Her Nightly Embrace Page 15

  SEVEN

  Samir Langhani was staying at a five-star hotel in Mayfair, off Marble Arch. Penthouse suite, of course.

  I had to phone and make an appointment to meet him to discuss his missing bride-to-be. He didn’t seem particular anxious that she had run away because, surprise, surprise, he didn’t really give a fuck. He was the type who didn’t care about anything beyond his own pleasure. I’d met a few of those types of rich boys when I was growing up, and when my family had visited India.

  He greeted me in an open hotel bathrobe that let his potbelly make a statement: he didn’t need to work out at the gym. He didn’t need to be good-looking. He was rich, so he could have any girl and as many as he wanted. That was punctuated by the two call girls lounging in their underwear on the sofa, sipping champagne. He’d been to the best schools here in the UK, went on the most expensive holidays, wore the most extravagant clothes, ate the richest food, and of course insisted on the most ostentatious hotel suites and the top girls.

  “Had you met Shazia before?” I asked.

  “Of course. We had a dinner here in London, with both our parents so everyone could meet and size each other up. Her father and my father already knew each other. It was pleasant enough.”

  “You know where she is, don’t you?” he added.

  Damn. He wasn’t stupid. He would have been easier to game if he were stupid.

  “We have some promising leads.”

  “So what are you really here for?” he asked.

  “Do you like Shazia?”

  “She’s all right. A bit reserved. Seems to like a lot of that Japanese anime like a kid. That’s what she comes off as. A little girl.”

  He was studying me for my reaction. I was in poker face mode.

  “Why are you asking me all these questions?” he asked. “Are you vetting me? It’s a bit late for that. The wedding’s a done deal.”

  “I just want to see if there’s anything about her you might know that we can use when we approach her about coming home.”

  “Like what?” He shrugged. “I found her rather reserved, a bit shy. Maybe that means she’s a tiger in bed, but I haven’t had the pleasure of finding out yet.”

  “How do you feel about marrying someone like that?”

  “I don’t see any problem. A wife is a wife. She’ll do her duty at home. I can do what I like outside. I expect I’ll be traveling a lot once I start doing more work for Pa, meeting people all over, here and there. I probably won’t be at home very much.”

  “So you’re planning on continuing the lifestyle to which you’ve become accustomed.”

  “Of course. You know as well as I do, in Asian society, that’s as it ever was. This is an arrangement between our families. If Shazia wants to have her own life, she can. I’m not going to judge. We can stay out of each other’s way and put up a front for family gatherings. I’m willing to negotiate.”

  I was imagining how Shazia would be in this sham of a life, sham of a marriage. Where would Adelaide be? At her own flat or kept in the same house? I didn’t want to think about where this could all go. I knew then I couldn’t discuss the possibility that Samir might call off the wedding. He could grass me out to his dad and her parents, and then where would we be? Me getting the sack for a start and Shazia grabbed and forced to come back for the wedding.

  “And then there’s the issue of children. Our families will expect that. I’m game,” Samir said.

  “She probably isn’t.”

  “Well, she’s going to have to be. We have a duty to fulfill, after all. I suppose she could just lie back and think of England.”

  EIGHT

  Eventually Samir got bored with me and busied himself with the call girls. The gods were raging all around me as I returned to the office. Vishnu and Shiva were still fighting, and the entire pantheon was egging them on.

  I didn’t want to use the office phone to call Amsterdam, so I used my mobile.

  “Julia, change of plans. Are you still friendly with Shazia and Adelaide?”

  “I’m meeting them tomorrow for lunch.”

  “Good. See if you can talk them into getting married.”

  “Sorry, Ravi, did I hear that right?”

  “Say whatever it takes. If they get married, have a license, it means Shazia can’t marry Samir Langhani. It’ll keep her safe.”

  “I take it your meeting with Samir didn’t go well.”

  “Tell Ken and Clive to come home. We don’t need them to grab her.”

  “So who do you want them to grab? Samir?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “That won’t work, Ravi.”

  “Just tell Ken and Clive. And help Shazia.”

  I hung up and found Marcie standing behind me.

  “You going off the reservation here, dude?”

  “I’m looking for a third option.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Samir is an abusive dickhead. He’s in our world. Shazia isn’t part of our world and doesn’t deserve to be dragged into it. None of the team feels good about this.”

  “So you’re going to, what, have Ken and Clive lean on him? He’s rich, and his dad’s rich. You can’t scare him off. He’ll just come after you with all his money, and if his dad has access to Pakistani Intelligence muscle, you’re opening yourself up to a world of shit.”

  “Mark already fell apart. I won’t, but if I have to get sacked to stop that wedding, I will.”

  “Whoa, whoa, let’s not go there. Let’s think. The job is to find her, right? You’ve done that.”

  “The Ibrahims also want her back, and she’s not going to come back willingly. Unless there’s no wedding she’s being forced into.”

  “Okay, so the solution here is to kill any chance of a wedding. So let’s think about this. If there was information leaked to the public that puts too much heat on Samir Langhani and his antics, that might sour Shazia’s parents on the marriage.”

  “I like where this is heading.”

