The dry Santa Ana winds were still blowing through the air. Vayu was still in the sky. Smoke clouds were still flowing from the hills.
Jarrod, Reyes, and Mikkelford went into the building while Ariel, Julia, and I sat in the SUV with the guns in the back. They wore their bulletproof vests and were armed for bear. Our backup plan was to show up at NoHo Recreation Center to make the exchange if Jarrod aborted the raid. Then the idea would be to get Keith back while Jarrod and the team tried to pick his captors off.
Ariel had her Bluetooth earphone on. Julia and I declined to listen in. They were the professionals here. We were out of our depth.
“It’s going to be a standard breach-and-clear,” Ariel said. “Kick down the door, flash-bang, pick them off, and take the hostage out.”
I heard a guttural roar outside the SUV and saw Rudra jumping and waving his arms. This meant things were about to kick off.
“Get out of the car, my son,” Kali suddenly whispered in my ear. “Now. Go into the building.”
What? Kali was standing outside the window on my side of the car.
“Mark my words and act,” she said. “Your lives depend on this now. Take your two lovers with you.”
“We have to get out of the car,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” Ariel said.
“We have to get out now,” I said. “Kali just talked to me.”
Julia and Ariel barely hesitated, which surprised me.
We got out of the SUV and ran inside the building. As we headed up the stairs, Jarrod, Reyes, and Mikkelford were just coming down with Keith in their arms.
“What are you doing in here?” Jarrod said.
“Something came up,” Ariel said. “What about you? That was fast.”
“We busted in the door and there was only Keith,” Reyes said.
“He said they just up and went out the door about ten minutes before we showed up,” Mikkelford said.
“They got a phone call,” Keith said. “They were speaking Arabic, I think. I didn’t know what they said.”
We turned back and headed outside, in time for gunfire to erupt.
Ariel threw Julia and me to the ground—Jarrod dropped as bullets speckled the wall next to us—Reyes and Mikkelford fell back into the building and pulled Keith in with them.
We saw the hostage-takers firing their Uzis at us as they got into the SUV with the guns. Two of them stood next to it and laid down cover fire while the driver set about hot-wiring the engine.
I grabbed Julia and pulled her into the lobby of the apartment building with me while Ariel and Jarrod returned fire. If we had stayed in the car, they would have come across us and shot us before taking the vehicle. They would have taken the keys off Ariel and driven off.
Jarrod and Ariel managed to drop one of the gunmen. As he lay dying on the grass, the SUV revved up and the remaining gunmen got inside and sped off.
Ariel fired her pistol at the SUV, trying to hit the tires. Jarrod and Mikkelford fired their AR-15s, shattering the back window of the departing SUV. Reyes left us in the lobby and joined them in laying down fire.
Rudra’s roar grew louder and filled the air. It was almost deafening, but only to me. No one else was hearing it. He was standing behind me. I didn’t want to turn around and see him.
The SUV screeched off, approaching the corner that would take it out of our view.
Then a sound like the Earth cracking, at the crescendo of Rudra’s roar, and the SUV literally disappeared.
“What the hell?” Jarrod said.
Rudra stopped roaring. The street was silent at last but for the faint howl of the dry, cool wind. And Rudra settled into a mischievous chuckle. A god of retribution chuckling was not a sound anyone should ever find pleasant or soothing.
We approached the spot where the SUV disappeared.
“Whoa,” Ariel said.
There was a massive hole where that section of the street had been, and the SUV had been swallowed up. We could barely see the vehicle at the bottom of the pit. It was at least thirty feet deep, with broken pipes and water filling the bottom, tiny fountains blooming. There was no need to speculate on the condition of the gunmen inside the car.
“Sinkhole,” Jarrod said.
“Is this type of thing common?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Reyes said. “More and more these days.”
“Holy shit,” Keith said.
