Her Beautiful Monster

by Adi Tantimedh

  Great. Benjamin had turned this night into a tech demo that sold some surveillance drones to a private military contractor. Just what we all needed. I’m sure he pissed himself laughing at this.

  “ICE will be busy trying to figure out what the fuck happened here tonight, and trying to track down the illegals you guys freed,” Ariel said. “Good thinking, Ravi. Child of Chaos for the win.”

  As we drove away, Ariel pushed the button on a small detonator.

  An explosion erupted behind us—the safe house went up in a ball of fire.

  “Was that really necessary?” I asked.

  “Didn’t want to leave any forensic trace we were there,” Ariel said cheerfully. “They’ll think it was a drug gang or cartel or something. More confusion. Fog of war is the shit.”

  “We fuckin’ hated that house anyway,” Reyes said. “Good riddance.”

  “Maybe we can talk the boss into buying the next one in Beverly Hills or Brentwood,” Ariel said.

  People came out of their houses to look at the fire. Someone called 911 and fire engine sirens filled the air. Or were those sirens for another fire in the area? It didn’t matter.

  I glanced out the back and saw Rakshasas dancing in front of the flames next to the onlookers.

  We were gone from that neighborhood before anyone really noticed us.

  FOUR

  We drove for nearly an hour before settling on a motel. At least this part of town was quiet. The night manager asked no questions. He looked like he was used to dodgy people coming and going all the time. He probably only ever got dodgy people as guests here. Jarrod used his company credit card and got us three adjoining rooms. We parked the two SUVs just outside the rooms so we had them in full view, since they still had the crates with the guns.

  We were still trapped in North Hollywood till the morning.

  “Might as well catch some Zs,” Reyes said. “Jarrod’s gonna call in for where to take the package in the morning.”

  “I resent being called a package,” Hamid said.

  As he should.

  “I mean the weapons, sir,” Jarrod said. Good save.

  Williams and DuBois took a room where they would watch over Hamid. Mikkelford and Reyes took another room with Jarrod. Ariel happily took the one Julia and I were in.

  I was not enjoying witnessing how Interzone operated firsthand. The sooner Julia and I were shot of them, the better, but it looked like we were stuck with them for the rest of the night.

  “Hey, there’s a liquor store just across the street!” Ariel said. “And it hasn’t been robbed or looted so far.”

  “We’re still on the clock,” Jarrod said, annoyed. He seemed to get annoyed with Ariel a lot, I noticed. I think that was their dynamic. This indicated to me that they often worked together.

  “I mean after this is over,” she said. “We’ll know where to grab some sweet relief!”

  The room had a faint smell of musk. The wallpaper was peeling slightly. There was hair in the bathtub drain, and we ignored the promise of premium cable stations as we kept the local news on to keep tabs on the rioting and looting in parts of the Valley. The fires in the hills gave the sky a menacing golden glow. The sheets were slightly yellow and only minimally clean. This was the type of motel where hookers took their johns while their pimps waited outside, where drug addicts came to shoot up or smoke meth. The smell of bleach was there to kill any stench of stale sex and burned drugs. This was the type of motel where any of the rooms might have been a crime scene with tape outlines of bodies on the carpet.

  So now Julia and I were getting the American Sleazy Motel Experience as well. This was turning into quite the Tour of America we were having, complete with guns, threats of wrongful arrest, and people out to kill us. It really was a busman’s holiday.

  “So how is this supposed to go?” I asked. “What’s the endgame?”

  “In the morning, we ought to drive Hamid and the guns to a private airfield,” Ariel said. “He and the shipment will be flown home, where he’ll be greeted by his handler from the CIA and members of his father’s Royal Guard and the surviving generals.”

  “So he’s supposed to form the new government once he gets there?” Julia asked.

  “That’s the plan,” Ariel said. She had a full-auto 9mm pistol in her shoulder holster and had brought an AR-15 into the room for good measure.

  “You guys really ought to get some basic gun training,” she said. “Could come in handy.”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “You’re so British and squeamish,” Ariel teased.

