Warrior Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  She was Noorzilla, and she waved her freak flag with pride.

  So, Ziya shoved her own feelings of desolation and despondence aside and went forward with a determined smile on her face.

  Ziya might have gotten shafted in the love department but she was determined that nothing was going to mar this happy occasion for her best friend. She had given up too much, fought too much to really not get every last detail right the day she decided to join her life to the life of the man she loved.

  And, if occasionally, she wanted to break down and cry in an expensive shopping mall, she did what she always did when she was stuck with an unpleasant task.

  She gritted her teeth, sucked it up, got on and got the job done.

  ~~~~~~

  Noor knocked on Ziya’s door in the house on Grosvenor Street, the house Noor had grown up in, the one next to Sam’s parents’ house, where Sam and she had first met. She came in without bothering to wait for the ‘Enter’.

  Ziya didn’t bother inviting her in either. With Noor, it was like vampires. Once she was in, she didn’t wait around for invitations. The first time was enough.

  “Babe, I was thinking,” she began as she entered the bathroom, where Ziya was trying to have a calming bath in the bathroom she shared with Noor. The bathroom was kickass and twice the size of her own back home in Goonj.

  Best of all, it had a bathtub.

  Something that most bathrooms in Indian homes didn’t run to because of space constraints.

  Ziya scrunched in into the hot, sudsy water and barely lifted her head from the towel pillow she had made for her head at the edge of the tub. There was no relaxing bath music; she had wanted some utter quiet time. Maybe fall asleep in the bath, if that could make her feel any better.

  Noor sat on the edge of the tub now and touched a golden streak that was turning more yellow by the day as the color was washed off.

  “It’s the holidays,” she said absently. “Maybe you should have the ends streaked red.”

  “Maybe,” Ziya murmured. “That was what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Noor shook her head and plunged her hand into the water, sifting through it, watching, admiring how even the sudsy water couldn’t keep the shine off her engagement ring. The diamond winked steadily, surrounded by more tiny diamonds and the gold band was untarnished, lovingly cared for by its wearer.

  “I am not sure of what inscription to get for our rings,” she confessed.

  Ziya sighed and moved her head a single inch so she could regard Noor through slitted eyes.

  “I thought you were going with SN and your wedding date. I thought we had given the go ahead to the jewelers, sweetie,” she said, as patiently as she possibly could.

  “I know.” Noor nodded earnestly, her waist length hair flying every which way. “But, isn’t that so trite? I want something unique, Zee. Something that no one else in the world has.”

  Ziya smiled softly, just a touch of wistfulness slipping through in the end.

  She laid a hand on Noor’s wrist, and squeezed it. “You do, Noor. You have Sam. No one else in the world has a man like Sam, who loves anyone as much as Sam loves you.”

  Noor sighed happily and hugged Ziya, getting half her clothes wet in the process. And when she leaned back, her green eyes were grass-green with happiness and the secure, slightly stunned knowledge of a woman in love…who was loved back.

  “Trust you to point out the obvious.”

  Ziya shrugged, a tiny movement of neck and shoulders. “It’s what I do, honey.”

  Then Noor’s smile faded, concern replacing the happiness in her green-green eyes. Distress clouded her face along with frustration.

  “Why won’t you just tell me what happened that night, with Krivi, Ziya? You always tell me everything, dammit.”

  Ziya smiled slyly. “Not everything, Noor. I didn’t tell you about Eddie Greenburg.”

  Noor’s jaw dropped. “Eddie G? That guy in my History of Egypt class in Trinity who drove the souped-up Yamaha, and had a cigarette dangling from his lips, never attended any classes and failed to show up for Commencement? The one we all wanted to mack with?”

  Ziya nodded, definitively.

  “Someone from your sorority, one of those It Girls bet me a hundred pounds that I couldn’t bag any guy from the Lit department on my best day.”

  Noor’s eyes rounded.

  “A hundred pounds is a lot of money for a broke nineteen-year old, as you well know, and I had already spent all of mine on these shoes I wanted. So then I decided to lure Eddie G with my old school cheerleading uniform. Remember that one?”

  “I didn’t even know your school had a cheerleading squad,” Noor said faintly.

  Ziya hadn’t gone to a gated, private school with marble benches in the cafeteria like Noor had. She had gone to a government run school in South London.

  “We weren’t very good. But the uniforms were cute. Anyway, uniform flash and the boy was toast.” Ziya smiled smugly at the memory of having bad boy ‘Eddie G’ wrapped around her like poison ivy, while they called his name at Commencement. “A hundred quid well-earned, baby.”

  She even winked and then sank deep into the water, till her face was submerged inside for a couple of seconds.

