Her Fugitive Heart Page 16

  I realized that Interzone had not killed a single person here, while Ken and Clive had racked up quite the body count in just two days. Cheryl had told me previously that Ken and Clive did not usually kill people on a case, that was more their outside hobby, so this kind of thing was an exception rather than the rule for them. It would have to be someone truly irredeemable to drive Ken and Clive to want to snuff them. This had never reassured me before, and it certainly didn’t now.

  “Huh,” Marcie said. “I thought it was going to come to nothing. Trail was stone-cold.”

  “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some calls to make,” Roger said and went into his office. Cheryl shut the door so we wouldn’t hear through the soundproof glass.

  I had a thought and walked over to Marcie.

  “The real al-Hassah has been dead for ages, hasn’t he?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny,’ Marcie said, smiling.

  “That report in the German newspapers six months ago that he died in that bombing in Basra,” I said. “That was one of the last sightings anyone had of him before we got the case four days ago that he’d snuck into the UK to turn himself in to you lot.”

  “Or someone who claimed to be him,” Marcie said.

  “Your people wouldn’t say it was him unless there was evidence or he’d sent some kind of proof it was him,” I said. “Or it was one of his doubles, who was one of his relatives anyway. You decided it was no longer necessary to have the narrative that al-Hassah was out there terrorizing the world when there are so many other bastards out there.”

  “Again, I can neither confirm nor deny,” Marcie said.

  “I get it,” I said. “Al-Hassah has become such a bogeyman for the West, a symbol for people to invest all their fears and paranoias in, that it doesn’t matter if nobody has seen him for over a year. In fact, it’s better. He gets to be the symbol of Ultimate Evil for the politicos to wave around every time they want more funding for the War on Terror or to pass through some insane legislation. Meanwhile, nobody really knows where the real guy is, if he’s dead or alive, and you end up with the myth. And even if it gets out, it doesn’t matter, because there’s so much bullshit surrounding the myth that the truth is buried.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Marcie said.

  “Christ,” I said. “That makes everything relative. And once again we’re the only ones who know what really happened.”

  “Well,” Marcie said. “It’s our job to make sure the public doesn’t.”

  “And you must have known Vanessa was having an affair with al-Hassah,” I said. “She was a CIA asset, must have been recruited when she entered college.”

  “She hadn’t even finished her training,” Marcie said. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t recruit her. I would have recommended we didn’t.”

  “Did you even know she was carrying on with al-Hassah?” I asked.

  “Actually, she hid the affair from us,” Marcie said. “You saw how good she was at compartmentalizing.”

  “You lot missed that when it was right under your noses.”

  “Yeah, yeah, rub it in,” Marcie said with a slight hint of exasperation.

  “That means we just helped the Company hide away one of its own embarrassing failures as well, didn’t we?” I said.

  “Some days I think I trained you too well.” Marcie said.

  You have no idea, I thought.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “You’re just going to let her go?” I said, barely stifling my outrage.

  “I had a long talk with Mr. van Hooten,” Roger said. “He’s still our client, and all this started because he hired us and we stumbled upon what his little girl was up to. In four hours, dear old dad is flying her out on his private jet and taking her back to New York, and no one’s going to be the wiser.”

  “It would have been really embarrassing for the public to find out she was having an affair with one of the biggest terrorists in the world,” Marcie said. “Roger told Mr. van Hooten that you guys discovered the insane shit Vanessa was up to and that you stopped her from doing something even more embarrassing—”

  “She tried to blow up Central London,” I said. “Understatement of the century.”

  “And I’m going to get her out of the country and back to New York before the shit hits the fan and the news finds out,” Roger said. “That way, van Hooten gets to dodge a major scandal about his daughter and the al-Hassah mess. The CIA won’t ever admit she was one of theirs, and she’ll be out of their clutches once she’s back in Daddy’s.”