  “Ravi, stop pacing around,” Julia said. “Take the weight off your feet. Lie down on the bed.”

  I felt myself sink into the bed. At least the mattress was still reasonably firm. Julia climbed on the bed with me.

  “I’ll be glad when this is finally over,” I said.

  “Come on,” Ariel said. “You love it. I bet you were getting bored with how normal everything you were seeing at your little LA office was. You just had to find a way to land yourself into something crazy.”

  “I was just helping out Keith,” I said. “There was no way I could have predicted this was where we’d end up.”

  “You had the gods watching you,” Ariel said. “Waiting for shit to happen. You had to have some expectation of chaos erupting whenever you got bored.”

  “I was not bored,” I said.

  “Yes, you were,” Julia said.

  “Look, this started when I was doing Darryl and Liz a favor,” I said. “We’re in a city and a job where things could go doolally when you walk through the wrong door.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ariel said. “And you chose to walk through that door when you could have just gone back to the office, sat around answering emails, surfed the Internet, and then gone home. You two could be asleep in your rental right now.”

  “I was getting a bit bored,” Julia said.

  “Do you feel alive?” Ariel asked. “Like your nerves are all jangly and singing? Like you took ten hits of cocaine?”

  Julia smiled. This was not good. This was her addiction getting gratified with an adrenaline rush. Kali was in here with us. She was standing behind Ariel, stroking her chin and licking her lips with that long tongue of hers, as if this was going swimmingly. And next to me, on the bed, sat Lord Vishnu, sagely observing, waiting for the punch lines.

  “Technically, you don’t need Julia and me around for the rest of this, do you?” I asked.

  “But I like having you guys around,” Ariel said. “You and I are the intercompany liaisons, remember? It’s good for us to hang out and improve relations between Golden Sentinels and Interzone.”

  “Whose idea was it to call the company ‘Interzone’ anyway?” Julia asked. “I don’t see Collins as a William Burroughs fan.”

  “That was his first partner when they formed the company together,” Ariel said. “Before my time. He’s dead now.”

  “Did Collins kill him?” I asked.

  “That’s what the rumors say.” Ariel shrugged. “It was probably over money and the direction of the company. And it didn’t happen on US soil. It might have been in Yemen or Somalia, I don’t remember which, where there wouldn’t have been an investigation. Either a mysterious death or friendly fire.”

  “Lost in the fog of war, then,” Julia said.

  “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “I see where this case is going.”

  “You’re calling this a case?” Ariel said, amused.

  “What else could it be?” I said. “Interzone’s job doesn’t end with babysitting Hamid Mahfouz till he gets on that plane tomorrow, does it? You lot are angling to get in with him and his government, perhaps even become his personal bodyguards because it’s obvious his own army can’t protect him over there. That’s going to be another cushy contract for Interzone worth millions of dollars. And it puts Laird Collins closer to another player on the global stage.”

  “Damn,” Ariel said. “Even when
you’re tired and rambling, you’re drawing connections.”

  “Everything’s about connections,” I sighed.

  “Close your eyes,” Julia said. “Get some rest.”

  I did.

  “My brain’s still buzzing,” I said. “I’m not going to fall asleep.”

  I fell asleep.

  FIVE

  From Olivia’s recordings:

  “I compiled my dossier, an interactive digital file that let the reader cross-reference names, accounts, and amounts of money with designer goods bought from their respective websites. If you opened it up and looked at the whole thing, it would look like a hypertext spider’s nest. I had to design the user interface to make it easy to navigate so a child could understand it.