  ~~~~~~

  When she came out, Noor grinned and yanked her hand back before Ziya could do her some bodily harm.

  Ziya sputtered and shook her wet bangs from her eyes, while glaring at her best friend with murderous intent. “That was uncalled for!”

  Noor shrugged, and blew on her nails. “Five quid from those hundred belonged to me too.”

  Ziya grinned, wicked and easy. “They did?” She poked her friend with one sharp finger on her thigh. “What about Sameth? Weren’t you guys dating then too?”

  Noor smiled. “We were, honey. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to plant one on Eddie G’s Brad Pitt lips.”

  Ziya returned the smile with a nostalgic sigh. “He really was the quintessential bad boy, wasn’t he?”

  “He started you on this path you are on, where you pick the least unsuitable men who look so fucking hot as to be criminal and then you walk away from them because your heart has never been involved.”

  Ziya didn’t refute the statement.

  Noor shook her by the arm.

  “Tell me what happened with Krivi, damn you!”

  Ziya gave her a single look and it was sad and weary. There were tears clinging to the lashes of her dishwater dull eyes. “I’d tell you,” she whispered. “I swear to you, I would, Nuria. I just don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Then start from the beginning, Ziya.” Noor was shocked now, and a little concerned.

  This wasn’t some random fling that had made Ziya wary so she cut the cord and run.

  There was a lot more going on here and there was no way she could pry it out of Ziya without hurting her. What concerned Noor was that Ziya was hurting at all. No man, in the history of Ziya, had ever been allowed to come so close as to hurt her.

  Not physically.

  And definitely, not emotionally.

  “I can’t. Not yet.” Ziya shook her head determinedly, so that some of the strands clung to her hot cheeks. She pulled them back and looked critically at the ends. “Maybe I will streak the ends red. For some festive cheer.”

  She gave a cheerful little smile that didn’t fool her best friend for a second.

  “You have to tell me sometime, Ziya. I can’t stand to see you hurt. And if Rambo hurt you in anyway, I will sic Sam on him. Engagement party or no engagement party. You get me?”

  Ziya laid her head on Noor’s thigh, getting the jeans wet and Noor stroked her wet hair.

