The Secrets We Live In: A Novel

by Fazle Chowdhury

  Blanchard understood that when there was big news on the market, overseas agreements took little precedence and received little attention. This could be pivotal, but market volatility would be catastrophic for her own company.

  “I know what you are thinking, Denis,” said Zain.

  “You are worried about your company faring well during a time of crisis but investing with me would give you more than enough leverage, certainly in profits and the access to markets you need.”

  Blanchard conceded to herself that what Zain said was true. Ascolit’s profits were tethered to the continent and its harsh tax codes. To match the likes of the big companies in London and New York, she needed an edge, and the nuclear deal would give her that. The long-term investment would pay off much later.

  “Denis, I’m only asking for a small buzz in the market, not that you or Mehdi take sole responsibility for crashing Evans.” Zain laughed, but the other two did not join him.

  “So, you only need us to create the buzz?” asked Touati.

  “No, I need Denis for that. But I want something from you too.”

  Touati did not like where this was going. His company, too, was deeply wedded to the success of Zain’s nuclear deal.

  “I want you to convince the Hallstein brothers to pull their shares out of Evans.”

  “That’s impossible,” Touati protested.

  Madrid-based Hallstein family consisted of four brothers that owned ten percent of the Evans Group.

  “They’re not going to pull out because I said so—they would want something in return,” Touati warned.

  “Up to you, Mehdi. Warn them that they will lose twenty percent of their wealth and have no chance of redeeming it if they don’t go with Denis. Right, Denis?”

  “So, I am the alternative?” asked Blanchard.

  “Undoubtedly, yes.”

  Touati knew this game all too well, and so did Blanchard. Market buzz, followed by a pullout of the most crucial investors. Under pressure and insurmountable stress, Evans’ stock price would decline, leading to a doomsday situation where all company assets would sink. When the majority inside the company understood that all those numbers were inflated and even fraudulent, the news would leak, and even more investors, partners, and vendors would pull out, leading to a larger investigation from regulators. Evans would be broken up into several companies, and ultimately, one or a set of them would declare bankruptcy. Touati knew Zain would target, especially the ones in Leeds.

  “But Evans’ most profitable asset is the Andaman Gas Pipeline. It accounts for nearly fifty percent of its revenues. As long as that is functional, all this is futile,” said Blanchard.

  “That is no obstacle, Denis,” he said.

  “Mehdi,” Zain said in response to Touati’s shaking head.

  “I feel like you don’t like this plan I have set, and why would you? Your company owns 2% of Evans, right?”

  Touati was stunned. His company had acquired 2% of Evans in the hopes of amassing large assets during the liquidation of several manufacturing plants in east Scotland. Touati’s Manolet was short on capital, but it had no debt, making it very convenient for Evans to strike a deal with them. Manolet would win favorable bids to revitalize these declining Evans assets in return for two percent of shares. But Touati soon learned that as they took on fourteen of these manufacturing plants, Evans continued its shady price-fixing so that profits were taken out of these entities and into Evans accounting books, leaving these businesses forever in debt. Touati also recognized that the two percent was really a gift to buy his silence and play along. If Evans got their way, Manolet would profit well too.

  “Are you making me an offer, Zain?” Touati asked.

  Zain laughed.

  “No, I am asking you to do the right thing.”

  “And what is the right thing?”

  Zain leaned forward and explained that Touati had two options: one, to sell his two percent after the Hallstein brothers pulled out, or two, go solo and provide a portion or all of the money to WTC.

  “I’m sorry, why WTC?” asked Blanchard.

  “Because that is how Zain looks at the refugee problem—give the money to WTC, make it rich enough to take on the moral responsibility that breeds from his hate,” said Touati.

  Touati’s response was as blunt and non-compromising, something Zain had hoped to avoid. For Zain, Touati was more worried about his profits than doing the right thing.

  “How long have we been friends, Mehdi? You have seen me from my sorrow to where I am now…Do this for me, please.”

  Touati protested.

  “If this goes wrong, it will hurt us all.”

  Zain knew what those words meant.

  He flashed back to an episode more than two decades before, when he and Mehdi had exchanged insults. Touati warned Zain about the path the younger man was embarking on. Leaving everything—his life, his family, his job, his inheritance, even his beautiful fiancé at the time— for Aylin. Zain pleaded to his friend to hear him out that Aylin meant a new life, something he would never have with what he had then.

  “Mehdi, there is no need for that,” Zain said, back in the present.

  “Do this for me, please.”

  “And what if I don’t?” Touati asked.

  Zain realized that he had no choice but to give an ultimatum to his old friend. He rubbed the back of his head and then adjusted his sleeves. He looked at Blanchard with a smile and then leveled his gaze directly at Touati.

  “Do this because it’s better than going to jail,” Zain warned.

  Touati knew this wasn’t an empty threat. He knew that Zain’s intelligence network could provide enough information on him to indict him on more than this, more than his secret deals that Zain had facilitated with several dark figures, many of whom worked as proxies so he could reap the benefits he enjoyed. He also knew Zain was privy to Manolet’s budget, which had grown under his leadership. Still, quietly, regulators were urging Touati to return $10 billion of the company’s revenues that had gone missing from its books.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Touati.

