Guardian Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  “You guys don’t remember that village that was burnt alive and the earth salted so nothing could ever live there again? What was its name, Santa Lucia?”

  Akira flinched at the stark horrifying words. “I get it. You want proof. That Sebastian is stashed somewhere and planning something. Am I right?” she asked slowly.

  “Yes, if you can find me a source that confirms his whereabouts, his sighting, anything. Maybe a picture or two, then we are in business.”

  Matt added, “On the record, of course.”

  “Matthew…” Akira turned towards him threateningly.

  “Matthew’s right. One on-the-record source, plus one picture. And you’re winning the Ramnath Goenka Award before your next birthday.” Anderson smiled wickedly here.

  “I’ll help you. I am amazing at research.” Matthew said with a wink at her and a grin at Anderson. Before he’d taken up this editorial position, he’d won the coveted Times Photojournalist of the Year award, for covering one of the many school shootings that had rocked the United States.

  Akira considered everything she knew about Brandon, Sebastian…weighed it against her own tenacity and determination to get to the truth. And made her decision.

  “Gentlemen, we have a deal.” She held out her hand as she stood up and closed her eyes on a sharp breath. The headache was vicious now.

  “And it’s all tomorrow, ladies and germs. Now she goes home. Singhji, you’re a great boss, but I don’t think your insurance covers dead-on-their-feet idiots.” Matt hustled her out the door, with her story still clutched in her hands.

  Akarshdeep waved them off.

  ~~~~~~

  Matt continued lecturing Akira, “And you. You are to go home. Sleep. For about seventy hours. I will not have you entering this place unless you look rested and fabulous and blow-dry your hair!”

  Akira thumbed her phone open and gingerly checked email. Finally. She was not amused to find the four hundred messages she had to sift through.

  She clicked out the spam, and then gasped aloud, when she saw one from Brice@brandonrice.com.

  Akira clicked it open, even though her brain commanded her not to.

  The subject was Hi, Brand here.

  She scanned the mail. It was five lines.

  Hello Akira,

  Hope your flights were alright and you didn’t have too much difficulty getting home. As promised I am writing you. Thinking of Fiji for my vacation, what say? How’s the shoulder? If it hurts, take the pain pills. Do NOT be a hero.

  Sincerely,

  Brandon

  PS: Henry told me to tell you Rumi and he were all…uh, safe.

  She was grinning, her mood completely improved by the time she hit on the Reply button and was typing out her email to the mysterious, secretive but word-keeping Brand.

  ~~~~~

  “So? Do you think they send the really bad writers down here to keep them from writing ever again?” Matt asked her a few days later, as he combed through an edition of Time Magazine from the early 2000s that carried a story of Sebastian’s wife’s murder.

  They had done a whole profile on Sebastian Delgado, as the heroic man who had suffered for his bravery.

  Akira and Matt were going through every cold article and press release they had been able to cull from the Locker, the basement that housed the Archives Section of the agency, since its inception. When the flood of ‘05 had damaged the space, Akarshdeep had reinforced the basement with three feet thick carbonized steel and an alarm wiring system that woke up the whole neighborhood.

  The filing system was very precise and, even with reference numbers and file numbers, it had taken them the whole of yesterday just to gather all their material.

  Akira and Matt dug up everything they could find on San Magellan and Sebastian Delgado and his democratic party.

  They now had about fifty-three boxes full of stuff to read through. English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese newspapers. Press releases from various companies that had set shop there.

  There were eight boxes on Delgado alone, and that was before he became Premier. The amount of press his election had engendered was numerous. The same articles repeated over and over again. Two boxes were video footage, and thirteen were microfiches.

  All in all, it was an impressive amount of research to index and cross-reference and with no idea or help as to what they were doing.

  “Here’s something. They honeymooned in Europe before coming back to settle in Lucre,” Akira muttered as she wrote it down in her notepad. There were about six of these pads between them, and one was already half-filled.

  “Akira.”

  “Yeah, I heard you. Bad writers come here to die. I am a bad writer, I get it. Stop pondering. Start reading. Here, take the nineties.”

  She shoved a box at him, while she read through another Portuguese article from San Magellan’s leading newspaper and it talked about how Lucre had fallen due to increasing drug trade.

  Akira noted that Tony Romero had been caught for drug trafficking once in ‘95. She wrote it down. He was clean now, of course. And, besides, all of the politicians had done time one way or another, but every little bit of relevant information helped now.

  “The nineties? Backstreet Boys and Shakira?” Matt gleefully rubbed his hands. And took the first article out.

  He put it back down in disgust. “That’s about the number of people slaughtered in a massacre in Belle Christo, a small fishing port. Pablo Escobar’s men carried it out.”