  “She doesn’t even get held accountable for nearly killing dozens of people.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Marcie said. “We all know Vanessa’s elevator doesn’t reach the top floor. There’s going to be a team of doctors and psychiatrists waiting for her when she touches down. Chances are, she’s gonna be spending the rest of her life in a big, bouncy room, pumped so full of drugs she’ll practically be a vegetable. She’ll be so brain-fried she’ll probably have to wear a diaper. She’s just going to be the madwoman in the attic that no one talks about. A dirty little secret we’re all glad was swept under the carpet.”

  In the end, our story held up: Roger, Marcie, the CIA, and Interzone would continue to think Vanessa killed al-Hassah and kept his body around because, well, she was completely fucking mad. Bunny-boilingly mad. Daddy van Hooten suddenly had a scandal on his hands, what with his daughter bonking the world’s most wanted terrorist, commanding a small cell of homegrown would-be terrorists, and keeping her lover’s corpse in her flat that Daddy was paying for, and probably having sex with it before trying to turn it into a bomb to blow up Big Ben. Golden Sentinels had the video of al-Hassah visiting and the two of them bonking like bunnies. Benjamin even had the footage of her destroying al-Hassah’s laptop, so kiss whatever intel he was bringing over good-bye. You would think there would be some bonus in the four homegrown wannabe insurgents that Interzone and Ken and Clive captured, but they didn’t know anything, and Marcie’s bosses were going to have to negotiate with the British authorities to take them off the Americans’ hands, since these idiots were UK citizens and what they knew was not worth holding on to them in a black site somewhere. A suitable cover story was going to be needed to explain how they were caught, where the Americans were left out of it and the British police could take credit for it. Marcie found doing that rather tedious, since it didn’t involve any A-list stars, but she did it anyway because it was her job.

  Roger had van Hooten by the short and curlies. There would be another negotiation: What did Roger want for the video and audio to prevent any of this from ending up in the news, published by van Hooten’s rival news outlets? Roger could use his pull—in truth, Marcie Holder’s PR skills and CIA contacts—to keep all this secret, and to hold off anyone who might try to sniff it out. Van Hooten’s papers could report that poor Vanessa had had her heart broken in London and suffered a nervous breakdown, so she had to go back to the States to enter a mental institution for treatment. Marcie’s bosses at the CIA would cover up the fact that there was nearly a major terror attack on London right under the British authorities’ noses, and no one would be any wiser. It wouldn’t even occur to the Metropolitan Police to hold a press conference to announce that an attack in London had been prevented. All’s well that ended well.

  Except for the matter of the $20 million reward for the capture of al-Hassah.

  “Sorry, guys,” Marcie said. “The stipulation was for his capture alive.”

  Ken and Clive sulked, but Marcie didn’t know why. The rest of us did.

  “We wanted to debrief him and get all that intel. With him dead, and with Vanessa cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs, we got zip other than what we already get from on-the-ground recon. Golden Sentinels gets paid the usual fee for this.”

  That meant no bonus for us, just the same amount Roger usually got for jobs Marcie brought to the firm. Roger still got some benefits, though. He had gained a new influential friend out of this job,
a media tycoon with deep pockets who would call on him more than ever. I nearly got murdered, my head cut off by some idiots, but I didn’t and it wasn’t. The gods were not going to let that happen. This was only the start of what was to come, and I had some part to play in it, whatever it was. We would all find out in the months ahead.

  “Ravi, me old china,” Mark said. “Did it occur to you that your near-death experience in the oil drum could have been your final rite of passage in your journey to become a shaman?”

  “What are you on about?”

  “In many cultures, shamans usually had to undergo a ritual of symbolic death to strip away their former lives before they could take on their new role.”

  “I can’t say I felt any different, other than being seriously fucked off about the whole ordeal,” I said. “I certainly didn’t feel like I gained any new insight or superpowers. My ego wasn’t stripped away, my personality didn’t go through any transformation. I’m still stuck being me. The gods are still here hanging about watching me like I’m their favorite reality show.”

