Her Beautiful Monster

by Adi Tantimedh

  “Here’s what I propose,” Roger said. “You continue to tell the Harkingdales you’re looking and collect your daily rate from them. Leave the rest to us. Meanwhile, you keep an ear on the Harkingdales and tell us if they start acting strangely, if they start losing patience, if they get more nervous than usual.”

  “All right. Sounds like a plan.”

  “And not a word to them that we’re in cahoots, eh?”

  “Too right, Mr. Golden—Roger.”

  “Good man!” Roger clapped Boyd on the back as he walked him out.

  “Epping Forest,” Ken snorted. “As if we’d pick a place that fucking obvious for a dump site.”

  “Shows how much he knows,” Clive sniffed. “Twat.”

  “Well played, boss.” Mark slow-clapped once Boyd was out the door. The gods clapped with him. It disturbed me how much in synch Mark was with the gods. I wished they would appear to him instead of me. At least he would really appreciate it. They would get on like a house on fire and leave me alone, but that was not to be.

  “Right, my dears.” Cheryl turned to us. “We just cleared the way for you. Time’s a-ticking. Chop-chop.”

  ELEVEN

  With Boyd out of the way, we could concentrate on our own efforts.

  Tobias Harkingdale, Cecily Harkingdale, Charles Harkingdale—the whole lot of them. And their spouses and kids were complicit. This was a family for whom murder was a tipple, a few drops of tincture into a cup of tea or a glass of brandy, a casual chore. To hire a hit man was to enter a different league altogether, and they were probably ill-prepared for that. This suited our plans.

  I could sense the air in the room get heavier. Ken and Clive. They were sitting stock-still, but the rage was radiating right off their bodies. I suppose this was what the Japanese called “killing intent” that combatants and martial artists sensed in an opponent ready to attack.

  “What?” Clive asked, after my stare.

  “You’re not thinking about kicking off, are you?” I asked.

  “Dunno what you mean,” Ken said.

  “The Harkingdales. Whole family of upper-class twats who might have got away with murder?” I said. “Just the types that get on your tits.”

  “What do you take us for? Couple of loose fucking cannons?” Clive said, rolling his eyes. “Do us a favor!”

  “ ’Ere,” Ken said. “You Hindus got a god that’s all about vengeance?”

  “Rudra,” I said. “God of rage and storms. And righteous revenge.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Clive said.

  “Oh, believe me,” I said. “He likes you.”

  Sure enough, Rudra stood behind Ken and Clive at their desks, grinning madly, nodding in approval at them, our office Rakshasas.

  Ken and Clive smiled, satisfied, and went back to reading their tabloids.

  “Sacha’s talking a lot about how to keep a dementia patient lucid with ginkgo biloba,” Mark said, reading the forums. “He’s also doing research about breaking down the plaques that cause Alzheimer’s. I think he’s trying to synthesize something himself.”

  “That’s ambitious,” Olivia said. “But he’s so typically careless for a clever nineteen-year-old. He hasn’t masked his digital footsteps as much as he thinks he should have. He hasn’t used a VPN to post on that forum. I can trace the IP address. Gotcha, you silly boy.”

  God, she was competitive.

  I blinked. An ethereal Chinese woman, serene and elegant in a white shawl, stood patiently behind Olivia, watching over her shoulder as she typed. I knew who that was. Quan Yin, the goddess of mercy. I’d seen Olivia quietly pray to her from her desk from time to time.

  “I’m in a discussion with him now about how protein is needed for the brain to retrieve memories,” Mark said. “He’s wondering if it’s possible to synthesize specific proteins for dementia patients to help them remember things. I’ve been asking if he tried any combinations of psychoactive compounds.”

  “Mark, do you actually know biochemistry?” I asked.

  “I dabble in my spare time,” he said. “It’s not just about getting high for me, you know. He’s starting to get pretty hardcore, talking about gene-editing with CRISPR.”

  “You mean gene-splicing and gene therapy? For Alzheimer’s?”

