Her Beautiful Monster

by Adi Tantimedh

  And still the singing in the air. I heard it even through the closed windows of the car and fair hiss of the air conditioner.

  “Bring me my Bow of burning gold;

  Bring me my Arrows of desire:

  Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

  Bring me my Chariot of fire! . . .”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Grosvenor Square,” Mark said as he lit up a spliff. “We need to lie low for a bit.”

  He took a puff and passed it to Julia, who took a puff and passed it to me. We were past caring about the police stopping us for smoking a spliff in a car. They had bigger problems on their hands, what with London—hell, the whole country—falling apart around their ears.

  I felt an overwhelming wave of sadness wash over me. Had everything we’d done, everything I’d done, come to this? I’d tried to do the right thing, tried to do right by people who needed my help. Roger never showed us his big picture, and it blew up in his face. This was all our fault. We all played a part. I hadn’t thought it would fall apart this badly. I couldn’t believe everything was gone, just like that.

  I had to call my parents. I didn’t care that I was still driving. I desperately wanted to hear their voices.

  “Ravi?” my dad said on the other end of the line. “Is that you? How is London?”

  “Falling apart. You and Mum picked the right time to move to Mumbai.”

  “We saw the writing on the wall,” Mum said. “Are you and Julia all right?”

  “We’ll be fine, Mum.”

  “Good. We’re off to see your grandparents for dinner.”

  “Um, didn’t Dadaji and Dadiji pass away ten years ago?”

  “They’re cooking tonight. It’s going to be a nice dinner. We’ll send them your love.”

  “Thanks, Mum.”

  “And Ravi,” Dad came on, “keep listening to the gods. You can’t go wrong.”

  “I will, Dad.”

  And with that, they were gone.

  Mark took my phone and Julia’s phone, removed the SIM cards, and tossed them all out of the car.

  “No more tracking us by GPS,” he said.

  “I will not cease from Mental Fight,

  Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

  Till we have built Jerusalem,

  In England’s green & pleasant Land . . .”

  At least the singing stopped by the time we arrived at a posh building in Grosvenor Square. It must have been worth over ten million pounds, had once been an embassy, but since then had been abandoned and taken over by a band of anarchist squatters who happened to be Mark’s mates. The entrance was fortified with sandbags and police barriers. Mark introduced us to Spider, who led us to one of the many empty rooms and said, “Make yourselves at home. Stay as long as you like.” Spider and his friends had turned the building into a small community. There were families who would have been otherwise homeless living here. Spider’s girlfriend Ginny had organized a crèche and ran a little school for the kids. They had a full staff running the kitchen canteen, and meals were served at set times. There was a playroom with a large flat-screen TV and a PlayStation games console with loads of DVDs and video games for keeping everyone entertained. The bookshelves were well stocked with everything from Dickens to the latest crime novels and potboilers.

  “This is where you’ve been living for the past year?” I asked Mark.

  “I helped them find this place and break in,” Mark said. “This is the future, mate. Government falls apart, anarchy reigns, the best collectives survive.”

  Mark went up to the roof to check his marijuana plants. He was the supplier to the whole of what was left of Mayfair, which brought a fair amount of money and services to the building.

  “I trust you children will make yourselves at home,” Mark said when he came back down. “Dinner’s in the communal area in the living room at seven. I’m going to be at the orgy on the third floor. It’s on at six. You’re welcome to join us.”

  “Thanks, Mark, but we’ll pass,” I said.

  “Well, the invitation’s open if you change your mind,” he said, and wandered off down the hall.

  “All in all,” Julia said, wrapping her arm around my elbow. “This has been a very English apocalypse.”

  Where were the gods in all this? They would usually show up in a mess like this. It was their jam. Not once through all this did Kali or Lord Vishnu or Ganesha or any of the pantheon show up to watch. Or did they orchestrate all this after all? They weren’t here because they were up there on high, having designed all this and put us down in it. Perhaps this was the end of their long game after all, the punch line to the story I was a hapless player in.

  Julia and I went to our room and lay down on our sleeping bags. I had to think about what to do with my life now. All bets were off. The whole world was in free fall and so were we.

  “Ravi,” Ariel said. “Come on, babe. We gotta move.”

  I opened my eyes.

  Ariel was wearing the leather bustier and thigh-high boots Julia had worn in Gossamer Rand Ross’s panic room.

  “Oh, Ariel, not now,” I moaned.

  “I’m serious,” Ariel said. “We got a situation.”

  The motel room came back into focus. It was morning in North Hollywood.

  “Keith’s been taken hostage,” Julia said.

  “You what?” I said.

  “It’s the guys who are after Hamid Mahfouz,” Ariel said. “If we don’t give them Hamid and the guns, they’re going to kill Keith.”

  SEVEN

  Everyone gathered in our room and looked at Julia’s phone. The abductors had texted her a photo of Keith looking terrified with two guns pointing at his head. They’d called Julia. She and Keith had exchanged numbers so she could touch base with him and set his mind at ease that we’d dropped off the guns.