  “I avoided putting in my own theories or opinions. This dossier had to present nothing but cold, hard facts. There were still things I wasn’t clear about, though, pieces that were missing. Who gave Derek the idea to publish the book? Was Marie truly the blameless worried wife in all this? Was the book part of a bigger game and Derek’s disappearance the part that backfired? Or was he just collateral damage in someone’s campaign? The Hong Kong Police were investigating Derek’s disappearance as a missing persons case. There were demonstrations demanding Derek’s release. These were good optics for the pro-democracy movement that painted the Mainland as authoritarian and overreaching, threatening Hong Kong’s fragile autonomy and showing up the limits of freedom of expression. Hong Kong was supposed to have its own set of Basic Laws separate from the Mainland’s, which included less censorship and more freedom of speech. The Mainland was violating that Basic Law in snatching Derek and other publishers like him. There was no comment from the Mainland, no confirmation that they were holding Derek, but everyone knew it was them. Online videos of pro-democracy activists condemning the autocratic actions of the Mainland were going viral. As I saw it, there might be more than one game being played here on multiple levels, and more than one governmental department involved in this. The dossier I compiled, for example, would be of great interest to the Anti-Corruption Squad back in the Mainland. My job here was just to get Derek released, not play political chess. Or get arrested myself.

  “It was time to toss the bait into the water to see what bit.

  “I contacted Marie and her lawyer and gave them the dossier on a thumb drive. I’d uploaded multiple copies of it to the cloud as my insurance policy. I told Marie and the lawyer that the dossier was crowdsourced, that I found a bunch of hackers on a forum who put all the information together.

  “Marie’s lawyer contacted the Chinese authorities and proposed a trade: Derek’s release for the dossier.

  “A series of negotiations were about to take place. Marie and I could only wait now.”

  SIX

  Wake up, mate,” Mark said. “You’ll want to see this.”

  I opened my eyes. Mark was shaking me.

  “Mark? What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve always been here, Rav,” he said. “David’s going mental. Everything’s gone pear-shaped.”

  I sat up on the office sofa.

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “We happened. Chickens come home to roost.”

  “Finally pissed off the wrong people,” David said, walking in and gathering up another batch of files. “I knew this would happen one day. Bloody Roger.”

  “Roger said this day would come,” Julia said.

  The office was a mess. Cheryl was busy pushing papers and files into a shredder, as fast as Ken and Clive could pass to her. David added his to the pile. Benjamin was whacking away at the computers with a fire ax, wearing a manic grin.

  “Wa-hey!” he said. “Nice of you to join us, Ravi!”

  “Honestly, Benjamin,” Olivia said, irritated. “I told you, the best way to get rid of evidence on a computer was thermite or C4.”

  With that, she pushed the button on a detonator and all the computers in the office exploded in puffs of smoke.

  “Let’s see them try to recover the data,” Olivia said, satisfied.

  “What the hell did we do?” I asked.

  Mark chuckled.

  “More like what didn’t we do,” he said.

  “Where’s Roger?”

  “Gone,” Cheryl said. “They’ve taken him.”

  “Who’s taken him?”

  “Who do you think?” Ken said with a sneer.

  “All his fancy friends in high places,” Clive said. “They fucking sold him out, didn’t they?”

  I looked around.

  “Where’s Marcie?”

  “Her masters called her home,” Cheryl said. “In disgrace. Nothing left for her here. Probably her fault.”

  “Bloody typical,” Olivia said. “She comes here, makes a bloody great mess of things, then buggers off to do the same thing somewhere else.”

  “So what’s going on here?” I asked.

  “What does it bloody look like?” Ken said. “It’s the end, innit?”

  “Gotta cover our arses,” Clive said.

  “Golden Sentinels is toast,” David said. “And we have to get out of here before they show up.”

  “Bloody right,” Ken said. “We don’t want to be here when Special Branch shows up.”

  Benjamin helped Ken and Clive pour gasoline over the whole office. Once finished, they tossed the cans aside and joined us at the exit.

  “Cheryl,” Olivia said. “Will you do the honors?”

  Cheryl lit a match and tossed it into the office. We didn’t stay to watch as everything went up in flames.

  “No forensics for them to recover,” Benjamin said.

  “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” Mark said as he blew a kiss at the burning office.

  Mark and David led us through the door out into the street.

