To Ariel, that was just sentimentality. But he was the client, so she didn’t argue.
I got a call from my father rather than the other way round.
“Dad? Is everything all right? What’s that noise?”
“Hello, Ravi! Say hello to your mother!”
“Helloooo, Ravi!”
“Mum? Are you drunk?”
“We are having the most marvelous time! Your father and I are burning down the old house!”
“What? Why?”
“To make a clean break,” Dad said. “This may be the old family house, but it has seen so much drama and tragedy, it’s no wonder none of the rest of the family wants to live in it. Since we’re selling the land, we don’t need the house anymore.”
“But to burn it down, isn’t it arson?”
“On a plot of land no one comes to. Whoever buys it is going to build an office or luxury condominiums,” Dad said. “I decided to make this a cleansing ritual. To burn away all the bad karma of the family. All the dramas, all the fights, all the tears, just be done with it.”
“And he’s invited the whole family!” Mum said. “It’s a party! Say hello, everybody!”
A cacophony of cheers rang down the phone. It really was the rest of the family. I’d only seen them weeks ago at my wedding.
“Aren’t the police going to be pissed off?” I asked.
“I still have some friends; they’re old like me and retired, but I called in some favors so we won’t have any trouble.”
“I haven’t had so much fun since your father beat up those gang members with a cricket bat!”
“Back to the party!” Dad said. “I just didn’t want you to worry, and don’t believe anything if you read it in the papers!”
“Papers? Dad, what—?”
He hung up.
“Everything all right?” Julia asked.
“I just found out my family is big on grand, mythical gestures,” I said.
“Now we know where you got it from,” Julia said.
THIRTEEN
As the days passed, the swelling on Kareena’s face subsided and the scars faded, and she looked more and more human. Dr. Kim’s work made her look like a new person, totally unlike Kareena Mahfouz. She didn’t look at all like the other women in Los Angeles with the obviously fixed pencil-thin noses, implanted cheekbones, or pumped-up lips. The point of Dr. Kim’s method was to make her look like an individual beauty rather than a generic one, and not like she’d had work done. The only trace of her old appearance was that intense gaze in her eyes. That was never going to disappear, and it was that gaze that lent her charisma.
Hamid hired a beautician who dyed her hair from dark to a lighter color. Her skin was already fair, so her ethnicity now had an indeterminate, if slightly exotic, quality. With her new lighter skin, she could pass for a slightly tanned Caucasian, a Latina, or someone of mixed race.
When she saw her new face in the mirror, Kareena became pensive.
“So that’s Karen Radley, then?” she said. “Is it really the face of an American? Hm.”
She spent her days watching television to absorb what she called “the grotesquerie of American Culture.” She changed her accent to knock out the Britishness and began to sound more and more American.
Julia and I were witnessing her becoming a different person. Karen Radley was a new persona gradually being layered over Kareena Mahfouz. There was still something incomplete about her transformation, though, and Julia and I had an idea.
Meanwhile, a casting director who had been accused by multiple women of sexual assault had had his car run off the road in the middle of the night in a secluded part of Glendale. There were no witnesses and he was not expected to wake up from his coma.
Eventually, Hamid called Julia and me in for a meeting at his office.
“She’s not going to stop with her campaign, is she?” Hamid asked.
“She has a mission,” I said. “And she has a whole network of contacts and the money to pursue it. It’s the same type of revolutionary campaign she carried out when she overthrew your father. She’s out to get justice for victims of sexual assault by enabling secret acts of vigilantism. She’s still a revolutionary. That’s her calling.”
“What am I going to do with her?” Hamid buried his face in his hands.
“We have a suggestion,” Julia said.
“You know your sister,” I said. “She’s a force of nature. She won’t ever be quiet. Sooner or later, she’s going to do or say something that puts her in the public eye in a big way, and it could be a world of trouble for the both of you. Those assassins you’re so worried about would know where to look for her.”
