“That’s an awful lot of trouble to go through for no apparent purpose.”
“But hardly the strangest thing that your government has ever done, no?”
“No.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m worried about Lena.”
“Of course you are. You’re her father. That’s your job. But she’s a big girl now. She can take care of herself.”
“And then some.”
“Living on the subcontinent is always something of a risk. But is it really that much riskier now than when you took her there as a child? Or is it just that you’re not there to look after her in person?”
“It’s not the same. The tensions between India and Pakistan are so much higher than they were back then. Couple that with nuclear weapons and the growing reach of the Islamists in Pakistan and it’s hard to be optimistic.”
“Who can be? But that’s pretty much true anywhere on the planet. Even in India, Lena is more at risk from typhus and traffic accidents than she is from nuclear bombs. It’s normal for a parent to jump to the far end of the bell curve of possibilities, the nightmare scenario. You’re hardly the first to do so. Children have to find their own way in the world. Lena will come home when she’s ready. Or she won’t. But it will be her choice.”
Sam could hear a note of bitterness in Vanalika’s words. He suspected she was thinking of her own structured upbringing and the choices that had been made for her at least as much as she was thinking of Lena. Sam could not fault her for it. For all of its privileges, Vanalika’s life had been something of a golden cage.
As if reading his thoughts, Vanalika squeezed his hand.
“You must think I’m a selfish little bitch projecting my own frustrations onto Lena’s situation,” she said.
“Not at all,” Sam said, but he laughed. Vanalika Chandra was very, very perceptive. He felt a brief flash of pity for her husband, Rajiv. There was no way he would be able to keep up. “All right, maybe a little,” he confessed.
Vanalika stopped. She put her arm around Sam’s waist and turned toward him, tilting her head back slightly.
“Kiss me,” she commanded.
Sam was only too happy to comply.
Later, he drove Vanalika home to the bucolic estate in Potomac, Maryland, that had been the home of the Indian Embassy’s political counselor for at least the last two decades. The neighbors were “horse people” who looked somewhat askance at the parade of dark-skinned men and women in saris who came and went from No. 97 Hickory Lane.
Vanalika made him park two blocks away to minimize the risk that anyone she knew would see them together. There was little chance of that. The houses here were far apart and there were only a few streetlights to do battle with the inky suburban darkness.
“It’s not too late to change your mind and come home with me,” he said.
“Yes, it is.”
“Can I see you next week?”
“We’ll see. The assistant minister is coming to town and he will want to be feted in the style that he feels is appropriate to his station. It could be busy. If it is at all possible, then, yes. I would like to see you.”
She kissed him softly. Her lips tasted of dark cherries and chocolate.
He ran his hand over her black silky hair and along the curve of her neck.
“I love you, Vanalika.”
“No, you don’t. You just think you do. You’re a sweet man, Sam Trainor.”
She kissed him again and she was gone.
• • •
Was she right? Sam wondered. Maybe he was confusing love with a lack of loneliness. This was the first time he had said “I love you” to a woman since Janani had died. He had not thought about it. He had just said it. Did that make it more true or less true? Did it even matter? Vanalika Chandra was complex. There were depths to her that Sam knew he could never plumb, mysteries and secrets that she would never reveal. How much did he really know about her? How much could anyone ever really know about someone else’s inner life?
In any event, Vanalika had made it clear to Sam that what they had together was enough for her. It would have to be enough for him too. Maybe she was right. Maybe he didn’t love her. But he sure did enjoy her. Vanalika was something else.
He turned off the Capital Beltway onto the George Washington Parkway. During rush hour, both the beltway and the parkway came to a virtual standstill. This late at night, there was little traffic on the roads and Howlin’ Wolf was singing the blues on the CD player.
“I am a backdoor man,” the Wolf sang in his unmistakable gravelly voice. “When everybody trying to sleep, I’m somewhere makin’ my midnight creep.”
“I can relate, Chester,” Sam said sardonically. When the lyrics to classic blues songs started to feel relevant, you knew you were in trouble.
Just south of Potomac Overlook Park, he saw flashing blue lights in his rearview mirror. The single squawk of the siren was universal police talk for “pull over.”
Shit.
How fast had he been going?
Sam pulled over to the side of the road, grateful that there was so little traffic. He fumbled in the glove box for the registration. It had been years since he had been pulled over for anything.
A man wearing the blue uniform of the park police tapped lightly on the glass. Sam lowered the window.
“Sorry, officer. Was I speeding?”
“License and registration, please.”
Sam handed over the documents.
There was something familiar about the officer, but he could not quite place what it was. Maybe he had seen him on patrol downtown at some point. The man was tall and had dark hair that was mostly covered by his cap. He was unsmiling and had a prominent lantern jaw with a cleft chin. It was a distinctive feature and there was something about it that made Sam uneasy.