  “I know. It’s not all boy band mania and ‘Whenever, Wherever’. Could you please jot down everything you think is relevant on this whiteboard here?” She indicated the large mobile board she’d dragged next to the table they were using as home base.

  “We are on a hunt here, Matthew,” Akira ended fiercely.

  Matthew was stupid enough to observe, “You know, if you showed half this much interest in a man, he’d come crawling over broken glass for you?”

  Akira gave him a look that shut him up effectively and had him searching for the next massacre in San Magellan. Just so he could be saved from one.

  Thirteen

  Three Weeks Later

  Chalet Zuffenhausen

  Basel, Switzerland

  Hi Brand,

  Well, while all of Mumbai slow boils in forty degree heat, the Meat Locker’s freezing cold. Both Matt and I have thermal blankets down here and these grandma socks you’d never want to be caught dead in. Lunch was a hilarious affair of trying to eat frozen ice-cream.

  Literally. No kidding. The ice-cream froze. Matt said that if things continue this way, and we are stuck here any longer, then he’d have to have sex with me just to keep warm…

  Brand read the email for the fifth time.

  He laughed as he thought about ice-cream freezing. And about Akira having sex with a guy named Matt ‘Boner’ D’Silva. Akira had told him it involved a chicken biryani incident that she was under solemn oath to carry to her grave.

  The smile faded. Thinking about Akira naked was a bad, bad idea. As he’d taught himself. It was like one of those games that you played as a kid, where your mom or dad or school teacher told you it was very, very bad for you to eat mud, but you ate it anyway. And then you threw up.

  And so you fixed it in your head. Mud, bad. Makes me throw up.

  He tried to fix it in his head. Thinking about Akira, bad. Makes me throw up.

  Except, she’d reply to his perfunctory one-liners with long and juicy emails and then he’d spend hours composing imaginary mails that he never sent and then he’d be back to square one. It was playing havoc with his concentration…communication with the reporter. A fact that he’d convinced his superior and colleagues, he was doing only because he thought she was a security threat.

  Akira never wrote about work.

  She didn’t ask him about his.

  But he knew, instinctively, that she wouldn’t let go. And this Locker place didn’t sound like the right place for a gunshot wound victim to recu
perate in. If that’s what she was doing.

  He wished he could actually use his expertise and train one of the passing mini-drones to make a quick flight over Lower Parel, where FPAI’s office was located, so he could take a quick peek into the place where she worked. Then, the drone could follow her home. And then maybe he’d get to see her naked….

  Brand snapped the monitor shut.

  He was a grown man. She was one woman. And, okay, she was persistent, but it didn’t mean anything.

  He took a deep, cleansing breath. Switched the monitor back on again. Hit the Reply button.

  Hello Akira,

  It has been good fun hearing about life in the Locker. But we have to move on now. And I think it’s time we said goodbye.

  Sincerely,

  Brandon

  His index finger was on the enter button, when he looked down at the keyboard.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. It’s just an email,” he muttered.

  His finger hit the delete key instead. And he started typing again.

  Hi Prison Inmate of The Meatlocker,

  Greetings from Robot Land. Did you know that Robots are supposed to take over the world sooner than you expected and that smartphones will lead the charge? Imagine, soon we’ll all be led by the ear by our iPhones and Androids and we’d never be free. Serves us right, doesn’t it?

  The Locker sounds like a perfectly awful place to be recuperating in. Are you sure you can't just take some time off, and vacation in a place you love? Always wanted to see? Is there such a place?

  If any of his crew found him bent over the keyboard, tapping out a long letter that would be routed through five different IP addresses before it reached the recipient’s mailbox, then they weren’t going to comment.

  Actually it was a distinct possibility anybody would find him writing mails. It was three in the morning, and he was the only one awake.

  Brand liked staying up nights.

  Fifteen minutes later, he finally hit the send button.

  Two hours later, Markham relieved him. He came bearing tea and a Danish. “Hiyah, Brand. Here you go. Thanks for keeping my seat warm.” He handed the food to Brand who gratefully accepted the two and stood up, groaning.

  They rotated on four hour shifts, or six hour shifts, depending on manpower. But between guarding the place, and the grounds (two acres of beautiful lawns and gardens) and working with out-of-town police forces because that’s why they were here in the first place, and keeping their real reason for being in Switzerland a secret, Brand hardly got any sleep.

  Plus, keeping one step ahead of his…employer was a difficult task too.

  The tea and the sugar high would keep him going for a while yet. He didn’t know if Akira was a tea or a coffee person.

  He grinned. He’d ask her that the next time.

  “You’re more than welcome, Markham. Sector sweeps in fifteen, okay? All clear for now.”

