cycle is endless! That’s why it’s a cycle! It’s going to keep going after we’re gone, because the system of subterfuge and deception was designed to be self-sustaining and self-perpetuating! You kill us or we kill you, there’s always going to be people who will carry on after us! There’s always going to be someone to do the killing, someone to get killed, someone to do the covering up, and someone to lie to the general public to keep them scared and docile! We are not special! So fuck duty and patriotism and all that shit! The only thing I’m in for is staying alive! You can torture and kill me, and I won’t be very happy about it, but you are just a bunch of sadistic dickheads getting off on violence!”

  Where were the gods through all this? You’d think they’d want a ringside seat here.

  The three idiots seemed to contemplate this for a few seconds as they continued to stare at me.

  “You talk a lot of Western decadent rubbish, bruv,” Amir said.

  “We’re not stupid,” Zeb said. “It’s about sending a message, yeah?”

  “Okay, okay, maybe all of that was a bit too existential for you!” I said. “I get it! Relativism can be a dead end! That’s why there’s such a need to find some belief system to embrace! Oh! Oh! Hey! Electrodes! I hate electrodes! Who doesn’t? Say, weren’t you supposed to start with the small tortures before you move on to the big, flesh-ripping mutilation stuff? I’m just saying, that’s all! You don’t wanna peak too soon—!”

  I spent the next eternity screaming.

  EIGHTEEN

  Being tortured is exhausting business. I really don’t recommend it. At least I think I was still in London, or somewhere in England. I seriously doubted they could have spirited me off to downtown Baghdad or anything like that, thank God, but I still had images of Abu Ghraib–style torture pictures in my head, and I started to realize it didn’t matter where I was while they were cutting and tweezing and electrocuting me. I could have been in South Kensington or Peckham or Bromley, but in the long run, I was going to be dead, so what did it matter at that point?

  But then it’s hard to feel better when you’re in excruciating pain. My only alternative was the image of Ken and Clive waltzing into the US Embassy carrying al-Hassah’s head in a bag and collecting the $20 million reward. Imagine how that one made me feel.

  Everything was a blur. I didn’t recall what I was shouting. My vision was all red with hellfire and demonic Rakshasas poking their spears at me. The gods were gone. I was in hell. I tried to shout at them in Hindi as their eyes blazed and tongues wagged and they punched and bit me with their razor-sharp teeth.

  They weren’t torturing me for information, but for some sort of ritual. I really hated it when that happened. And it really wasn’t fair that I was a stand-in here for the sins the West committed on the rest of the world. I did try to empathize with my torturers’ plight, being victims of imperialism, their sense of alienation and all that stuff, but they obviously didn’t give a shit about any of that, and I couldn’t say anything to them that would have any effect anyway.

  All that stuff you hear about your life flashing before your eyes before you die is true, by the way. The problem was, I seemed to be caught in a loop, because I found myself watching the same parts of my life again three times, probably because, let’s face
it, I hadn’t been on this Earth for that long. I desperately wished I would pass out or go into shock, so my brain would shut down. Well, perhaps I did a few times, but I kept waking up and getting tortured with spears and claws and teeth again, at which point the life-flashing-before-your-eyes part started all over again. Huge chunks of my life were really boring! I’d lost all sense of time, had no idea whether hours had passed or if it was just twenty minutes since Vanessa van Hooten walked out. My entire world was contracting into Pain and Bad Memory Reruns as the flames of hell raged around me. Rakshasas with their burning eyes rushing at me in a frenzy and tearing away at my flesh down to the bone, until there was nothing left, then I would awake to see it happen again in an endless loop. The smell of my flesh burning from the hellfire, or was it the electrodes? I watched them eat my heart again and again, my cries and protestations the same each time. And then everything went dark every time they swallowed the last bites of my heart.

  When I opened my eyes, the three idiots were cowering in the corner of the room.

  “Fucking hell!” Amir cried. “What the fuck was that?”

  “That was fucked up, bruv!” Baz said. “We barely laid a finger on you!”