“What do you suggest?” Hamid asked.
“Cast Karen Radley as the new star of Ultimate Times,” I said.
Hamid’s eyes went wide. He looked at me like I’d gone mad.
“Think about it,” I said. “It’s better than casting drug addicts and toxic narcissists.”
“Hazards of show business,” Hamid said. “They’re the ones who possess that mad charisma about them that the public loves. I don’t set out to cast addicts. The most compelling actors keep turning out to be mentally unstable, outright insane, or addicts.”
“But for a children’s variety TV show?” Julia said.
“Kids love them,” Hamid said. “By the time we find out they have problems, it’s too late, until their problems make them unable to do the show anymore.”
“Karen has the wholesome good looks that the networks like,” I said. “You already know she’s mad as a hatter and charismatic as hell. You also know she’s disciplined enough to sustain the type of work ethic needed to star in a show. After all, she managed to spend the years needed to whip a whole revolutionary army into a state where they were capable of overthrowing your father’s dictatorship. She wants to influence hearts and minds. She’ll be more than willing to support causes that lift up children, girls, and women. She’ll use her celebrity as a platform for her revolutionary impulses. She’s a fanatical believer in social justice. She has the presence of mind not to film a sex tape. She knows how to use the Internet and social media to organize people for her causes. She knows how to fight trolls and harassers and she’s not afraid of anyone. She’ll be the perfect star.”
“And it lets you keep her close by so you can continue to watch over her,” Julia said. “She’ll effectively be your employee.”
Hamid’s face stayed frozen while we spoke.
Then he let it sink in.
“This is so crazy it can only work.” Then he started laughing. “Mine eyes have seen the light!”
FOURTEEN
It took a bit of wrangling, what with some of us stuck in different time zones, but I finally managed to get a video conference call with the rest of the firm. Olivia and Benjamin were calling in from Japan. Cheryl and Marcie from London. Mark from an anarchist squat in Cornwall.
“It’s nice to see you all again,” Cheryl said. “I’ve had everyone doing their bit investigating Roger and his shenanigans.”
“We sent Ken and Clive following a paper trail we found in Roger’s safe,” Marcie said.
“Benjamin and I have been downloading the files Roger had me upload to the cloud years ago,” Olivia said. “They date all the way back to the nineties.”
“A lot of the recordings are from usin’ the bugs I made for the firm,” Benjamin said.
“And Roger’d been supplying drugs to his clients from my stash for years,” Mark said. “He bought them off my friends and paid them not to tell me. I never sell drugs, and he turned me into a drug dealer.”
Benjamin and Mark were particularly pissed off.
“You know what Ken and I found?” Clive said. “A bloody private military contractor company registered in Reno, Nevada, under Roger’s name. It’s the same ex-Interzone blokes wot got nicked on that plane in Nigeria!”
“I see Roger’s game now,” Mark said. “Fuck up Laird Collins’s head at the
party in Sussex, then start quietly poaching mercenaries from Interzone when they start doubting Collins because he’s gone off his rocker. Roger didn’t just want revenge on Collins. He wanted his own Interzone. He wanted it all.”
“I knew it,” Cheryl said. “No wonder he was so cagey. He knew I would never let him do that, so he kept the pieces from me so I couldn’t put it together till it was too late. He’d been plotting this for more than twenty years.”
“We got Roger’s files off that cloud server,” Olivia said. “Nearly every government scandal you can think of that’s been covered up in the last fifteen years is here, and a few nobody ever even thought of. It’s Roger’s nuclear option. We can use them to leverage his release. The question is which files to release and how much.”
“All of them,” I said.
Everyone went quiet.
“Seriously?” Marcie said, almost laughing.
Benjamin burst out laughing.
The gods burst out laughing.
“Why not?” I said. “If we want a change, this is our chance.”
“Bloody hell, Ravi,” Mark said. “That’s the nuclear option.”
“There ain’t no takin’ that back, son,” Clive said.