  “They must have had to go with a new plan when their friends didn’t come back from Gossamer Ross’s house,” Julia said. “Decided to grab Keith from his flat to use as leverage if their mates didn’t get the guns.”

  “When did all this happen?” I asked.

  “They phoned me while you were asleep,” Julia said.

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Keith had my number on his phone, not yours. They think I’m his girlfriend, and that I’m Gossamer’s other assistant.”

  “Why the bloody hell would they think that?”

  “Because I told them.”

  “You what?! Why?”

  “Because I needed to keep them talking and stop them from hurting Keith.”

  “Good thinking,” Ariel said.

  “No it’s not!” I cried. “Why didn’t you put me on the phone?”

  “You needed the rest,” Julia said. “And I’m an investigator, too, remember? I took the initiative just as you or Mark or any of the others would. Stop trying to protect me, Ravi.”

  I could only splutter.

  “We have to rescue Keith,” I said.

  “He’s not the mission,” Jarrod said.

  “His boss is a client of ours,” I said. “That makes him our responsibility.”

  “Your responsibility,” Jarrod said. “Not ours.”

  “Fuck off,” I said. “You don’t need Julia and me anymore anyway. We can just call the police. That means telling them what the hell we’ve been up to for the last twelve hours with you lot, and they’ll want to question you as well.”

  “Do you really want to kick this hornet’s nest, brother?” Jarrod said.

  “Do you really want to suddenly make the headlines and become more famous than you want to be?” I said. “Or do you want to rescue Keith and keep a lid on this whole situation before it gets totally out of hand?”

  Jarrod and I glared at each other. He was probably weighing up the pros and cons of just shooting me at that point.

  “They don’t even know where we are,” Williams said. “We are free and clear. Fuck ’im. He’s not our problem. We deliver Mahfou
z and the package and we’re home free. They got no leverage.”

  “And isn’t this mess partly Keith’s fault?” Ariel said. “He was the one who left the gate open and let those guys in. Let him stew.”

  “He was thrown into this by his boss and out of his depth,” I said. “You only found out about this because he brought me into it, which helped you with your mission here, so we owe him.”

  “So give him a goddamn medal,” Reyes said.

  “And this adds additional risk,” Mikkelford said. “Puts extra hours on us.”

  “They’ve been after us and the guns anyway,” I said. “This is a chance for you to remove a whole threat vector from this scenario.”

  They looked at me skeptically.

  “I insist that you rescue Keith!” Hamid suddenly declared. “He is in this situation because of me!”

  “Sir,” Jarrod said. “Our first priority is your safety. This goes against all protocol not to mention common sense. It is not our problem. They miscalculated the value of their hostage.”

  “What kind of ruler would I be if I let someone die in my stead?” Hamid said. “He is my friend’s employee and I have a moral obligation. You may be the professionals here, but I am the boss! I say we save him! Your future contract with me is riding on this!”

  “Besides,” I said. “For you lot, it’ll be fun. Don’t you live for this shit?”

  The gears shifted in their heads. Ariel licked her lips. She reminded me of Kali there, only her tongue wasn’t as long.

  “Keith is an employee of my friend,” Hamid repeated. “Granted, Gossamer is not a close friend, but there is an ethical consideration here on top of basic human decency.”

  Jarrod sighed, seemed to soften a bit.

  “It’s still not your concern,” he said. “Ravi here is right. We could just phone this in to the police and let them take care of it.”

  “You know the cops will fuck this up,” I said. “First the cops may not get there at all because of the chaos from the brush fires, and second they don’t know what they’re up against. This could end up in a siege and a standoff and be a huge mess.”

  “Be great cover for us to get Hamid out of Dodge, though,” Williams said.

  “I am declaring right now that we have to save Keith!” Hamid said. “And I am going nowhere until we do!”

  “Sir,” Jarrod said. “That puts you and the package at unnecessary risk.”

  “And I am the leader of my country, and as an act of goodwill, I have to put the safety of an innocent man first! What kind of ruler am I if I just let him die? Let this be my first act as a sovereign!”

  Jarrod grimaced.

  “All right. We have to discuss tactics.”

  He took the men and Ariel to the corner, leaving us in ours.

  “Well put,” Julia said.

  “Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that only a megalomaniac, a narcissist, or a sociopath could be a despot, and I want to avoid becoming any of those,” Hamid said.

  “That’s awfully astute,” I said.

  “I’ve gone through this with my therapist. Took years.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Of course.”

  I knew Hamid wasn’t necessarily agreeing to rescue Keith out of the kindness of his heart. This was also another way to delay his getting on that plane to fly back to the country that would end up being the death of him.

  Jarrod and the men finally decided to play ball. Ariel was just along for the crack of it. I worried Julia was, too, and what would she do if this sort of thing wasn’t enough to sublimate her addictions?

  I got on the blower to Benjamin, who had been on standby at his computer in his hotel room in Venice Beach.

  “Wotcher, tosh!” He addressed Jarrod. He really was laying on the South London accent thick while he was here in the States. “We have a clear line to these arseholes because we have poor li’l Keith’s mobile number, which means I’ll be able to track them via GPS. We already own them. Wa-hey!”

  Really laying the accent on thick.