  “I can’t stand to see me hurt either.” She closed her eyes and murmured, “I am not hurt. Not anymore.” Then she looked up and gave Noor a wan smile. “And Krivi will let Sam pound him to mulch because he is more scared of you than any of us.”

  ~~~~~~

  “We have to do something about her,
” Noor told Sam, later that night.

  They were laying entwined together in her old room, spoon-fashion. Sam was kissing her neck, melting her spine with every brush of his lips against her skin.

  It had been this way since she was sixteen and they’d come together for the first time; and she hoped it would stay the same when they grew old and wrinkled together. Love like this came once in a lifetime, but it was an added bonus to have the chemistry too.

  “Who?”

  Sam ran his hand down Noor’s left hand and lifted it, to look at the ring winking in the light of the moon. .

  “Zee, dummy.” She sighed and turned into him, burying her face in the crook of his neck, breathing him in deeply.

  “She is so sad, Sam. I am really worried about her. I think Krivi did something terrible to her. Maybe assaulted her or something.”

  “Tried to,” Sam interjected quietly. “And I don’t think he did anything of the sort.”

  “Have you seen him, Sameth? That man is GI Commando. There would have been no try about it.”

  “Your friend is no lightweight either. She would have woken up all of Leh before letting him touch her if she didn’t want him to,” he argued back. “It wasn’t like that. Ziya would have had him hauled in chains if it were.”

  “You might have a point there,” she conceded.

  He grinned into her hair. “I always do, baby. You’re just too stubborn to see it.”

  She punched him on the shoulder, and then leaned back to see him. Misery plain in her grass green eyes. He kissed her forehead and said, “Yeah, I know. There is something wrong with her. And I can’t get a handle on it either.”

  “She hasn’t gotten laid,” Noor commented. “I swear, no woman on earth could be that miserable if she has had some sort of sex in recent times.”

  Sam shook his head. “No, Noor. You are not pimping your friend out.”

  She gave him an innocent look. “Hello! I am no pimp. I am just going to…create opportunities. It’s what a good friend would do.”

  Sam sighed and kissed her quick on the lips.

  “What am I going to do with you, Noor?” he whispered against her lips.

  She smiled, twined her arms around his neck, and rubbed her leg against his. Thrilled with the idea of sleeping like this with him every night, for the rest of her life. Sometimes, mind you, some very rare times, the fates were kind to you.

  “Love me. For who I am,” she answered promptly.

  Sam smiled and all that he loved about her could be visible in the smile. And it was a direct reflection of all that he felt in his heart. He couldn’t wait for next week, when he could announce it to the rest of the world.

  Noor was his.

  The thought was still playing in his head as they drifted off to contented sleep. Together.

  Twenty

  The Woodpecker was enthralled.

  The thing on the table was a thing of beauty and such grace…Wood touched the thing on the table with reverential fingers.

  Blueprints. Oh god, just looking at the blueprints was enough for now.

  And to think, that very soon the blueprint would have an actual working prototype that would then go to the highest bidder on the planet.

  A hydrogen bomb that could be dismantled into a suitcase and assembled in fifteen minutes. A hydrogen bomb with a blast radius of twelve city blocks, easy. A hydrogen bomb that didn’t need a carrier plane to be destroyed when it was deployed.

  The human touch was required for this one.

  Tom had asked for patience, had promised that the patience would be rewarded in the end. All these months, almost a whole year of inactivity, of doing nothing but sit around in expensive hotel rooms and order room service and watch boring TV.

  All those months when there was so much work to be done, when there was a possibility the name Woodpecker had been forgotten by those in the business…and Wood had been inactive.

  But no, Tom had asked for patience.

  Wood had been driven bat-crap crazy by the inactivity, by having all those creative juices burning inside and with no outlet for them.

  After the first couple of incidents, Tom had as much as ordered to not kill innocent, incompetent people who didn’t do their jobs well. Like delivering pizza, or dry-cleaning or cleaning toilets. Or making up the bed, sometimes.

  So Wood had been bored too.

  Until Helena had come along.

  Wood smiled as Helena walked out of the bathroom, wrapped in nothing but a large bath towel. One tug and the bath towel would come off. How arousing to know that what waited underneath was all Wood’s.

  “Pequena,” Wood said. “Come look at this.”

  Helena came and bent down to check out the blueprint. There were markings for casing, bolts, propellant and explosive. There was a remote control device that could be activated only by touch and numerically…to activate the detonator. The name of the labs in Mexico, Libya and Switzerland which had worked on all the different components were visible on the upper right hand corner.

  Triton, Extec and Schaffenhaus.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Wood ran a loving hand down Helena’s back.

  She shrugged. “I do not understand what it is. But if you say it’s beautiful, it must be.”

  Wood grinned. “I do say so. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.”

  A fax hummed somewhere in the next room, caught by the almost superhuman-hearing Wood possessed. Tom’s room. And Tom was out.

  “Wait here, I’ll just be a minute,” Wood murmured.