  Farringdon was in pandemonium. Black smoke was everywhere, billowing into the sky. Sirens in the air. Burning cars. Riot police chasing protesters with placards that read “NO MORE LIES!” I heard helicopters overhead.

  “Yes,” Mark said. “It’s gone a bit J. G. Ballard, hasn’t it?”

  Somewhere in the distance, clear as a bell, a boy was singing “Jerusalem.”

  “And did those feet in ancient time,

  Walk upon England’s mountains green:

  And was the holy Lamb of God,

  On England’s pleasant pastures seen! . . .”

  As I looked around for where the singer was, Julia pulled at my arm.

  “Ravi, look.”

  “Roger?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  In the middle of the street was a metal table at the top of a twenty-foot wicker man, and there sat Roger, handcuffed to it. Gone was his expensive Savile Row suit and tie. In its place were the orange prison overalls you found in American jails. Roger was unshaven, his eyes red from lack of sleep and weeping.

  “Ahh, Ravi old son, the bastards finally got me.”

  “I warned you everything would come a cropper one day,” Cheryl said, her rage barely contained. “You just had to chance it.”

  “What’s the point in saying sorry, eh?” Roger said.

  We all stood in front of the desk like a tribunal, judging him. He looked like an exhibit, a cautionary tale in the middle of the street, an art installation by some Goldsmiths graduate who’d used found objects to capture the times.

  “All your wheeling and dealing,” Cheryl said. “All your favors, all the dirty laundry you had us hide and clean, and this still happens.”

  “Yes, yes,” Roger said, all fight gone from his body. He looked shockingly frail, broken.

  “You’re not takin’ us down with you,” Ken said. “I’ll tell you that.”

  “I’m not taking you down,” Roger said. “It’s all me. Just me.”

  “Too right,” Clive said, and began to pour gasoline over the wicker man, Roger, and the table.

  “Listen,” Roger said, spluttering. “I can still get out on top. It all depends on you, Ravi.”
>
  “Me? What the hell can I do?”

  “You know what the big picture is. You know where the bodies are buried now. I want you to use it. You’ll know what to do with it all. We can still come out a win. Work with Olivia.”

  “Sorry, Roger,” Olivia said. “I’m off to run a bank in Shanghai. This is all my past now.”

  “And I look forward to being your kept man, babes,” Benjamin said.

  “We’ll see how long that lasts,” Olivia said with a sniff.

  “Come on,” Roger said. “Just one last hurrah, eh? What have you got to lose?”

  “Enough!” Cheryl said. “We’ve lost everything thanks to you! I followed you for over twenty years, you bastard! I loved you! You were always a disappointment! I waited for you to become the better version of you! But no, you liked the gutter too much because scraping for leftover power was all you ever went after! Once a chancer always a chancer! Now everything we built up has gone up in flames! Only one last thing left to burn!”

  Ken passed Cheryl a box of matches.

  “Is this absolutely necessary?” I asked.

  “We have to get rid of all evidence that comes back to us,” Cheryl said. “It’s every man for himself after this.”

  Roger just nodded sadly.

  We watched the wicker man burn in this final ritual. Roger disappeared in the smoke and the flames. I bet he never thought he would end up a sacrifice to the forgotten pagan gods of the British Isles. We all turned away.

  “And did the Countenance Divine,

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

  And was Jerusalem builded here,

  Among these dark Satanic Mills? . . .”

  Where was the singing coming from?

  Mark tossed the car keys to me.

  “Ravi,” Mark said. “You’re driving.”

  “I’ve got the legal paperwork and your statements all filed,” David said. “We should be in the clear. You get into any trouble, call me.”

  Julia and Mark joined me as we got into the black BMW and drove off. Everyone else got into the other cars. It felt like this would be the last I would see of them. I thought of Ken and Clive. What would become of them now, unleashed from the restraints of Golden Sentinels, where they were barely restrained to start with? They were going to be sink back into the fabric of the land, become murderous urban legends, hunting the truly wicked. Why was I so certain of that now?