Lord Vishnu, Kali, Rudra, and Ganesha looked on and applauded. This was a good twist to the show they were watching. Was this a scenario they had written together or one they’d just been waiting to see? I didn’t want to think about that question.
“I guess the package is a write-off,” Mikkelford said.
Ariel was looking at me.
She knew.
She knew Kali had told me to get her and Julia out of the car before we got shot.
“Which god caused this?” she asked, mischief in her voice.
“We don’t have a god of sinkholes,” I said without much conviction.
Jarrod looked around. People were coming out of their houses to look at the sinkhole. Sirens were in the air. Someone must have dialed 911 when they heard the shooting.
“We gotta get out of here,” Jarrod said.
Jarrod, Reyes, and Mikkelford went off to steal a car.
“Rendezvous at the motel,” Jarrod said.
“Keith,” I said. “Can you give us a lift?”
TEN
Keith drove Ariel, Julia, and me back to the motel in his Prius. We had the radio on to listen to the news. There was a report of a squad of ICE officers being ambushed the night before, and a house being blown up. Authorities suspected that the officers had attempted to raid an address that was controlled by a drug gang whose members were on the list of violent criminals who were in the country illegally. Now those gang members were at large, and considered armed and dangerous. A police manhunt was under way. The fire brigade, or as they called them in America, the fire department, had declared that the brush fire was slowly being brought under control, and traffic was starting to move again, but slowly. Access to the freeways should be opening up soon. Reports were coming in about a shooting near Vineland, and a sinkhole had erupted nearby. Details were still unclear as police and emergency services were still en route.
Keith was lucky on so many levels. Since his apartment hadn’t become the venue for a firefight, he was spared having to make up some story about being taken hostage. There would be no connection drawn between him and the gunmen at the bottom of the sinkhole in an SUV with crates of classified military weaponry in its back. In fact, the world at large would be no wiser to his connection with the cache of military weapons or the heavily armed dead men in the sinkhole. It was going to take a day for the fire department to fish the SUV out anyway. By then we would be long gone.
Keith thanked us and drove off back to his life. He would have something to write about for his screenplay now. Williams and DuBois told us Jarrod and the others would be back shortly once they ditched the car they’d stolen.
“What a pity the guns were lost in the sinkhole,” Hamid said, not regretful at all.
“Good thing we kept half of the package in the second SUV, huh?” Ariel said.
“Honestly,” Hamid said. “There weren’t enough weapons to supply the whole army back home. Those are really a sample to convince them to buy more. More money to the US for arms sales. They were a symbolic gesture to the generals, that I was able to deliver some state-of-the-art American weapons for the struggle to regain power from the rebels and terrorist groups trying to gain a foothold.”
“Does this jeopardize your standing with the generals, then?” I asked.
“Oh God, I hope so!” Hamid said. “Perhaps they’ll think me incompetent and pick someone else to take over the country! Leave me out of it!”
“Hamid,” I said. “Did you make a call to the rebels when we left? To tell them we were coming? I was wondering how they could leave Keith
alone in his apartment and then double back around the building to grab the car with the guns in it.”
“I called my sister and she passed it on,” Hamid said. “And I’m glad you didn’t get shot.”
“You’ve been playing your own double agent,” Julia said. “Trying to sabotage your own campaign to go back and rule.”
“Guilty,” he said. “And I really should be punished, don’t you think? As ruler, I declare that I should be exiled from my country, condemned to live out my days here in America.”
“Don’t look at us,” Williams said. “We didn’t have orders to stop him from making phone calls.”
“Sneaky fucker,” DuBois said. “Went in the bathroom and made those calls on his cellphone.”
“I have spoken to Uncle Carl,” Hamid said. “And I put my foot down. I am not getting on that bloody plane back to my country. It is not safe there. I am staying in Beverly Hills.”
“And he’s okay with that?” I asked.
“Of course he isn’t, but I didn’t give him a lot of choice. I spoke to Mr. Collins and hired Interzone to be my personal bodyguards here in Los Angeles, and I’m going to form my government-in-exile here.”