  “Don’t take too long. Clicking your fingers is faster than picking the phone, and when it comes to you, Mehdi, what I can do and what I want to do are two different things.”

  Just then, Kamikazed rushed into the room with two of her men.

  “Whatever you guys are doing, postpone it. Denis, Mehdi, you both need to get out of here!” she warned.

  “But we still need to finalize a few more things,” Blanchard protested.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll coordinate it,”

  she assured as her men whisked Blanchard and Touati out. Kamikazed locked the door and shut off the lights. In the dark, Zain whispered,

  “I didn’t think you could see from outside into the basement.”

  Kamikazed turned her phone off.

  “I turned the lights off because of the cameras. I didn’t want to risk whoever was tailing you breaking into our server and getting access to footage,” she said.

  “Wow, you really do think of everything, don’t you?”

  From her crouched position on the floor, Kamikazed sat on the floor pulled Zain to her. She had developed a habit over the years of grabbing his hand and then pushing it away, a mirror of her simultaneous love for and denial of him. There was a long silence between them.

  Now what? Zain thought. Shouldn’t he be doing something? There were no ways to occupy himself. Kamikazed did not utter a word, and the silence was becoming increasingly uncomfortable to him. He looked at his surroundings. A caterpillar had found its way into the room and crawled towards another. As they greeted each other, Zain began to chuckle. He closed his eyes.

  “It’s very annoying,” said Kamikazed.

  “What is?”

  “That sound you’re making.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said.

  Kamikazed’s tone resonated to events to their past to a quiet restau
rant on Rue de Richelieu. Tears streamed down her face as Zain told the woman sitting opposite him that their engagement was over. He had unintentionally been transparent to make matters worse, revealing he was in love with a seventeen-year-old. Kamikazed, who had worked tirelessly to transform herself from the daughter of an arms dealer to a respectable professional, her personal life began to crumble.

  She was furious, and that anger turned to a burning flame of vengeance. But her love for Zain remained, albeit with a different flavor. Zain was everything to her: a former football star, educated at Oxford, and on a career path to becoming the chairman of his family fortunes. But he wanted to throw it all for a temptation. A feeling of disgust and unease corralled her as he spoke about it. Why would someone like Zain throw it all away for some girl? She wept without any regard. Perhaps that was what horrified her most. That Zain had no regard for his own life or future.

  Kamikazed felt rejected on several elevated levels. She wanted to shout, if not for herself but for Zain. He was destroying himself in the blindness of a love he believed he had with a seventeen-year-old but that he actually had with her.

  The waiter left their food on a cart near the table, and the divide between the two felt like the perfect metaphor for her own life. She had lost her father three years before when he was assassinated in front of the Royal Palace Hôtel. His death was an effort to damage a network of arms dealers. But for her, her father's death was like the cart, separate from the table. And the table was the life she would have had that now looked to be broken. She saw a semblance of it when her napkin fell to the ground, and she realized that one of the supporting wooden pillars was broken. Cracked at certain ends but still holding the table. She realized her engagement may have been broken, but her relationship was still intact. She knew then that she wanted Zain to remain in her life.

  “Cafe au lait crème brûlée,” she said, signaling that she wanted her third plate of the dessert. Zain did not mind. Kamikazed realized that she would lose her fiancé but gain a daughter.

  “Chloe, say something.”

  Zain would say those same words now as they crouched in the darkness of the basement.

  “Chloe, say something.”

  “Just a little while, and you can go,” she said in a non-conciliatory tone. Her cautiousness was evident. What amount of intensity could the present situation allow? Zain thought.

  “Did Sumeyyea like her classes from Chef Anton?” he asked.

  Kamikazed nodded and did not say a word.

  “Sumeyyea has grown up to become such a lovely girl, all because of you,” he said.

  “Our—” as soon as Zain said that word, Kamikazed turned. She looked at him in a way that even the darkness could not hide her fury. Zain hesitated. He corrected himself.

  “I mean your daughter—you have done such a fantastic job raising her.”

  Kamikazed kept her silence. The heartbroken moment she endured decades back was now part of her DNA. And hearing her grown-up daughter, who adored her biological father but unknowingly called him uncle, made all those ill feelings towards Zain rise.

  Then the lights came on. Kamikazed signaled to Zain to wait until she got the call that it was safe.

  “Bring the minivan at the back,” Chloe ordered.

  “You are free to go, Zain,” she said.

  Zain picked himself up and stretched his aching back. He adjusted his coat and looked at Kamikazed, only to be confronted with silence. He proceeded to exit, convincing himself that her tantrums were connected to the immense stress she was under.

  “It’s not her,” she said as Zain made his way out the door.

  He stopped.

  “What’s not her?” he asked.

  “Brianna is not Aylin.”

  Kamikazed met her, spoke to her daughter, asked some men to check her background. There was no evidence that Brianna was that seventeen-year-old girl Zain left her for.

  “You’re 100% sure?” Zain asked.

  “Yes, Zain, I am,” she said.

  “Well, thank you for having my back on this.”