  EIGHT

  Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” Jarrod said to Reyes and Mikkelford. “You know the drill. This is a hostage extraction. Breach-and-clear. In-and-out.”

  They locked and loaded their guns, all business now.

  “And we’re on domestic soil,” Jarrod continued. “Homeland means no canoeing. I’m looking at you, Mikkelford.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Canoeing?”

  “Oh, it’s a term that came out of Seal Team Six,” Ariel said, shrugging. “It means mutilating an enemy corpse for kicks.”

  Julia shuddered.

  Another wave of disgust washed over me. These fuckers were monsters. I saw them as Rakshasas, their burning skins and glowing eyes belying their hunger for violence as they set out for the hunt.

  “It’s all gone a bit J. G. Ballard,” I muttered.

  “Sorry?” Julia said.

  “Just something Mark would say.”

  “I wonder how he would deal with all this if he was here instead of us,” she mused.

  “Probably better than I am,” I said. “He’ll think this was all typical of the big cosmic joke.”

  “Now, they don’t know we have Hamid as well,” Jarrod said. “So we use the guns as bait.”

  “So we best keep Mr. Mahfouz out of sight and the hell away from any of this,” Reyes said. “Which means splitting up.”

  “One team takes the guns and runs the op to extract Keith,” Mikkelford said. “The other keeps Mr. Mahfouz safe.”

  “They want Ravi and me to drive the guns over to them in exchange for Keith,” Julia said. “No police or Keith is dead, of course.”

  “So they know about me because Keith must have told them we were taking care of the guns,” I said. “Do you reckon they would let us go or kill us since we’re witnesses?”

  “Best not to take any chances,” Ariel said. “Kill ’em all.”

  The meeting was set for the Starbucks on Camarillo Street. That made sense, since it was near a busy intersection that gave them access to a freeway on-ramp, which would let them get away, if the traffic had cleared up by the time we met.

  “Hang on,” Benjamin said on the phone. “Are these people idiots or what? It’s in a strip mall with a cramped parking lot that’s chockabloc all the time. If either side wants to get away, they and you would be stuck in the sodding parking lot for ages. Find someplace else.”

  I called Keith’s phone to introduce myself.

  “I need to have proof of life,” I said. “Put Keith on the phone.”

  “I’m sorry!” Keith said. “They just grabbed me! I don’t even know who the fuck they are!”

  The man with the accent snatched the phone back.

  “We meet in an hour,” he said.

  “Hold on,” I said. “You do not want to meet at the Starbucks.”

  I told them the situation with the traffic in that area.

  “Don’t try to trick us,” the man with the accent said.

  “No tricks. We don’t want to be trapped in that damned strip mall and neither do you,” I said. “We need someplace else where we can both get away from each other as quickly as possible. Traffic is only starting to ease up from the brush fire.”

  There was a pause as they conferred amongst themselves. They were obviously not from around here, but then neither were we.

  “Goddamn amateur hour,” Jarrod muttered in the background. Hopefully the man on the phone didn’t hear that.

  “Excuse me,” Hamid whispered. “Are you really hoping these bastards would be a bit more competent and have a better chance of killing us?”

  “Just saying,” Jarrod whispered.

  “I, for one, am grateful they’re not as professional as they ought to be!” Hamid hissed.

  Julia hushed them.

  “Tell them to meet at the parking lot of the North Hollywood Recreational Center,” Benjamin said via my Bluetooth headset. “The part that’s on Chandler Boulevard. Easy enough to
drive away.”

  Of course, the point was to not let them drive away with the guns. There should be plenty of spots for Jarrod and his team to set up and lie in ambush.

  The man agreed. I recommended they used Google Maps to suss out the best route to get to the park. Julia and I were to drive the guns out there in an hour. They would be in a van with Keith. Once they confirmed we were alone and had brought the guns, they would put the guns in the van and give us Keith, and we would part ways.

  Benjamin told us that judging by the GPS on Keith’s smartphone, they were in his apartment. Jarrod and the team debated storming the place. It was close quarters, with too many variables in the confined space of a cheap apartment building with thin walls. The risk of stray bullets hitting neighbors in a shoot-out was not worth it. There was also the strong possibility of Keith ending up dead and members of the team getting shot. At least Benjamin had used thermal imaging on his drones and determined there were four of them holding Keith in his apartment. Just like he used thermal imaging to detect the ICE agents making their way to the safe house in the middle of the night.

  Not being an expert at these types of tactics, I couldn’t judge whether meeting out in the open at a park would be any better than raiding an apartment building. With the apartment, there would be nearby buildings to use as vantage points. Walls to hide behind, easier ambushes to be laid. I just had to take their word for it, which didn’t make me happy.

  Of course, all this was to confirm where they were. We were already outside Keith’s apartment building by then.

  And the gods were back, watching with anticipation.

  NINE

  We had left Hamid back at the motel with Williams and DuBois watching over him. The meeting was at noon, but we had chosen to drive out towards Keith’s place an hour earlier to catch them before they left. Benjamin monitored Keith’s phone and would tell us when they went on the move. Then there were his drones, of course.