  “It’s the future of dementia treatment, Ravi.”

  “Surely he doesn’t have access to actual gene-editing tools?”

  “I seriously doubt it,” Olivia said. “Look, he says he wishes he could run some kind of simulation software on his computer.”

  “All right. So is he actually conducting experiments?” I asked.

  “Says he’s mostly doing theoretical formulating,” Mark said. “No opportunity to do it for real.”

  “And he’s doing all this while in hiding,” I said. “How’s he feeding himself and his mum?”

  “Easy,” Mark said. “He’s selling nootropics to his classmates. Smart drugs. Basic memory and cognition-enhancing supplements that aren’t technically illegal. His own mixes. For the ones who need to be up all hours studying for their exams, writing papers, and whatnot. I gave him a few tips on dosages and combinations.”

  “Sounds like you should go into business with him, Mark,” Benjamin said, barely looking up from printing out a new drone on the new 3-D printer he’d convinced Roger and Cheryl to let him buy. Benjamin was all about DIY, and what better prospect than untraceable surveillance drones that weren’t purchased from known manufacturers?

  “Tempting,” Mark said with a wistful smile.

  “Wouldn’t he need a lab to do the combining?”

  “Oo-er,” Mark said. “So you’re asking where he would find a lab to do that stuff in?”

  “He must be sneaking into the lab at uni,” I said.

  “His big obsession is getting ahold of CRISPR tech to do some real gene-splicing,” Mark said.

  “I can do him something close,” Olivia said. “A computer software simulation program that runs gene-editing and synthesizing models.”

  “Isn’t that program extremely expensive?” I asked. “Only available to institutions?”

  “Please!” Olivia rolled her eyes. “I have my ways. Someone’s always going to leak it online.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Right, here’s our play,” I said. “Mark, send a private message to Sacha offering him a copy of this program on a drive, arrange to meet to talk about smart drugs and gene-splicing. Meet him someplace like a pub near uni so it’s public and he can feel safe, but we can control the exit points so he can’t do a runner easily.”

  “Oh, he’ll well be up for that program.”

  TWELVE

  As Mark took his correspondence with Sacha to Direct Message, Benjamin turned to me.

  “ ’Ere, Ravi,” he said. “You might want to check on your folks.”

  I logged onto the server to review the surveillance footage Benjamin had installed in my parents’ living room and Mrs. Dhewan’s food bank.

  “You know,” Benjamin said. “I would bet the food bank is a money-laundering front.”

  “I assumed as much,” I said. “I don’t think she does anything from just the kindness of her heart. She’s probably getting some kind of kickback from the shops and warehouses that are supplying her, or it’s a way to off-load stolen gear.”

  I clicked on the various feeds to make sure it was all kosher. Benjamin had told only Mrs. Dhewan he was installing cameras and where they were, just in case any of her own people were the ones nicking the supplies. She wanted to have whoever it was bang to rights.

  “What the fuck?”

  I fast-forwarded through hours of footage of my father sitting on the sofa in his living room, keeping guard over the boxes from the food bank, his trusty cricket bat in his hand.

  Why wasn’t he in bed with my mum?

  I checked the feed to my parents’ bedroom and found my mother sound asleep during the night. She tossed and turned in bed and occasionally got up to
go to the loo. I clicked to the live feeds. It was late afternoon and my mum was back working the counter at the food bank, and my dad was sitting in the living room watching daytime telly, still with his cricket bat on his lap.

  I called him on my smartphone.

  “Dad, why are sitting around with your cricket bat?”

  “Your mother has turned me into a nervous wreck! I must stand guard lest some ruffians break in.”

  “Did she say they would break in?”

  “No, but since all these goods are here, it would stand to reason!”

  “So let them take it. Why put yourself at risk?”

  “It’s a point of principle! I will not let my house be invaded by a bunch of have-a-go Henrys!”

  “Dad, you look ridiculous.”

  “What you do you mean?”

