Her Fugitive Heart Read online

  “I convinced Cheryl to let me order some from China,” Benjamin said. “These are big over there.”

  “These look like giant versions of my butane cigarette lighter,” Mark said.

  “Ahh, Chinese pragmatism,” Benjamin said. “ ‘Let’s just set the rapists on fire.’ ”

  “See, Ravi?” Julia said. “I feel safer already.”

  Beside her, Louise nodded in approval.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the two figures approaching that I was most dreading: Laird Collins, head of Interzone, the private military contractor we kept having to deal with in our work. And where Collins went, Ariel Morgenstern was never far behind.

  Collins walked towards me with that charmer’s smile, Ariel behind him in an elegant black business suit. I’d already learned how to spot the bulge of her holster under her jacket.

  “Ravi.” Collins offered his hand, which I shook with extreme distaste that I hid as best I could.

  “I’m surprised you’re here,” I said. “Doesn’t Interzone already have contracts worth tens of millions more than Golden Sentinels’?”

  “Your boss has presented us with an interesting proposal,” Collins said. “One that’s intriguing enough for me to think about.”

  “Does this involve Roger using your people for whatever it is he has planned?”

  “Why else would we be here?” Ariel said. “Well, I’m always happy for an excuse to come to England.”

  I winced.

  “When we have a moment,” Collins said, “I’d like to talk to you about your opportunities at Interzone. We might be able to finally entice you.”

  “I’m fine where I am, Mr. Collins,” I said.

  “The world is changing faster than ever,” Collins said. “You’ll want to be on the winning side when the time comes. Your insight from God can be very useful to me.”

  “What do you mean?” I must have blinked and showed weakness.

  “Don’t your visions tell you anything?” Collins asked.

  “The gods never tell me anything interesting that I haven’t already thought myself,” I said. “That’s how it’s always been.”

  “You’re selling yourself short,” Collins said. “Prophets don’t get a lot of honor or credit these days.”

  “I’m not a prophet.”

  “You’re a shaman,” Collins said. “That means you serve as an intermediary between humans and God.”

  “Is working with Roger part of your plan to bring on the Apocalypse and the Second Coming, then?” I asked.

  “All my decisions are for that end,” Collins said, smiling. “We’ll talk again. My offer to join Interzone is still open.”

  With that, Collins went off to mingle with the guests. Unfortunately, Ariel didn’t join him. She lingered with me.

  “So you and Julia are tying the knot,” she said, smiling. “Is it going to be an Indian wedding?”

  “Her parents are planning it,” I said. “It’s actually going to be an English wedding.”

  “Oooo! All the women are going to wear fancy hats! I like fancy hats. They make good targets. That is going to be so much fun!”

  Ariel went off to rejoin Collins.

  I tried to catch Julia’s eye, but she was busy talking to the Tories, whose interest in her was too leering to be strictly business. I suddenly wondered if Julia had invited Ariel to the wedding and my blood ran cold. Surely Julia wouldn’t do that, would she?

  Would she?

  I noticed that Mark, Ken, and Clive were all watching me with weird smiles on their faces, just what I needed. I saw Julia watching me also. Our eyes met and I couldn’t read her expression.

  SIX

  In the past two years, Roger had shown me a thickening file of what Interzone and Laird Collins had been up to on his jobs. That Collins was a born-again Christian who believed everything he did, everyone he killed, was God’s work and part of his mission to bring about Armageddon, the Second Coming of Christ, and the Rapture, which made him the most dangerous and insidious creature I’d ever met. Roger had obviously asked Marcie to get him the Interzone information using the excuse that since Golden Sentinels was also an independent contractor for the CIA’s outsourced jobs and it was in all our interest not to step on each other’s toes should we end up pursuing the same contracts on opposing sides, which was precisely what had happened when I had my first run-in with Interzone two years ago.

  “I’m amazed you haven’t stopped poking at the hornet’s nest with a stick even after you knew what they were capable of,” Cheryl had said before we left London.