  “Why are you so obsessed with nipples?” I cried.

  “You what?” Zeb said.

  “All that biting and clawing!” I said.

  “What are you talking about, bruv? You just went into some kind of trance! And what was all that you was babblin’?”

  “Like you was fucking possessed!” Zeb said.

  I was confused.

  Then I noticed I wasn’t bleeding, and no real pain from my body, other than the dull aches I’d already had when they first brought me here. Did the gods do this? Did they send me into some kind of fugue state and have me babbling in tongues? Was this their way of protecting me? If it was, where were they? Wouldn’t they be here with me now?

  “I ain’t touchin’ him no more, nah,” Baz said. “Fucker’s fucking scary.”

  “What if he’s contagious?” Amir said.

  “What you saw,” I said, “was the real ecstasy of martyrdom.”

  They looked at me in shock. Of course I was making this shit up as I went along, still dancing as fast as I could to stay alive.

  “This is what you have to look forward to if you truly believe,” I said. “This is that transcendent state you get to achieve if you really, truly believe.”

  They looked at each other in confusion.

  “Nah, you’re just fucking mad, bruv,” Zeb said, unsure.

  “Or you could just walk away,” I said. “It’s not too late. Just don’t do what it is she wants you to do. Go home. Go back to your lives. You have that choice. Go on.”

  I was using my old Teacher’s Voice, the one I used to admonish students when I caught them during break planning something naughty. If I could keep it up and draw them in, I had a chance.

  They conferred in the corner in whispers again, then seemed to reach a decision.

  “She said we should kill him,” Zeb said.

  “Oh, come on!” I said.

  “Shut up, you! Don’t question us! We got our priorities!”

  This was bad. I was in an already ridiculous situation that was about to get truly dire. The gods were still nowhere to be found. Radio silence when their presence might have reassured me.

  “Yeah,” Baz said. “We kill him. You know, cut his head off. Film it and all.”

  So that was it. I was about to die. I was about to be murdered by a bunch of idiots for no good reason.

  “Hang on,” I said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “Do what, bruv?” Zeb asked.

  “Look at my skin!” I said. “I’m dark-skinned. If you kill me, no one will give a shit!”

  “What are you on about?” Baz said.

  “If you kill me on video,” I said. “Yeah, sure, it’ll be horrible, because you’re cutting my head off, but I’m not a white guy! They won’t care! They think dark-skinned people kill each other all the time! They don’t even care if I’m not Muslim just because of my skin color! You’ll have wasted your time!”

  “Yeah, that’s a good point, bruv,” Baz said. “I mean, we’re not prejudiced, yeah? We’ll kill anyone.”

  “I know,” I said. “But it’s all about the optics, isn’t it? It’s all image and branding!”

  “But she wants us to kill him,” Zeb said.

  “If we just kill him without any publicity, it’s just a waste, innit?” Baz said.

  “My point exactly!” I said.

  “Vanessa still wants ’im dead, though,” Amir said.

  “How? We stab him? I don’t want to hear him screaming again, bruv,” Zeb said.

  “I don’t ever want to hear all that weird shit he was shoutin’ again,” Baz said.

  “Yeah, and we don’t want to make a mess,” Zeb said.

  “I know, let’s just stick ’im in the oil drum. He’ll run out of air. That should take care of it,” Amir said.

  “Good idea. No muss, no fuss,” Baz said.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?!” I cried.

  I shouted and protested, kicked and struggled as they stuck me in the drum and shut the lid. It got stuffy immediately, then I was rocked and spun as they shifted me to wherever it was they stored the drums.

  NINETEEN

  This was it. I was going to die. On the eve of my wedding, alone, in the dark, in silence and hidden away. No gods, no voices. Just my head as I ran out of air.

  How long had I been stuck in here dying? It felt like an eternity. I didn’t remember how long it took to suffocate to death in an airtight drum. It wasn’t something I’d ever thought to look up.