  “But you didn’t enter some kind of altered state?” Mark asked.

  “Well, I did hallucinate a bit when I thought I was being tortured. Don’t know what that was all about. What?”

  Mark had that look on his face.

  “How do you know that wasn’t an intervention?” he said, a bit smug.

  “Perhaps now you’ll listen to us more often,” Shiva said.

  No chance.

  Roger didn’t seem to bat an eyelash at the news that we weren’t getting the twenty million, but then Interzone wasn’t either, so that was a win as far as he was concerned.

  “Job well done, children,” he said. “Onwards and upwards.”

  He went back into his office and got on the phone to his new business partners. He’d shut the door, so we couldn’t hear what he was laughing it up about.

  The gods leaned back on the sofa, contentedly exhausted from this whole drama.

  “Wow, that was intense,” Louise said. “I feel like I should light up a cigarette.”

  “A marvelous display of deception and duplicity,” Bagalamukhi said. “Best case ever.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  And so, to our wedding.

  It was as if the last case was but a distant dream. My bruises had almost completely healed. Now I was in a new dream, a much more pleasant one where I wasn’t threatened with murder. David and the lads gave me a stag night, of course. We weren’t the idiots we were in our twenties anymore, so there was no flying off to Ibiza for a drugs-and-booze-filled night of debauchery where someone ended up getting killed. I’d already nearly gotten killed on this last case and had no desire to repeat that experience. And none of us was interested in becoming another statistic in the crisis of fatalities on stag nights. This was a uniquely British phenomenon. As Marcie would say, only us Brits would overdo the booze and turn what should be a joyous rite of passage into a horrible tragedy. My stag night was a surprisingly sedate affair at a club David booked in Soho. We’d had enough excitement on this past case, and my friends from university, including David, were all past the need to drink ourselves stupid. Most of them had kids to go home to. Instead, Ken and Clive served as chaperones and bought us whiskey. Instead of a stripper, Mark booked a burlesque dancer who depicted a sexy fairy godmother who danced on strands of aerial silk as she removed her layers of clothing in an elegantly choreographed display of Olympic-level gymnastic skills. Ken and Clive were in charge of making sure everyone present got home in one piece, and in one or two cases, they picked up one of my friends like a football and installed him into a taxi. No one was driving.

  For her hen night, Julia was taken to a bar in Hoxton with a muscular male stripper doing an Ali Baba routine. Or was he a genie? I forget. Julia was a bit vague about the details. Much wine was drunk, then champagne as Julia was presented with a tiara and a sash. From what little she told me, it was much, much raunchier than my stag do. Marcie and Olivia, who were there, wouldn’t tell me anything at all. Julia’s friend Angie from college copped off with the stripper at the end of the party. At the end of the evening, Julia went to her parents’ house so that we could observe the tradition that the groom didn’t see the bride the night before the wedding.

  By the time my parents came to pick me up in the hired car in the morning, I was already dressed and only mildly hungover. Dad had actually persuaded Mum to let Brenda get on with the fashion choices. Our relatives who had come in from India all wore formal attire, and that was going to lend the proceedings a nice splash of color. They were also quite keen to experience an English wedding.

  David had the rings ready and we got to the chapel. The guests were all in their pews, my relatives on one side, Julia’s on the other. Anji and Vivek held their kids. Mum wept. So did Brenda. Dad had a look of relief on his face that I had managed not to end up in a mental institution and was getting married. Julia’s father smiled and looked stoical. The gods were there, all in formal attire. Louise sat with them, her dress and hat far more glamorous than anyone else’s, of course, as she beamed at her little sister.

  It was an Anglican wedding, but to please Julia, her parents agreed to a multicultural look. Mum had sat with Brenda as she worked with the vicar at the parish to plan out the service. It didn’t matter that the groom and more than half the attendees were Hindu.