  “Somehow, I just can’t help it,” I said.

  “Do the gods make you do it?” Mark asked.

  “It’s all me,” I said. “I just hate the fuckers.”

  The gods certainly loved watching me do it. It was as if Kali was especially delighted every time I insulted Laird Collins to his face. It wasn’t even as if I believed the gods would protect me from the day Collins might decide he’d had enough of me and it was time for Ariel or his faithful soldier Jarrod to shoot me in the head and dump me in a ditch somewhere. No, they didn’t compel me to continue to despise Interzone and its band of Rakshasas, demons in human form, it was my own middle-class upbringing and morality. They really offended me on a fundamental human level. They were the embodiment of chaos and murderous indifference as far as I was concerned. Kali actually once told me she enjoyed them because they were catalysts for rebirth. I suppose what she meant was that the people they killed were released back into the cycle of reincarnation. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Ariel had a tattoo of Kali on her arm. Ariel certainly didn’t think so. She believed it was fate, kismet, that we would be in each other’s life. And Julia was there to serve as, what, a witness? Julia believed she was there to protect me from Ariel.

  Julia and I getting married didn’t faze Ariel even one bit. She had thought it was marvelous when we emailed her the news. She didn’t think it would put a damper on getting to have sex with either or both of us, even though we hadn’t seen her since we left Los Angeles last year. Julia just had to do her own poking of the bear by texting Ariel a photo of the engagement ring I gave her. I don’t think I’ll ever understand the way women taunt each other while pretending to be friends. I hoped Ariel would be far, far away, probably in some war zone in the Middle East, by the time we had the wedding.

  Roger’s other ulterior motive for compiling a file on Collins and Interzone was to look for any leverage he could use against them in the future. He had always vowed he would bring down Collins, and if it took over thirty years, so be it. His revenge would be cold and sweet. Whatever happened between the two of them back in the 1980s, it was personal for Roger, even if Collins seemed to regard it all with utter indifference. I wondered how the hell Roger could possibly get back at Collins. After all, Golden Sentinels was peanuts compared to the behemoth that was Interzone. We were a bunch of small franchised firms of private investigators. There were far bigger and more upmarket international firms out there. That Golden Sentinels had gotten as far as it had was down to Roger’s dog-and-pony show and Cheryl’s business savvy. Interzone was in a whole other league—their contracts were worth tens of millions, providing entire regimes with military might and firepower, a small side trade in arms-dealing with the CIA’s tacit approval, since they could pass the list of their clients back to the Company so they could keep track of them for, you guessed it, leverage. According to the file Roger had put together, the rumors that Interzone was involved in human rights violations, the killing of civilians in the Middle East, and even targeted assassinations were all horrifyingly true. Collins had even ordered his own employees killed when they threatened to sue or blow the whistle on the company’s activities. I was quite sure Ariel might have pulled the trigger on more than one of those occasions. If Collins felt like it, he could have Roger knocked off at any time. That he felt Roger was too far beneath him to be worth the bother only inflamed Roger’s hatred of him even fu
rther.

  And yet here he was breaking bread with Collins in this country mansion, laughing it up as it were. What a sight to behold. I had a vague flash of panic that Roger might throw me as a bone to Collins to show how chummy they were getting, but Roger privately reassured me that this was never going to happen.

  “He wants you so badly?” Roger said. “That’s exactly why he’s not gettin’ you, old son. Rest assured. The more he doesn’t get to have you and your secrets, the more torture it is for the bastard. And that’s good enough for me.”

  Would it surprise you if I said this didn’t particularly put me at ease one bit?

  It must be a bloody big deal if Roger was willing to shake Collins’s hand and work with him. The only thing that could possibly bring them both together was money, and lots of it. Lots and lots and lots of it. And not just money. Power. It had to be power, since that was what both Roger and Collins were drawn to. The type of power that put them on the board as major pieces, not just pawns to be moved. That was what Roger always wanted: to be a big fish swaggering about in front of the hoi polloi.