  “I’m looking at you right now.”

  Dad froze. He looked around, paranoid.

  “Did the gods put you up to this?”

  I winced. Lord Vishnu was standing over me, watching the screen.

  “Dad, I told you Benjamin was going to install these cameras to keep you two safe.”

  “My life has come to this! Presiding over stolen goods and put under surveillance by my own son!”

  “Dad, will you please talk to Mum and sort out whatever this tension is between the two of you?”

  “If only it was that simple,” he muttered.

  “I can get you some pamphlets from the GP about intercourse after prostate cancer surgery.”

  “I don’t need you to do that for me.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  “You know your mother is highly strung and demanding at the best of times. She’s gotten even worse in the last few months.”

  “Isn’t it because she’s been getting, well, frustrated?”

  “Well, you getting her in with that Dhewan woman again hasn’t helped. It’s made it worse!”

  “Look, Dad, do you need to see the doctor about your situation? You’re in full recovery. Normal sexual function should be back by now, or on its way back. It’s all right if you’re anxious and can’t perform, and even if you don’t have a prostate anymore, you can still experience orgasm. It might feel different—”

  “Ravi, stop. You have your father under surveillance and you’re trying to teach him how to orgasm.”

  Oh my God. This is what my life has come to.

  Behind me, Vishnu and Shiva were laughing their arses off and gave each other a high-five.

  I stammered some excuse and hung up.

  Everyone in the office was staring at me with a mix of pity and bemusement.

  “I set up a meeting,” Mark said.

  “Thank fuck,” I said.

  Anything to get me away from thinking about my dad’s sex life.

  THIRTEEN

  One of Mark’s talents, aside from his massive intellect hidden under a stoner façade, was his sincerity. He was genuinely interested in the types of research and experiments Sacha Mayakovsky was doing in nootropics and cognition drugs, so he wasn’t lying when he said he wanted to meet so he could give Sacha a copy of the software. Mark made social engineering look easy.

  Sacha had picked a café in Central London, not far from Tottenham Court Road station. Mid-afternoon. Crowded. If anything went awry, he would have plenty of options to do a runner—onto a bus, into the Tube, even vanish into the crowd in Oxford Street. He had clearly picked this with some care, displaying a basic grasp of tradecraft. Had his father taught him some basics of setting up meetings and avoiding tails? It wouldn’t have surprised me if that were the case.

  But we outnumbered him, and we were organized. Even with Olivia sitting this out back at the office dealing with her own case involving Hong Kong, and Marcie sitting this out because she was off talking to her friends at the US Embassy, we still had it covered. Only Mark was in the café waiting for Sacha. Ken and Clive were close by, within sight, but out of sight of anyone coming to the café, and even did a reconnaissance of the surroundings ahead of the meeting time. Benjamin had gone into the café an hour ahead of the meeting under the guise of buying an espresso and planted an insect-sized drone near the counter. He then retreated to the car around the corner and flew the drone above the heads of all the customers to record footage of Sacha when he came in. And just to be safe, Mark was wearing one of Benjamin’s pin-sized cameras on his jacket.

  Julia and I were in the electronics shop across the street, posing as a couple shopping for computer parts. The latter was actually legit—Benjamin had given us a list of accessories and parts he wanted for stuff he was putting together back at the office. We were in touch with Mark through our Bluetooth earpieces.

  Trust Benjamin to find ways to milk side benefits out of an op.

  “Pragmatism,” he had said cheerfully, totally shameless. “Kill two birds with one stone. Besides, Cheryl already approved those parts for my gadgets budget.”

  We watched Sacha Mayakovsky walk into the café, approach Mark at his table, and shake his hand. Then they started talking. We heard them get well into it, jumping right into chemical compositions and cognitive enhancement, using terms and names that were way beyond the rest of us. This must be what it was like when two people with high IQs got together. The rest of the world was simply shut out. Sacha’s London accent still had traces of Russian from the first ten years of his childhood. He also had the sad, soulful eyes of a lad who had seen some things while he was still too young, the types of eyes that broke girls’ hearts.