“I know,” I said.
The ensuing silence was broken by Cheryl.
“I’m tired of Roger’s playbook,” Cheryl said. “We can do that and go back to the old status quo, continuing Roger’s game, and he compiles even more files like this like he’s been doing for twenty years.”
“But he’s not the head of Golden Sentinels now,” I said. “You are.”
“I’ve put up with this rubbish long enough,” Cheryl said.
“Too bloody right,” Ken said.
“Are we all in agreement?” I asked.
Everyone grunted, not a hint of reluctance among them.
“Are we really doing this?” Olivia asked.
“You know what?” I said. “I’m sick of this. Just release the files. All of them.”
And with the push of a button, Olivia did what she’d done when she was a teenage hacker. She created an anonymous email account and used it to dump the files at every major newspaper and online outlet that had a trusted correspondent. It took two days before the papers raced each other to release their files.
For the next few weeks, we watched the world go mad on the news. Roger’s files were like a nail bomb that exploded on the political carpet, sending shrapnel into both the British and American governments. Politicians were scrambling. In London, questions were being asked in parliament. The papers were running new revelations every three hours on their websites in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Lawsuits and writs were threatened to no avail. The prime minister was completely gobsmacked by all the dirt about the party that Roger’s files had exposed. Half the cabinet were former clients of Roger’s, and he’d collected secrets of theirs they hadn’t expected him to find. There was dirt that went back ten, fifteen, twenty years. Adultery. Underage kids. Embezzlement. Suspicious deaths. Bribes from foreign companies. Sex trafficking rings. The City was in turmoil from all the dirty deals that Roger’s files detailed. He’d gathered them using Olivia’s hacking skills for years, based on gossip his clients told him, long before I arrived at Golden Sentinels. Roger’s instincts as an investigator told him there were trails to follow, and he used people like Mark and Olivia to sniff out the dirty little secrets that he then banked for a rainy day like this one. In America, politicians were fighting over the most expensive lawyers to prepare for questioning about their donors, the lobbyists whose pockets they were occupying, the business deals that earned them money they shouldn’t have been making.
I wondered if Roger had predicted that I would go nuclear and release all the files. If this was the end of my career as an investigator, I might as well just vomit it all out to the ether. The investigations and inquiries looking into Roger’s coup would quietly stall and go away. News coverage would fizzle to the point where everyone conveniently forgot about it. Roger would be off the hook in a few weeks, and eventually we would receive a call from Marcie.
“Cheryl says the heat’s off Golden Sentinels,” she said. “Come home when you’re ready, kids.”
FIFTEEN
I put in a call with Sanjiv at Golden Sentinels Mumbai to see how things were.
“All’s well, beedu,” Sanjiv said. “Hey, you never told me your father was hardcore, yaar?”
“Well, I didn’t know about that either.”
“Burning the house to the ground for the whole city to see, that sends a message that he and your mother are nobody to be messed with.”
“I suppose it does,” I said.
“Hey, just for the hell of it, yaar? I looked up your father’s history? Before he emigrated to the UK, he was a seriously badass man, you know that?”
“What are you talking about? I thought he was a professor at the university.”
“He was—what? Did he never tell you? He was what they call a firebrand. He had his own crew, he led protests against the police, against the authorities, when he was younger, he was in so many street scraps. I think he left for England because there was nothing for him here anymore, yaar?”
“I didn’t know about that at all,” I said.
“You come from a family of interesting people, beedu! You should ask your parents about that more.”
“But things are sorted with them, right? They’ve left?”
“You have nothing to worry about. Your parents are on their way back to London now. They have a reputable agent handling the sale of their property. Everything is sorted out A-OK.”
“So what did you find out?” I asked.
“The Dhewans are one of the bigger families in Mumbai who somehow manage not to be considered a major crime family, if you can believe that. They deal with trading goods, luxury items, food stuffs, entertainment products, ‘off the back of a lorry’ types of things.”