  Now that I thought about it, no wonder Cheryl refused to be a part of this weekend. Her disapproval of Roger’s decisions had been growing over the last three years, possibly even before I started working for the firm. If there was one thing I’d learned in my time at Golden Sentinels, it was to trust Cheryl’s judgment on everything. That she reacted to whatever Roger had planned for this weekend with utter disgust the likes of which I hadn’t seen before—and we’d had plenty of occasions when Cheryl expressed her disgust at Roger’s actions—didn’t bode well for us. But what could we do? We were employees and Roger had ordered us to work this weekend doing what we did best—keeping tabs on people, taking photos, recording video and audio, and waiting for whatever silly buggers they got up to, since Roger liked having leverage. He said these weren’t clients we were recording. They were friends and future business partners.

  “If I pull this off,” Roger said, “we’re in for the top, lads!”

  The gods laughed and applauded when Roger declared this to us. It was the type of approving laughter and applause that was anticipating something horrible to happen. I could tell. The gods were reveling in Roger’s hubris, which meant a huge fall was coming. I just hoped Roger wasn’t going to drag the rest of us down with him. And I wasn’t expecting the gods to protect me.

  “The gods giving you shit?” Marcie said, seeing my face.

  I shrugged.

  “I suppose it’s good that you all can take my psychosis in stride,” I said.

  “Chill, dude,” Marcie said. “You’re not psychotic. A little neurotic, maybe. That’s about it.”

  That caught me up short.

  “You know,” I said, “for a British person, that might actually be worse.”

  “You are our witness and our soldier,” Lord Shiva whispered to me. “Have at it, my son.”

  “Do us proud, my precious boy!” Kali said.

  SEVEN

  The afternoon ended with Roger leading the guests on a tour of Alfie Beam’s mansion, showing them the living room where Alfie’s guitar, gold records, and assorted memorabilia were on display. Madame Felicity’s girls paired up with their assigned clients and clung to their arms to bolster the guests’ sense of privilege and male pride. Roger had been a personal friend of Alfie’s and was able to sweeten his narration with a lot of anecdotes the official biographies never brought up, mostly stories involving drugs, groupies, orgies, and Alfie’s forays into occult rituals when he and Stephanie went through their mystical phase. Roger kept the guests’ rapt attention as he regaled them with his depiction of the mansion as part of Alfie Beam’s myth, a myth they were going to be a part of when they had their own party later in the evening.

  “So these guys are all Alfie Beam fans,” Marcie whispered, amused. “I should have guessed Roger might have sold a party here as part of the package.”

  “Except for Collins,” Ken whispered.

  “Yeah,” Clive whispered. “Fucker couldn’t give a toss about one of our greatest glam rockers. He was a national treasure, Alfie was, God rest his soul. Collins is just here for the money and the power, probably see how he can fuck the boss over.”

  “This bloody dick-swinging contest will be the death of them both,” Ken whispered. “Mark my words.”

  “Roger really has a touch of the used car salesman about him in his gab, doesn’t he?” I whispered as we watched from the back of the room.

  “That’s what he probably would have ended up doing if he didn’t become a private eye,” Mark whispered back. “Family business.”

  Then came the big dinner, which took place in the grand dining room. Roger and the guests ate the lavish five-course dinner cooked by a celebrity chef client who owed him a favor. The girls sat with the guests as their trophies at the table.

  We weren’t part of dinner, so we stood outside the dining room while Roger had the door locked. He didn’t want us inside to hear what they might be saying while Wittingsley served the food in the most formal manner imaginable. Wittingsley told us that we would be getting the same meal in the kitchen once this was over.

  “Benjamin, you’re taping the audio inside as well, right?” I asked.

  “Of course I am, but Roger’s not really talking about anything in his business plan. It’s mostly small talk and things like ‘As you read from the prospectus I sent you’ and ‘We are in this together.’ ”

  “That’s it?”