“So you’re going to rule as a despot in Beverly Hills?” Julia asked. “How is that going to work?”
“It doesn’t,” Hamid said. “But until they sort things out over there in a way that guarantees I don’t get assassinated within a day of my setting foot there, I’m not going. And they can’t force me. Let the military gain control first. Then I’ll think about going back.”
“What about the guns?”
“I’ve contacted the military attaché at my embassy and told him to send someone to pick up the guns. They can try to ship them back home for the army to use.”
“So what you’ve done is bought yourself time again,” I said. “You’re just putting off going back there. Sooner or later, you’re going to run out of excuses.”
“Let me enjoy life as a civilian a bit longer,” Hamid said. “Let me be a restaurant owner and a producer who has to deal with a star who has to go to rehab.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“And if, say, the weapons failed to get to my country, then there’s even less incentive for me to go back.”
When Jarrod and the rest of the team got back, Hamid briefed him on the situation. Jarrod called Collins to confirm that Hamid was now a client and under Interzone protection. The CIA had contracted them to protect Hamid and secure the guns in the first place, but now Hamid was directly contracting them, possibly sidestepping the CIA’s original brief for them. I wondered if there was a conflict of interest there, but that wasn’t my problem. Jarrod didn’t have to like it. Hamid had already arranged a bank transfer of a few million dollars to Interzone to secure their services.
Frankly, none of this made much sense to me, but then neither did the last twenty-four hours. I was just a private investigator on a busman’s holiday who got a lot more than he bargained for. There were so many ambiguities, uncertainties, and outright mysteries to this world that I should just stop trying to make sense of it. The best I could do was to stay in one piece and, as Julia said, bear witness. And there was the rising karmic debt, which I was sure I would be called upon to pay someday.
Ravi,” Hamid turned to me, “if you represent what the Golden Sentinels agency has to offer, then I am impressed. I may call upon your services one day.”
“Well, you can talk to Gossamer Ross and get the agency’s number from him,” I said.
“Excellent.”
Roger was going to be pleased.
We would be stuck in the San Fernando Valley for one more day, waiting for the city’s traffic to normalize. The next few hours were spent sitting around the motel watching daytime telly. Hamid complained about the Mexican takeout Jarrod bought from the local restaurant up the block. He regaled us with stories about how brutal the generals were in his country and checked with Jarrod on how many of them were still alive. To his disappointment, it was more than he had hoped.
“Murderous bastards all,” he said. “Even if I call some of them ‘uncle.’ ”
More palatable were his stories about the Hollywood actresses he had bedded, especially the A-listers. That got everyone’s attention and passed the time better. His attention turned back to his drug-addicted teenage sitcom star and how he was going to have to hold auditions for her replacement and the nightmare of dealing with stage mothers who invested all their hopes and dreams in their hapless daughters who were going to be fucked up by show business. All this was just to hold off thinking about the inevitable: that sooner or later, Hamid was going to have to fly back to his country and face the music, to be America’s puppet in ruling the place. His family wasn’t Muslim but Christian, which made them much more attractive to Western allies who had an eye on the oil fields that gave him his leverage. Hamid was spoiled, privileged, lazy, and entitled in typical rich-kid fashion. He also had a massive capacity for duplicity, an ability to play all sides against one another while trying to keep his hands clean, but still possessed a modicum of self-awareness and even a core of basic decency. That might still save him, or he could still become a monster. There was a chance he could have gotten us killed today, but he depended on our professionalism and luck to stop that happening. I didn’t want to think about it at the time, but this was not the last I would see of Hamid Mahfouz. He was pretty much a client by now.