  “And then if his dad’s business dealings, all of which were considered suspicious and already reported as such, were to be in the media that people actually paid attention to instead of just the business news, that could also make the family too hot to marry into.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Let me make a couple of calls. I still got some moves.”

  “Brilliant. Thanks, Marcie.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  NINE

  I went back to Samir’s hotel. My inclination was to tell him to fuck off to his face, none of that “breaking up by text” bollocks. Call me old-fashioned.

  I came out of the lift and saw a couple of hotel staff wheeling a laundry trolley out of his room. He must have messed up a lot of sheets and towels judging from what he was about to do when I last left him. His sex toys were strewn on the bed, fresh after I left him.

  I was about to knock on his door when I noticed it was slightly ajar. I pushed it open and went inside.

  “Samir?”

  His stereo was still blaring that Asian electro he liked so much, but there was no one in the suite. Empty glasses and booze bottles. Room service cart with empty plates. Bedsheets pulled off and all over the floor.

  Kali’s words from days before came flooding back to me.

  “Always pay attention to the laundry, my son. . . . Therein lies the important details.”

  The laundry cart. Big enough to hide a sleeping body in. And two men to wheel it.

  Shit.

  Shit!

  I ran for the lift in time to see the doors closing shut. No time to wait for another lift, but this was the ninth floor. I ran down the stairs, all eight stories. At least I was going down. Would they wheel him through the lobby or the service entrance in the back? Probably the back to avoid attention. They would still need to get to their vehicle in the car park. I didn’t need to try to follow them, I just needed to get to the car park.

  I cut through the lobby and ran to the
car park in time to see the two bellhops loading Samir into the back of a van. As I ran after it, I finally wondered, What do you think you’re going to do? I didn’t have the company car with me. I had come on the Tube. No way was I going to catch up to a speeding van.

  And I didn’t.

  I saw it go out into Marble Arch and disappear into Lancaster Gate.

  TEN

  The gods had gone quiet. Vishnu and Shiva’s fight was over. Shiva threw the fight and Vishnu looked like the winner, both of them saved face. Now I understood how the fight was a reflection of this case. It was always going to end up with me in the end. The gods knew that before I did. The fight was a front, a distraction from what was really brewing away underneath. Another agenda was playing out. A desired outcome but through an unexpected route and secret moves. It was really chess, after all.

  I got back to the office and told everyone what happened. They weren’t upset about it at all. After all, he wasn’t our client.

  “Aw, man, Ravi,” Marcie said. “I can’t believe you tried to rescue the guy! Do you know how deep the shit you could have landed in?”

  “Who grabbed him?”

  “Sounds like an interested party.”

  “Marcie, stop being evasive.”

  “If I had to guess, it’s probably the Americans.”

  “You mean the CIA.”

  “Well, it was probably a proxy, a contractor so they could have deniability.”

  “For what?”

  “Sounds like extraordinary rendition,” she said.

  “Don’t they do that to terror suspects?”

  “And persons of interest.”

  “He didn’t deserve it!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s not a terrorist!”

  “We don’t know that. He could be financing terrorists with his pocket money. God knows his daddy sells weapons to terrorists from time to time.”

  “Wait,” I said. It finally dawned on me. “This is about the Americans wanting to get at his dad, isn’t it?”

  “That’s probably it, yeah. They’ve been looking at him for a long time.”

  “So they kidnap his son?”

  “Come on, you said yourself he was a dickhead, that he might have ended up being an abusive husband. Shazia has been saved from a nightmarish marriage she didn’t want,” Marcie said.

  “You used me.”

  “I called some guys I know at the US Embassy.”

  “Including the CIA station chief, I bet. How long is Samir likely to be gone?”

  “Well, with this kind of rendition, it’s like disappearing down a hole, so it looks like he’s gonna be gone long enough for there not to be a wedding. You saved Shazia. You can safely tell her parents where she is, and she can probably come home if she wants to. If she’s already married Adelaide Robertson, they can’t force her to marry some guy. She can decide to stay disappeared. The risk of an honor killing has been majorly reduced. They’ll probably disown her, but she’s got a new family now, right?”

  “This isn’t how I wanted it to go! We got a guy sent to Guantánamo!”

  “Technically, it won’t be Guantánamo. Chances are it’ll be a black site somewhere in Romania or Poland or something.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “Look, Ravi, he’s not going to be tortured. They’re just going to sit on him, treat him well, probably give him his cable TV and porn. They don’t really want him. It’s his dad they want.”

  “He’s what, a hostage?”

  “Collateral. They say to his dad, ‘Dude, we got your kid. You want him back? Come work for us.’ ”

  “So they’re not going to arrest his dad?”

  “No. He’s better left in the wind as an asset. Think about all those people he sells arms to. They can keep tabs on them through him. They get to control the flow of information, know who gets what, and wait to grab the biggest fish. Realpolitik stuff. And when Samir marries? I think they’ll want approval of the bride. It’ll be someone useful to them, too, not some nice math major who likes anime. They’ll be running that family like their own Sims video game.”

  “Marcie, how do you know this much about how the CIA works or what they want here?”