  “He’s very Russian,” Julia said, observing him.

  He also had a bit of a black eye.

  “What happened to you?” Mark asked.

  “Got into a fight on the street last night,” Sacha said. “Couple of blokes heard me speak Russian on the phone and thought I was Polish.”

  “I’m sorry you had to grow up here and experience British xenophobia,” Mark said. “British racists don’t just hate people with different-colored skin, but even white-skinned people who aren’t English. Some of them are still racist towards the Irish and the Scots.”

  “And my father told me this was the most civilized country in the world,” Sacha said.

  “When we want to be, yes,” Mark said. “But the British have always had the tendency to blame the Other for their woes. Poles and Eastern Europeans just got on their radar recently because they were doing menial jobs like building work.”

  “In the end, my father’s romanticism for England got him killed,” Sacha said bitterly.

  I had a decision to make now. We had set up a series of options. Ken and Clive could try to grab Sacha when he left the café. We could let Sacha go back to wherever he was hiding. The thumb drive Mark gave him contained not only the CRISPR simulation program but also a rootkit that would surreptitiously install itself on his computer and take it over, a nasty, insidious little present Olivia wrote. It would give us the option to track his computer by GPS, and we could just find him when he was next online.

  Julia read my cue. We crossed the road hand in hand, shopping bags in our free hands, entered the café, ordered cappuccinos, and went over to sit at the table next to Mark and Sacha’s. Sacha hadn’t cast his eyes on us, which meant he was not used to tradecraft or watching out for surveillance. As Olivia said, he was still an amateur.

  Julia and I looked at each other like a couple in love, which wasn’t acting.

  Then I turned to their table and smiled.

  “Hello, Sacha,” I said. “Don’t run. We’re on your side.”

  FOURTEEN

  Of course Sacha was hiding his mother with his classmates in their flatshare not far from the university in Central London. The Harkingdales wouldn’t have thought to find them there. Boyd might have cottoned onto this, given enough time. The flatmates didn’t seem to bat much of an eyelash at having a Russian woman in her fifties with early onset Alzheimer’s living in their midst. I would have thought it massively disruptive and stressful to their routines
, but apart from her sitting around muttering to herself in Russian all day, they seemed used to having her around. I suppose Sacha had explained the stakes to them, that she and he were in danger, and they had risen to the occasion. They weren’t wasters or layabouts. They were earnest students pursuing their degrees and worrying about their student loan debts. They reminded me of some of my secondary school students, the ones who would get their act together and go to university.

  Irina was sitting quietly in the living room staring at the telly when Sacha showed us in. The flat was slightly messy, as student flats tended to be. Irina had been helping herself to the cigarettes the flatmates left around the place, and the ashtray was a blooming tree of spent fag ends.

  Sacha kissed her on the cheek and she smiled greeting him, then said she was waiting for her son to come home.

  “She thinks she’s at the dacha in Crimea where her family took her on holidays when she was young,” he said.

  This was what it was like to have a parent with dementia: you lost them piece by piece, in slow motion, every day, until in the end there was almost nothing of them left.

  “I’m trying to at least stabilize her with my formulas,” Sacha said, “keep her calm, but it’s difficult with her moods. That’s normal for her condition.”

  This wouldn’t do. I put in a call to Cheryl, who got Roger to sign off on putting Sacha and his mother up at one of the firm’s safe houses in Pimlico, and we hired a twenty-four-hour nurse with experience caring for Alzheimer’s patients. This was an extra expense, but Roger was gambling on getting into Sacha’s good graces, since it was now quite likely that he was going to inherit a proper chunk of his father’s fortune. Roger, ever resourceful, even managed to find a nurse who spoke Russian. Julia helped Irina get dressed while Ken and Clive helped Sacha pack their things. By the end of the afternoon, it would be as if Sacha and Irina had never been in this flat.