  ~~~~~

  Helena was still studying the complicated blueprints when Wood made short work of slipping into Tom’s room, by angling the keycard just so, checking for the tell-tale strand of wet hair, and remembering its position so that it could be replaced.

  Wood walked straight to the printer that had just spewed out at least a ream of paper.

  There was some encrypted data on the screen, child’s work if Wood wanted to decrypt it, but there was all that paper.

  Wood lifted the first sheet off and started reading. It was history, past history. Wood’s history, from the mouths of the fools who wanted Wood dead and gone. About the London bombings, which had really been a kind of curtain-raiser for the profession Wood had chosen.

  And one name leapt out of the printout. One of the car owners’.

  Krivi Iyer. Ex-MI5. Thought to be freelancing with a K&R outfit headquartered in America but operational globally. Recent whereabouts unknown. On the trail of the terrorist known as The Woodpecker. Mission unsuccessful. Dead-end reached in investigation.

  Wood frowned.

  Someone was after the terrorist known as The Woodpecker? What was next, a trial without cameras and a quick, quiet death by lethal injection?

  Wood didn’t think so.

  Wood shoved the printout down, and then thought better of it. Smoothing the edges of the paper, the printout was restored to its former, crisp state.

  Then Wood sat down on Tom’s chair, and typed quickly on the keyboard, so that everything there was to know about recent mail history could be seen.

  There were several communiqués.

  All encrypted.

  Wood smiled, and began to type. Quickly, accurately. Feeling something rise inside that had been lying dormant for almost a year now.

  Regular people would have called it bloodlust.

  Wood called it going to work.

  Twenty-One

  Chelsea Mews

  London

  Three Weeks to Christmas

  The investigation has reached a dead-end.

  Krivi read his own report for the millionth time and wondered at the empty, gnawing feeling inside him at the words.

  Dead-end.

  Such a final word, as if there was no possibility of anything else happening. Never, ever.

  Dead-end, which translated to dead in plain English.

  The investigation was dead, the trail had gone cold months ago because The Woodpecker had n
ot surfaced for close to a year now. No explosions, no bombs, nada.

  Nothing.

  The psych-eval report included with his own debriefing report had stated, categorically that they were dealing with a sociopath and a psychopath, most probably with terrible childhood trauma. Sexual abuse was not ruled out, but it may not have been the trigger that turned the terrorist onto his chosen path.

  The psychopathic behavior was attributed to the fact that the terrorist dealt with scenarios that always required a personal touch.

  Killing was personal for The Woodpecker, always had been.

  And the sociopathic behavior was the almost paranoid way in which he hid his tracks, used new people every time, if he did use anyone at all for contacts, intel and resources. Also, he wasn’t above disposing people off, once they had served their purpose.

  There was something so clinical in the way he conducted his business, that the psychiatrist had to conclude that it was just that, just business for him. A business he was terribly good at, but just a business nevertheless.

  There was an extremely generic profile for The Woodpecker.

  Early to mid-thirties, college-educated and definitely a man. Women just didn’t have the guts or the stomach to be in this business for that length of time and not slip up.

  Which had everyone on the debrief team conclude that The Woodpecker’s support system was also largely male-oriented.

  Krivi wasn’t sure of anything about the profile except that someday, very soon, The Woodpecker would strike again. Because he was so bored.

  Sociopaths got bored quickly, almost on a daily basis. And this sociopath killed when he got bored. It was his preferred method of letting off steam.

  Sometimes, Krivi wondered if he should start collating the number of deaths reported everyday on scanners, worldwide, and start to figure out a pattern from there. Anything to keep from letting the numbness escape.

  Krivi slid the two-inches-thick report into a case that he slid under the motel bed, he was renting by the week under an assumed name. Juan Maartel. The passport picture was his own; the passport he had swiped from the guy next to him at Heathrow’s men’s urinal, four months ago.