  I had nothing to do but think about how this was where my life had led. Maybe this was comeuppance for my hubris, my moral compromises, my complicity in all the nasty shit we got up to at Golden Sentinels. I was at last paying for the lives I’d blown up, the people whose deaths I’d been party to, the chaos I’d caused and unleashed into the world. This was the price for my hypocrisy. I had no one to blame but myself. I had made the decisions. No one forced me. I chose to work at Golden Sentinels and not quit as soon the first morally fucked up decision had to be made. I had known and done too much to be able to consider myself a good person by now. I felt guilty about the grief Julia and my family were going to be put through once they found out what had happened to me.

  Breathing was getting difficult. It probably wouldn’t be long now. It was just going to be darkness and nothingness. No gods, no heaven or hell, just a total loss of Self. As an atheist, I didn’t believe in any afterlife. No comfort for me. No reincarnation, no respite. No reward or punishment. This end was the punishment.

  I was so preoccupied with losing consciousness that I barely noticed the shouting and banging outside the confines of the drum. I assumed it was auditory hallucinations as my brain fired off its last desperate synapses before shutting down from oxygen depravation, until the scraping of metal screeched over my head and the lid of the oil drum was forcibly removed.

  “There you are,” Ariel said, as she and Jarrod pulled me out.

  And now the gods were here, gathered together and taking photos with their smartphones.

  “Hurrah!” Shiva said.

  Great.

  I coughed and took breaths.

  “Easy, brother,” Jarrod said.

  “How long was I in there?” I asked. “Felt like hours.”

  “About ten minutes before we came in,” Jarrod said.

  “Christ, felt like a lot longer than that,” I said.

  “Time flies when you think you’re dying,” Jarrod said matter-of-factly. “Your adrenaline’s just firing like crazy. Its normal.”

  I looked around at the hideout. A pair of Rakshasas—no, it was Mikkelford and Diaz, the Interzone mercs I’d met before, a year ago in Los Angeles. They were busy putting zip-ties around the wrists and ankles of Amir, Baz, and Zeb. Interzone had breached the door and shot
them all with nonlethal beanbag rounds. They knew not to kill anyone on British soil, as it would have raised too many questions.

  My legs were a bit wobbly, and Jarrod and Ariel had to hold me up.

  “Seriously, Ravi?” Ariel said. “You thought you could use your good looks to lure Vanessa van Hooten into a trap? You have majorly overestimated your Chick Magnet Rating.”

  “I wasn’t trying to seduce her! I was just trying to distract her long enough for Ken and Clive to get out of her flat!”

  “You say she was the one who seduced you? Honey, aren’t Julia and I enough for you?” Ariel said, smiling in mock jealousy.

  “I was trying to do my fucking job! Seduction was not on my mind!”

  “Sure, brother.” Jarrod chuckled.

  Even Mikkelford and Diaz were grinning.

  Julia was waiting in the van when Ariel and Jarrod brought me out. She put her arms around me and kissed me, then draped a blanket around my shoulders.

  “I don’t need this,” I said.

  “You’re in shock,” she said.

  “I’m not in shock,” I protested.

  “Babe, you’re in shock,” Ariel said. “You were nearly murdered. Your adrenaline’s spiking. You’d have to be a psychopath with a low heart rate to not be in shock. You’re gonna crash in a moment.”

  “That was more than the Banality of Evil back there,” I said. “That was sheer bloody Stupidity of Evil! A combination of mental instability and idiot malice! Never thought I’d ever see it up close and personal!”

  “Calm down, brother,” Jarrod said as he started the engine. “You’re in shock.”

  “I’m in shock,” I said, deflating, feeling the crash at last. “Wait, how did you find me anyway?”

  “Kali told me,” Ariel said, grinning.

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  “That’s what I said,” Jarrod said. “But however way she did it, we found you. She even knew which drum you were in.”

  “You must have had a drone or some kind of GPS or you tapped their phone or something,” I said.

  “Nope,” Ariel said. “Kali whispered in my ear. Told me who had you, where, and how many of ’em there were. How do you think we knew where to hit in the room so we’d avoid you?”