  After Zain exited, Kamikazed broke down in tears. She was plagued with guilt. She had Sumeyyea, but Zain had no one. But at least, as Kamikazed thought, he did not need to be with the woman he left her for.

  ╔ ——————————————— ╗

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ╚ ——————————————— ╝

  “This is as far as I can go,” said one of Kamikazed’s men that escorted Zain from Solstice. He had no idea where he was. There were a lot of people, mostly bystanders and some pedestrians. Lights from police cars flashed, accompanied by loud sirens. There had been a bomb threat opposite to Gare du Nord, and a block away, another police unit was managing a protest on how the government was ignoring the refugee crisis. The anti-government protests clogged the streets, and Zain feared this was an opportunity the far-right groups would seize upon.

  Zain struggled to move through the crowd and into the metro station, which sharply contrasted with the tension just outside. Zain bought a ticket for his one-way ride. The machine coughed out his ticket. In its mirrored surface, Zain saw the reflection of a man who was staring in his direction. Tall, bulky, curly-haired. He had a distinguished eyebrow and both hands in his pockets. He had an unusually deep V-neck shirt that was dark purple. Zain felt like the man had come into the station behind him.

  Picking up his ticket, Zain walked to the tunnel not far from the platform. He seemed to be the only one walking in that direction, but he heard two sets of footsteps behind him. His instinct told him he was being followed, but he pushed down that feeling, telling himself he was just being paranoid. Zain walked slowly but calmly. Upon arriving at his platform, he realized the metro would take a while to arrive. He looked around him. He wasn’t completely alone. There was a pensioner at the far end, two women dressed for some corporate job despite the late hour, an old lady with a large handbag, and two university-aged boys. The two men that followed Zain were waiting in the corner, like panthers a heartbeat away from pouncing their veal. They were soon joined by two more. Now, Zain had four men to contend with.

  It had been a long night, and he was still hours away from the mansion. The goons watched Zain; Zain watched them back. They both kept an equal distance to mark their space. They orbited him, waiting for a moment when the platform would be empty.

  A mostly empty train pulled in. Zain decided not to take it. People pushed past him and onto the train. It pulled away from the platform, echoing down the tunnel. As he suspected, the men still stood in the corner, eyes on him. Then came the next wave of passengers onto the platform, one of whom brought the detestable smell of cannabis with him. The smell was so strong that two of the men watching him walked up to the platform to get on the next train. A train pulled in, and people piled on. Now, there were only five people watching Zain, and the one supplying the cannabis odor at the platform became too unbearable to manage. Perhaps that was Zain’s saving grace, that the odor was just too strong for the two men to do anything to him.

  A train pulled in, and everyone barring Zain and his predators got on. He was utterly exposed. A shower of bullets was definitely in the cards, but something was amiss. The goon who was calling the shots was hesitating. Zain sensed his assassins had a clear shot. It was only a matter of time until his end. Zain saw they were wearing earpieces. But something was not right. Then he heard a sound. A nice sound. A man began to play the violin by the track. It sounded like Baptiste Rodrigues’ version of “Ravel's Tzigane”, a troublesome tune that felt like an incomplete story. Time stood still, and Zain was growing increasingly frustrated. The notion that he could be killed any moment made him pace back and forth while the goons in the corner just watched.

  As Zain walked and waited for the metro, a wave of tourists entered the platform. He saw a man with a fashionable Super-lite Cap and a similar height and build as Zain. He offered the man €30 for the
cap, which he accepted. The train came, and the man departed, but Zain waited for the next one. There were more people on the platform now than he’d realized. Feeling a little safer, he sat close to the violin player on the floor, who went on playing.

  Zain knew that someone had tipped these men off about his whereabouts. Another train closed in, and he wondered whether he should get on. He tried not to look too worried. From what Zain knew that some assassins could be overeager, that sometimes they’ll look for a reason to fire on a target, but in a public setting, that would be their last resort. But as he observed his whereabouts, a thought came to Zain. Radiofrequency would be hard to come by so deep underground. The assassins had probably confirmed their orders before entering the metro station. Tension was heightening for Zain, and time dragged on. Would he take the next train, which may be his last ride ever? He heard a sound of a phone ringing just once and a woman cursing the spotty reception in the station. Zain’s suspicions were validated that there may be confusion among the goons. He recalled something Herzl had once said to him, referencing the Babylonian Talmud:

  “If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first.”

  When the next train came, four women, clad in black from the neck down, stepped out. They looked at Zain and smiled flirtatiously and winked. They noticed the two goons not so far away. They approached the men and attacked them, leaving them bloody and bruised. This was more than an assault. It was an execution. A CCTV camera honed into the attack. It looked like an episode of vengeance in the highest form. Blood was everywhere, and the men could barely breathe as they were slammed against the wall and the bench, and their mouths and noses were rammed against the cemented floor. And yet, Zain did not hear anyone coming to the men’s aid. He merely watched in shock and awe. When one of the women pulled out a knife and held it to one of the men’s throats, one of her companions delicately plucked it away. The assault was over. They roped the men together and kicked them onto the tracks just as the train sounded its arrival. As the women made their exit, the last one gave Zain a wink and then disappeared off the platform.