In the rearview mirror, he could see a second cop get out of the vehicle, which was an unmarked Ford. The flashing blue lights had been set into the grille. They had been turned off in favor of the Ford’s regular blinking hazards. Was it normal for uniformed officers to ride in unmarked cars? That would seem to defeat the purpose.
“Sir, I need to ask you to step out of the vehicle, please.”
“What’s the problem, officer?”
“Just step out of the car, please.” Sam saw the cop’s right hand drift down toward the gun on his hip. Something did not feel right.
An image of the cop flashed into his mind, dressed not in the blue of the park police but in U.S. Army green. Sam remembered where he had seen this man before. He had been with John Weeder coming out from behind the steel door that led to the Morlocks’ lair. Sam wondered if this was the last man to see Andy Krittenbrink alive.
Without conscious thought, he slammed the shift lever into drive and smashed his foot on the accelerator. The Prius jumped forward and the “cop” stepped back, fumbling for his gun.
Sam had a head start, but he was driving a 134-horsepower Prius and the big Ford was soon on his tail. That they were not using the lights and siren only reinforced for Sam that this was not the police. The Ford slammed into his rear with a crunch of metal. Sam took a curve at high speed and felt the rear wheels slip on the slick pavement. He fought for control and kept the car from fishtailing. But the Ford used the opportunity to get in between Sam and the sheer rock wall on the right. His pursuers slammed into the rear quarter panel of the Prius and nearly spun Sam into the wall.
Before his first Islamabad assignment, the State Department had required Sam to take a defensive-driving course outside of Richmond. The course, which was known informally as Crash-and-Bang, was widely considered something of a lark among the diplomats. It was a fun field trip, but few of them could envision ever being in a situation where they would be required to employ the somewhat esoteric skil
ls the course was designed to impart. Sam remembered that the best way to drive a car off the road was not to slam it full-on but rather to nudge either the front or rear quarter panel exactly as the Ford was trying to do. Maybe the driver of that car had graduated from the same course.
The instructors at Crash-and-Bang had been the particular mix of ex-military and “security professionals” that had begun to accrete, barnacle-like, to every exposed surface of the federal government after 9/11. At graduation, the lead instructor—a former DEA agent named Dwight with an immense beer belly and a Southern drawl—had passed out hats that featured the logo of TacTrain, the company that ran the program on behalf of the State Department.
“Here you go,” he had said. “With our compliments. If you are ever attacked by terrorists and survive the experience, we’d like you to wear this hat to the press conference. If you fuck up and get yourselves killed, with your last dying breath I want you to take your hat and toss it far enough away so that it’ll be out of the frame when the good people from CNN show up.”
They had all laughed at that. It had been funny . . . at the time.
Sam remembered another element from his time on the track. The bootlegger turn. He pulled up hard on the emergency brake with his right hand while simultaneously jerking the steering wheel to the left in a controlled movement of something less than a quarter turn. The Prius swung into a sharp 180-degree spin in front of a pickup truck that swerved to avoid him with a loud honk. Sam jammed down the accelerator as the Ford sped past, caught by surprise.
It was a temporary reprieve. Even going as fast as he dared, it was only a few minutes before his pursuers were again on his tailpipe. Sam was hoping to make it to the exit in McLean for the CIA. There were real cops in abundance to be found on the access road to Agency headquarters.
It was not to be.
The Ford again nosed up to the Prius’s right rear quarter panel and locked bumpers. The Taurus outweighed the Prius by at least five hundred pounds and put out at least twice the horsepower. Ever so gently, the Ford pushed against the rear panel and Sam could only watch helplessly as his car spun out of control. He did a complete 360-degree turn before plunging off the edge of the parkway and down the steep embankment that led to the Potomac River.
The Prius smashed through a stand of saplings and ripped thick bushes out of the ground by their roots. About halfway down the hill, the right front corner slammed into a thicker oak tree, spinning the car sideways and causing the air bag to deploy.
Sam lost his orientation as the car rolled at least twice before finally coming to a halt propped up against the side of a maple tree. It was at least upright.
The air bag deflated. The windshield of the Prius was smashed and a thick tree branch had penetrated the glass on the passenger side. It was sticking into the seat like a spear and would have impaled anyone who had been sitting there.
Bizarrely, Howlin’ Wolf was still playing on the stereo.
“Something just ain’t right. That’s evil. Evil is goin’ on wrong.”
Sam unbuckled the seat belt. His body felt sore and bruised. The door would not open. He kicked it and it popped loose.
He looked up toward the road. It was dark, but he could hear the sounds of two men clambering down the slope.
“You go for the car,” he heard one of them say. “I’ll head to the river.”
The river.
Sam shook his head in a vain attempt to clear it. There was a ringing in his ears and he felt oddly distant from what was happening. He was in shock. But if he did not move, that wouldn’t matter because he would soon enough be dead.