For the time being, I was mainly thinking about Julia and me, and how we probably had had enough of Los Angeles by now. I was starting to miss the gray, damp dystopia of the UK. Sure, things were bad there, but it was ours. I grew up there, amidst its history and its flaws. My morals came from there, and I missed the sense of the roots I had there as much as my family had roots in India. The emptiness of Los Angeles didn’t suit me at all, its perpetual erasure of history as it kept renewing itself with new architecture and trends. The gods might find it amusing as they found everything amusing, but I think even they were more at home in London with me. This was also a busman’s holiday for them. They were, after all, my gods, not this city’s.
And I didn’t know what to think about their actions here in the last few weeks. A man saw them the same way I did, even if he was probably on drugs at the time. Kali told me to do something that saved my life. Did Rudra open a sinkhole that stopped those gunmen from escaping with a carful of military-grade weapons or was it just a coincidence? Was I channeling them as Ariel and Julia believed? Was this what being an untrained shaman in a city was going to be like? Or was I doing exactly what they expected of me? What was their endgame? Was there an end to this or was I stuck dancing for them forever?
It was night now. Julia and I were back in our motel room after that Mexican dinner. We were all set to retire when there was a knock on the door.
It was Ariel, all smiles, with a bottle of tequila she had bought from the liquor store across the street.
ELEVEN
From Olivia’s recordings:
“Marie’s lawyer reached a deal with the Mainland. Derek would be released shortly after he appeared on television reading a confession that he had traveled to China to assist with anti-corruption investigations. Marie just had to keep this quiet and let it play out.
“I continued my cover of going about my days shopping and lunching. When I texted the wives on ChattyMe, I was met with silence. I phoned their houses, and the housekeepers told me they had left. Their husbands had suddenly been called back to China. I stopped by Hua’s place and was told she and her husband had left in a hurry. Same with the rest.
“Interesting.
“Three days later, Derek appeared on the news. He had been held in Shenzhen. He looked exhausted and had lost weight. He sat at a table facing the camera with two uniformed Mainland policemen standing behind him. He read a statement in halting Mandarin, since it didn’t come naturally to him, and he occasionally slipped into Cantonese as he ‘confessed’ to crossing over the border in
to China without the proper papers and having paid the penalty. He had spent the last few weeks in China helping the authorities with their inquiries into the publishing of morally corrupting materials in Hong Kong, and apologized for aiding and adding to the atmosphere of decadence and salacious gossip.
“They drove Derek back to the border that night. Marie and their lawyer went out to meet them, along with a small army of photographers and reporters. Derek was now the latest victim of China’s autocratic overreach. Academics and activists would be citing him as an example in their push for upholding democratic rights in Hong Kong.
“I went over to visit Derek and Marie the next day, after he got in his first good night’s sleep for six weeks. He was still tired and shell-shocked. There was one surprise: they’d told him to continue to publish the book, but an updated edition that named names—the husbands, the wives—with a new afterword describing how they were found out and sent back to China to face the consequences of their corruption and decadence. Contrary to killing the book and shutting down Derek’s publishing company, he was allowed to carry on. The book actually suited the Mainland government’s anticorruption drive after all. It sent a message they wanted out there to the officials: that corruption and bribery were not tolerated, and they were watching.
“I’ve thought about this for hours now, and here’s my theory: the Mainland’s Anti-Corruption Squad got ahold of the book and wanted to know who the officials depicted in it were, so they got in touch with Brother Bull to arrange for his men to grab Derek and deliver him to them. That way, no Mainland officers or agents would be implicated in Derek’s disappearance.
“What did Brother Bull get in return for this little assignment? They would turn a blind eye to his black market fish sales to the Mainland. Hua’s husband, he of the Ministry of Agriculture, might have been getting a kickback from Brother Bull for a hand in smuggling the fish in. Fay’s financier husband might be the one handling the extra pocket money they were all making in Hong Kong, hiding it in dummy accounts and stock investments. Bee’s husband, being in Public Morals, might have been the one who blew the whistle on Derek and demanded he get arrested as a way to draw attention away from them.
Her Beautiful Monster Page 22