  “He’s just makin’ small talk. David’s just standin’ there looking like he’s shittin’ bricks,” Benjamin said.

  “What about Collins?” I asked.

  “He’s just sitting there not sayin’ a word. Ariel’s lookin’ over the room like she’s sizing up everyone to see which ones she would want to shoot first.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s her default mode.”

  “I didn’t see any prospectus or business proposals lying around,” Mark said. “Whatever it is, Roger must have already pitched them before today.”

  “And less than a dozen investment partners in this venture,” Marcie said. “Which means one, these guys are putting a fortune into Roger’s plan, and two, Roger’s keeping the circle small so there’s less chance of anyone leaking details about it. These guys all have plenty of skeletons to hide. This business venture is probably going to become another big pile of skeletons.”

  We all felt the same tension. If Roger was keeping this thing a secret from us, how bad could it possibly be? And how bad could it get if it blew up in his face and bit us in the arse?

  “If Roger’s getting into bed with Interzone, that’s it. I quit,” I said.

  “Calm down, Ravi,” Julia said.

  “I’m serious. I don’t care. I’ll go work in a McDonald’s if I have to. I’m out.”

  “If McDonald’s will have you,” Marcie smiled.

  “Yeah,” Benjamin chuckled on the Bluetooth. “You’ll be lucky if you can find a job at McDonald’s these days.”

  “Ha bloody ha,” I said.

  “You’re not going to get much trying to eavesdrop outside the door, chaps,” Benjamin said. “I’m gettin’ everything from the camera feeds and I’m already bored out of me face.”

  “I’m not going to force you to quit with me,” I said to Julia.

  “Of course I’ll come with you,” she said. “We have some money put away that should tide us over for a little while.”

  “So Roger didn’t invite these guys here to pitch them his plan,” Marcie said. “They’ve already bought in. This weekend is a party to celebrate the partnership. Roger’s too cheap to pay Madame Felicity’s girls out of his own pocket. He must have used some of the funds from their buy-in to get them a weekend with the most exclusive girls in London as a sweetener for the deal.”

  “Probably claim it off taxes, too,” Clive snorted.

  “And he has us here to see what kind of dirty laundry we can pick up on his partne
rs,” I said. “Which means it’s the kind of deal where Roger needs to have blackmail as an insurance policy.”

  “Typical Roger,” Mark said.

  “Oy oy,” Benjamin said. “Ariel’s excused herself and comin’ out.”

  The doors opened and Ariel made straight for me.

  “Man, it’s boring in there,” she said, and took my arm. “Mind if I borrow him for a minute, Julia?”

  She didn’t wait for Julia’s reply before she dragged me around the corner of the hallway.

  “Just what is the business venture Roger’s been on about anyway?” I asked. “That even your boss wants in on?”

  “Roger didn’t tell you?” Ariel said. “Guess you’re not supposed to know. Way above your pay grade, babe.”

  I glanced up at Benjamin’s webcam, hidden on the chandelier. He would be at his terminal now watching Ariel molest me and recording it all, which was ironic since I was the one who’d put that camera there in the first place earlier that day.

  “Wanna find a room?” Ariel said, pushing herself close and rubbing against me. I could feel her heat through the silk blouse and expensive black pantsuit. “One more for the road while you’re still a free man. Julia can join in if she can sneak away from those pasty-faced assholes.”

  “We’re done with that stuff,” I said, thinking of the best excuse. “I’m not doing the open relationship thing anymore. I’m taking my marriage seriously.”

  “Is Julia really going to go along with that?” Ariel asked, her voice full of innuendo. “Can she actually resist fucking other people?”

  “Of course she can. She’s been in recovery for over two years now. She’s taking it as seriously as I do. That’s the whole point of getting married. We’re making a serious commitment.”

  “We really should be committing together, all three of us.”

  “Ariel, we really can’t do that anymore.”

  “I get it,” she said. “No means no, so you keep saying it like you believe it.”

  “Why do you want to have sex with me so much anyway?” I asked.