  “Oh, you know, my friends over at the US Embassy. Everyone likes to gossip. It’s not like any of this is classified.”

  “Marcie . . .”

  “What? You got that look.”

  “Are you CIA?”

  She looked at me for just a second too long, and then she burst out laughing. She laughed and laughed for a few seconds too long.

  Oh shit.

  Oh Christ.

  Oh fuck.

  What had I done?

  What had I just been party to?

  It felt worse when Marcie finally stopped laughing. She was still smiling.

  “Walk with me, Ravi.”

  ELEVEN

  We went up on the roof, as we often did to share a spliff with Mark.

  “You were lucky I put the word out that you were a friendly,” Marcie said. “They could have thought you were an accomplice and grabbed you, too. You’d be sitting in a cold cell in God knows where by now.”

  I was fighting a wave of nausea. The fresh air on the roof was not helping me.

  “You okay, dude? Want me to get Mark up here to roll you a joint?”

  “No. Just—just tell me the truth.”

  She sighed.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said.

  “I bloody hope not, because I’m thinking of some pretty bloody awful shit right now.”

  “Look, Golden Sentinels is not a CIA front, okay? You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “There’s a ‘but’ here,” I said.

  “Hey, ever since the seventies, the Company has been outsourcing a lot of work. All those movies, all that James Bond shit, none of it’s true. The CIA runs operations, gathers intelligence—”

  “Runs networks, topples governments.”

  “—and keeps governments in power. But sometimes, certain jobs they don’t do themselves; they subcontract out. Gives them deniability. They can admit they didn’t do something because it’s true. Technically.”

  “And Golden Sentinels is on their payroll.”

  “As a preferred contractor, yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since right before Roger ‘hired’ me.”

  “I always thought you were rather overqualified to be working here.”

  “Hey, in case you hadn’t noticed, everyone here is overqualified. Except maybe Ken and Clive. They’re old-school. They’re the quintessential ex-cops turned private eyes.”

  “So your story about that commercial shoot that ended your career in PR, did that really happen?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  “It was part of your cover, then? To make you look like you cocked up? Because you’re too smart to be party to a career disaster like that.”

  “Aw, thanks for thinking that, dude,” Marcie said. “But yeah, part of my legend, as we like to call it. Nobody would suspect a publicist who screwed up her career and ended up working here. Kinda broke my heart I had to fake being a fuckup. I liked doing PR.”

  “Hold on, if you’re a spook, why do you come into work every day like an employee?”

  “Ever heard of NOC? Nonofficial cover?” she asked.

  “But don’t NOC agents usually work for oil companies and travel? What are you doing hanging around a lowly private investigations firm?”

  “It’s my own pilot scheme. Intelligence officers run networks of assets. The more diverse that network, the better.”

  Then it dawned on me.

  “You’re Roger’s handler.”

  “When the Company has a job for Golden Sentinels,” she said, “they tell me about it, and I tell Roger.”

  “Roger,” I said. “Always wheeling and dealing, looking for the main chance, the next big brass ring. He gets the attention of the intelligence services, but
asks around and does a bit of thinking, decides he should do freelance work for the biggest fish of all: America. Nice big jobs for nice fat fees. That’s how he expanded. Bigger office, latest tech, bright young things, the next generation of investigators.”

  “Yup, done pretty well for himself, our Roger,” Marcie said. “So, what, you thinking about quitting?”

  “I’m not going to be party to evil shit like today.”

  “Get over it, dude. Samir Langhani is not a good guy. His dad’s an even bigger asshole. The CIA isn’t going to arrest him. They want to flip him. Make him work for them.”

  “So they give him back his son, and in return he tells them who he sells weapons to so they can track those people. Thus, an intelligence network is born.”

  “You were always sharp, and getting sharper. Roger was right about you.”

  “You used me. I’m a patsy.”

  “No, you’re an asset. Just like Roger’s an asset. Everybody in the agency is an asset, and a damn good one.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Okay, think about this. All those times you got on a plane to fly out on a case, to New York, to Chicago, to LA, you never had a problem with the TSA. You were never pulled out from the line, never stuck in a room and interrogated, never searched, did you ever wonder why? Because you’re on a list. The opposite of a No-Fly List. It’s a very special list. A Friends List. I made sure you were on it. Everyone here is on it.”

  “Does everyone in the firm know?”

  “Sure they do.”

  “And nobody told me?”

  “I guess we all assumed Roger, Cheryl, or one of the others might have told you? Eventually?”

  Marcie paused and thought about this for a moment and just said, “Huh.”

  I’d heard enough for one day. I was out of words.

  “Think about it,” Marcie said. “We are good at this. We managed to tail this girl and her girlfriend halfway across the world, figure out what her deal is, and not fuck up her life. In fact, we saved her life without her ever knowing we were ever there. She and her parents will never know how big the bullet is that we helped them dodge. That was above and beyond what they hired us for. She’s free to have the life she wants now. If her parents disown her, she has her own support network of LGBT geeks who will back her up. She can stay away from home because she has a family of choice now. You saved her life. You don’t feel proud of that?”