  “That’s the beauty of the Church of England,” Mark said. “Faith is optional.”

  Yes, Ariel showed up, dressed extravagantly and in a large hat as expected of women attending British weddings. Considering she saved my life, it would have been churlish of us not to invite her. She had been unsubtly angling for an invitation all that time. She seemed to enjoy the whole experience since she found it all delightfully alien. Then again, I had the feeling she found most normal human social gatherings alien.

  “But I think in her own way,” Julia said, “she loves you.”

  I honestly didn’t know how to process that. I still don’t.

  The organist played to signal the arrival of the bride, and when I turned to greet Julia, I was gobsmacked. Julia was dressed in a stunning golden Zac Posen dress, her face behind a gold veil. The dress had belonged to Louise, from her days as a supermodel. I was reminded here that with her looks and body, Julia could have pursued a modeling career herself but had chosen not to. The décolletage plunged deep to reveal her cleavage and back; the gold patterns of the dress were tiny seashells. She looked like a princess that had risen from the seas as she walked towards me. She looked almost naked, the dress an illusion. I felt the temperature in the whole church go up. When she turned it on, Julia could reduce men to gibbering wrecks. Louise had made a career out of doing that herself. Perhaps it was a good thing Julia had chosen not to do that. The world might not have been able to withstand two Fowler sisters at once.

  “Fuck me,” Benjamin muttered, and Olivia smacked him on the arm.

  Julia winked at me from behind her veil. I was in a sherwani, a traditional Hindu groom’s outfit. It was also gold, and complemented Julia’s dress. There was no gray or white at this wedding. It was gold and bright colors, the way the gods liked it.

  At the back of the church, Louise sat with the gods and beamed with pride at her sister. She even dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief while Lord Shiva gave her shoulder a squeeze. They were sitting behind our people from Golden Sentinels. Strange to think we were tied to them now, to the point where some of them had nearly gotten me killed. And Ariel.

  The organist played an intro to signal the start of the ceremony. The vicar welcomed the guests and began the ceremony with a prayer. This was the first time my relatives had experienced a full Anglican wedding and prayer service. They found it all fascinating.

  A hymn was sung. The vicar offered another prayer, then the preface:

  “In the presence of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we have come together to witness the marriage of Ravi Chandra Singh and Julia Annabel Fowler, to pray for
God’s blessing on them, to share their joy, and to celebrate their love . . .”

  My relatives were experiencing firsthand how long prayers and sermons at an Anglican wedding could actually be. My cousins’ kids got bored and fell asleep. For our part, Julia and I were not unaware of the paradox that we were both atheists getting married in this ceremony because her parents always wanted one for her. She was baptized when she was a baby, and they had begun putting aside money for a wedding that long ago.

  “First, I am required to ask anyone present who knows a reason why these persons may not lawfully marry to declare it now.”

  Julia’s racist grand-uncle who had dementia didn’t say anything or start a scene. I was more worried about Ariel pulling out a gun and shooting up the church and everyone here, but that was just one of my flights of fancy from stress.

  “Will you, Ravi Chandra Singh, take this woman to be your wife? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and protect her, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?”

  “I will.”

  “Julia Annabel Fowler, will you take Ravi Chandra Singh to be your husband? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and protect him, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?”

  “I will.”

  “Will you, the friends and family of Ravi Chandra Singh and Julia Annabel Fowler, support and uphold them in their marriage now and in the years to come?”

  “We will.”

  Then the vicar led the prayer and read a passage from the Bible before Julia and I spoke our vows. Then the exchange of rings, and Julia and I held hands while the proclamation was said.

  “In the presence of God, and therefore this congregation, Ravi Chandra Singh and Julia Annabel Fowler have given their consent and made their marriage vows to each other. They have declared their marriage by the joining of hands and by the giving and receiving of rings. I therefore proclaim that they are husband and wife. Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.”