He turned and ran as quickly as he could downhill. He misjudged a leap over a log and went sprawling into a bank of soft mud at the edge of the mighty Potomac River. It might have saved his life. He looked up and saw the lantern-jawed soldier dressed up as a park police officer. A wolf in sheepdog’s clothing. His gun was drawn and he was scanning the riverbank. As quietly as he could, Sam slithered into the cold, dark waters of the Potomac. The icy current grabbed him and threatened to pull him deep under the surface, but a few quick, strong strokes underwater brought Sam into deeper water where the flow was not quite as fast. He stayed under for as long as he could, swimming out toward the middle of the river and letting the current carry him away from the crash site.
When he could no longer hold his breath, Sam stuck his face out of the water long enough to quickly exchange the carbon dioxide in his lungs for a gulp of life-giving oxygen. His limbs were already heavy with cold. In April, the river was still running high with snowmelt.
He did not dare return to the Virginia side, however, and he swam the breaststroke on the surface toward the Maryland shore, trying not to think about the stories of the six-eyed fish and eight-legged frogs that had come out of the polluted Potomac. Eventually, he made landfall by the point near Fletcher’s Boat House. He was shivering and he had to beat his arms and legs to get some feeling back into them.
Oddly, the dominant emotion he felt was vindication. Two of Vanalika’s zebras had just tried to kill him.
“At least I’m not crazy,” he said out loud to no one in particular.
MUMBAI, INDIA
APRIL 19
The taste of defeat wasn’t so much bitter as it was sour. Even more interesting, Lena thought, was that it had texture as well as flavor. It was like trying to eat a mouthful of ash. You could chew it, but you could never swallow it.
The Gummadi brothers were coming. Ramananda’s little monkey-wrenching trick had bought Dharavi a little time, maybe two weeks but no more. Her last meeting with the brothers had ended badly. In truth, she did not know what she had expected. The land the slum was built on was worth too much and the people who lived there were worth too little for the outcome to be in doubt.
She had stayed late at the school, ostensibly to organize the tools and equipment but really to organize her thoughts. She was just about out of ideas. One of the lawyers she had hired had told her that day that he would keep taking her money if she insisted on it, but there was nothing more that he could do. The legal battles were over. The PR campaign had never really taken off. And there was no political white knight ready to ride in on his trusty charger to save the day. Lena was on her own, and she had failed.
It was so late when she reached the little bridge across the fetid canal that Tahir had already crawled onto his sleeping mat under the stairs.
“Madam,” he called out, as Lena crossed the bridge. “Madam, I must speak to you.”
“Good evening, Tahir. I hope you weren’t waiting up for me.”
“No, madam . . . well, not entirely.” The boy stammered as he pulled himself up onto the bridge by his hands. Lena wanted desperately to help him, but she knew that she could not. It would have been an insult. Instead, she reached into her pocket for a ten-rupee coin.
“No, madam. No toll tonight. There is something I must tell you.”
“What is it?”
“Do you know that you are being followed by a man?”
“Is it Brad Pitt? Or maybe Shahid Kapoor?”
“No, madam. A much less handsome man with a beard.”
“Do you see him now?”
“No,” Tahir admitted. “He comes and goes. I think he knows that I see him. But he watches for you, and when you leave, he follows you.”
“How long has this been happening?”
“Just a couple of days, madam. I do not know what he wants with you, but I am afraid.”
“Don’t worry, Tahir. I’m not. It will be fine.”
“But . . .”
“It’s okay. Really.”
“Of course, madam.”
And the young legless Indian boy who so tugged at her heartstrings dragged himself back under the bridge.
As she picked her way carefully across the trash-strewn bridge, Lena found herself
scanning 60 Feet Road looking for the man Tahir had described. He was just a boy, with a boy’s imagination, but Lena had no trouble believing that the Gummadi brothers had sent someone to keep an eye on her. Not that they really stood to gain much from it. For all intents and purposes, they had already won. At this point, her campaign against the Five Star development amounted to little more than tilting at windmills.
Maybe they thought that she was responsible for the vandalism of their heavy machinery. Even a few weeks’ delay in the schedule would have been costly, and an old-fashioned gumshoe tracking her movements would be a cheap countermeasure. It would be in character for the Gummadis to assume that Lena would look for some last-ditch way to hurt them, even if the effort was fruitless. It is what they would have done.
Lena saw nothing out of the ordinary as she crossed the street to her building. There was no mysterious bearded figure lying in wait in the entryway. Everything seemed perfectly normal.
By the time she reached her small apartment, Lena felt ready to surrender to her exhaustion. It had been a long and emotionally trying day.
Once through the door, she kicked off her shoes and wiggled her toes, enjoying the feeling of release and freedom that came with bare feet. Nandi and the other boys went barefoot all the time and Lena might have envied them if she had not known that it was only because their families could not afford shoes.
There was a bottle of cold Bisleri mineral water in the refrigerator and a clean glass in the dish rack. She sat down on the couch and thought idly about putting the next episode of Mad Men on the DVD. She was about halfway through the third season and seriously addicted to the travails of Don and Betty.
There was a knock at the door. Soft. Almost tentative.
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