  “Well, that’s a sweet smile for a man to have when he’s just come off staring at empty monitors for about four hours,” an intruder commented.

  ~~~~~~

  The man standing in front of him smoked a thin cigarette, hands in the pocket of his black pants.

  He, like the rest of the crew, like Brand himself, was dressed in severe black, with camo pants that had a million pockets, spiked running shoes, and a black tee shirt. Unlike the others, he wore body armor under his clothes.

  “You’re awake awfully early for someone who just had life-saving surgery three weeks ago,” Brand said mildly, plucking the cigarette from the man’s hand and putting it out on the marble banister of the balcony they were standing in.

  The Chalet was a beautiful vacation place, and had all sorts of decadent amenities like football-sized bathrooms, Jacuzzis, rock gardens for meditation and balconies that led to the gardens from every damn room. While the balconies were a charming addition to the architecture of the place, they were a tactical nightmare.

  It was difficult to block all twelve all of the time, without someone asking questions. The help who were in and out all the time, or the housekeeper who made the sign of the cross every time she saw Brand in his black avenging angel outfit, and scurried down the other way.

  And, specifically, the town police force who were terribly suspicious of a group of extremely capable men who just happened to be in their small town, installing a new alarm system in a new acquisition by a vague, supposedly agoraphobic multi-millionaire.

  It was awfully difficult trying to keep a supposed dead man alive. Especially if the supposed dead man wanted to wander down balconies with no protection and no sense of self-preservation.

  And especially, Brand thought with an open sigh, if the wandering, supposed dead man was Santiago Sebastian Delgado.

  “I have my reasons, my friend.” Sebastian tapped a fresh cigarette out of the pack he was never without and lit one. His smile of amusement as much a dare to Brand as a mockery of his own habit. “And so do you.”

  He blew smoke out into the balcony.

  Brand groaned. “Seb, you’ll set off three different motion sensors. Not to mention the smoke detectors. And then the local police, not to mention the damn French Police will get you here and you are not going to be happy with the welcoming committee. Use the damn smokeless ashtray, okay?”

  Sebastian shrugged. Reached down into one of the numerous pockets and removed a tiny glass object. He tapped the ash into the tray, watched it disappear.

  “Live dangerously, I say.”

  “Can't sleep, huh? What’s bothering you tonight?”

  Brand wished ardently that he’d not finished his Danish so quickly. His stomach was rumbling from a combination of high-level alertness, exhaustion and anticipation. Plus, all that pent-up energy from writing an email that he really shouldn’t have written.

  “Enough about me. Attack on me, people out to get me. I’m old news. Let’s talk about you, this fine morning,” Sebastian commanded, puffing his way through the first smoke.

  “What do you want to talk about me for?” Brand was blank with surprise.

  “It passes the time. I am curious. Take your pick. Who were you emailing?” Sebastian asked casually, stubbing the cigarette out and lighting another.

  Brand looked at the glittering smoke with disapproval as he tried to formulate an appropriate response. “It’s early yet, Seb, I’ll walk you to your room. Take a tour of the perimeter and then turn in. I am tired,” he answered, easily.

  “Aah, he deflects. Must be a woman. A woman he wishes to protect, perhaps.” The former premier was dry in his humor and observation.

  “No woman. No deflection. No protection. Bed for you. Now.” This time it was Brand who ordered and hustled Sebastian out.

  “You know, sometimes it’s alright to let someone in. If not for trust then for need,” Sebastian’s remarked as they walked the five hundred feet to massive doors that would open in to Sebastian’s living quarters.

  Brand and the men were camped opposite and across in four-man teams. And someone or the other was constantly watching Sebastian.

  That he greatly resented the loss of his freedom, that it chafed Sebastian, was a fact he made everyone aware of every day. Like clockwork.

  “I know. Get to bed, now. Murad is going to be very mad that you gave him the slip again,” Brand said, with a small grin.

  His men were the best, trained to be alert at the slightest provocation. Yet, when Sebastian Delgado wanted to get away from his bodyguards, like for his pre-dawn walks, he did.

  “What can I say?” The former ruler smirked quietly.

  “Say you won't give us any more trouble.” Brand began his familiar refrain. “Say that you’re aware of how dangerous this game that you’re playing is, even if we are renting this chalet with my money rerouted through Lucas’s magic money fingers. Say that you won't do anything stupid or foolish.”

  “Like writing love letters to your sweetheart?” This time Sebastian showed a lot of teeth.

  Brand sh
ut up. “I am not writing love letters to my sweetheart. Where did you get that absurd notion, Seb?”

  “Akira is incredibly smart. She’s feisty. And she’s pretty. Plus, she has you hooked enough to email her. Maybe you should give in with good grace now,” Sebastian suggested logically.