“Do you mean smugglers? Black marketeers?”
“Sort of,” Sanjiv said. “At least the Dhewan family is benign.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“They don’t kill people.”
“Fair enough.”
“They don’t deal drugs, which would bring them the attention of the law, and so their people don’t get arrested often. They don’t engage in violent gang wars like you see here in Mumbai, so they don’t get beaten to death in custody. As far as the law is concerned, they’re pussycats who pay a bit of bribe money to the police to turn the other way, and they sell goods at a discount to people who aren’t rich. They’re a vital part of the city’s economy if you can believe that.”
“So my ‘auntie’ back in London is just carrying on a branch of the family business, then?”
“Just doing what they do best, yaar? Another thing: while we were watching after your parents, our boss here made contact with the head of the Dhewan family in Mumbai.”
“Oh, no.”
“It’s good news, beedu. It looks like the Dhewans are now Golden Sentinels Mumbai’s newest clients. They’ve hired us to do checks on their business partners, due process to check they’re not getting cheated, make sure the goods they receive aren’t fake. It’s all jhakaas.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that the bosses at every Golden Sentinels branch would be cut from the same cloth as Roger, always with an eye for deal-making. I just hoped not all of them became megalomaniacs who tried to take over a country in a coup.
“Sanjiv, mate, I owe you one for helping out my parents with the contract stuff on the house.”
“What are friends for, eh, beedu? We’re all Golden Sentinels. We do our bit.”
Julia and I continued to work with Hamid to prepare Karen for her entrance into the world. Hamid hired coaches to teach her to sing and dance, and media consultants to teach her how to hold herself and speak during interviews. Given that Kareena had attended the best private schools in Europe, half the work was already done. Th
e rest was how to conduct herself on camera. Again, she had learned that already, when she was a revolutionary who appeared on video as she overthrew her father. She already had good posture, and she knew how to sit and stand in the most poised manner that would draw people’s eyes to her. Her father had expected her to be married to a rich and powerful man and made sure she learned how to act like that girl.
And Karen Radley agreed to all this without any resistance after we explained to her that this was how she could be a revolutionary in plain sight. It didn’t occur to her to become a TV star, but once she got the idea, it made perfect sense to her. That was why she agreed to learn to speak in an American accent, to hide her past self under this new persona.
Karen spoke to us in Kareena’s voice, the one with the British accent from the years at school, perhaps for the last time.
“This is what I am now, but the real me will always be lurking at her core. I will continue to hide and plot, and this is how I will fight each battle in the shadows. Karen will be the creature the world sees, and she can do her part to make the world better while I do mine.”
The gods gathered to observe her final transformation with great interest, as if they were watching a highly rated talent reality show. There was something in it for all of them. Shiva and Kali noted the death and rebirth of her life. Bagalamukhi admired the layers of deception in the creation of Karen Radley. Louise Fowler oversaw her learning to become glamorous, her charisma growing. Lakshmi saw the abundance of wealth around her. Rudra was there for her righteous vengefulness, a girl after his own heart. Ganesha was impressed by the way she swept aside obstacles.
Hamid was well versed in the art of cultivating the image of a new star. By the time he brought Karen to the network as the new lead of his show, she had the executives eating out of her hand. She was sexy, yet wholesome enough to appeal to kids. She had a little bit of an edge in her strength of personality, so we had to coach her to downplay how strong and aggressive she could get. She knew how to get her way with a smile. We watched as they filmed her first shows, held press junkets where she was interviewed by the celebrity press. She was the new face of Hamid’s show and, in a few months, the face of the network. In six months, she would be on the cover of every magazine on the stands. Product endorsement deals flooded in. She supported causes like children’s education, women’s health, and of course the exposure of sexual predators and help for their victims. She would cause as many headaches for the network for her outspokenness as she would earn them tens of millions of dollars, so they put up with her. Her entire being was a massive feat of social engineering.
Her Fugitive Heart Page 22