Veil

by Eliot Peper

  “Sit with me,” said Zia.

  Dembe pressed her lips together into a firm line. “On duty, ma’am.”

  “It’s Zia,” said Zia as she poured tea into two delicate porcelain cups. “And as your principal, I need your protection from the indignity of drinking alone. Cream, sugar, lemon?”

  Dembe’s face was hard but her eyes were smiling.

  “Come on,” said Zia. “I would ask what’s the worst that could happen but I know you’ve already thought of whatever it is and prepared contingencies.”

  “Cream, sugar, no lemon.” Dembe sat.

  Zia obliged. “As a kid, I always loved pouring the cream,” she said. “I’d watch it swirl into the tea and imagine I was summoning a djinn. It always struck me as odd that people read tea leaves to tell the future. Cream always seemed to be more fruitful material for prognostication.”

  “There was a woman in the village where I grew up who all the kids thought was a witch,” said Dembe. “If you paid her, she’d tell your future. My friends would save up just to hear her spin a riddle. I never did. Why would I want to know my future? If she’s right, I can’t change anything anyway. If she’s wrong, I just wasted my coin. The best part about the future is that it’s unknowable. I wouldn’t have a job otherwise.”

  “Personal protection as divination.”

  “I constrain downside risk,” said Dembe.

  Looking at Dembe, something clicked inside Zia—raising goosebumps. Those eyes. Those striking amber eyes.

  “I’ve seen you before,” said Zia, frowning as memory churned. A mother pushing twins in a stroller. The incomprehensible chatter of Japanese bankers. “You followed me in Zürich.”

  “Guilty as charged,” said Dembe, calmly holding Zia’s gaze. “I was assigned to your detail.”

  You hire spooks to follow me around and don’t even mention it to me? Santiago’s Adam’s apple had bobbed up and down in mute admission. What did she have to do to get out from under him, to find the space to be her own person? Was independence too much to ask for? It felt like Zia had been trying to escape his ubiquitous, inexorable influence her whole life. Santiago applied his being on the world as a forcing function. Dembe was his tool, a weapon in his bandolier. That’s how anyone ended up who spent enough time around him. That’s what Zia was now too, in a way. She was doing what needed to be done for him, wasn’t she? Even if it was against her will and, ostensibly, his.

  “Were you there in Chhattisgarh?” asked Zia.

  Dembe sipped her tea, examined Zia, nodded.

  “What is it like,” asked Zia, remembering the half-imagined fireworks show that accompanied her descent into drug-induced oblivion, “to kill someone?”

  “It’s hard—until it’s not,” said Dembe, eyes luminous. “The better question is: what is it like to save someone?”

  “Thank you,” said Zia, voice suddenly hoarse.

  “Just doing my job,” said Dembe, taking another sip of tea. “You messed that guy up pretty good with the pizza. I’ve seen a lot, but never that.”

  “Zachary’s is better pizza than he deserved,” said Zia.

  Dembe laughed a bright, sparkling laugh that counterbalanced her gruff manner, then cut off abruptly and touched her earpiece. She listened intently for a moment, then met Zia’s eye.

  “Someone’s here for you,” she said.

  Zia smiled. “Galang’s arrived early,” she said. “He can help us finish the pot.”

  “Not Galang,” said Dembe. “Aafreen Solih.”

  +

  21

  +

  Every time Zia saw Aafreen, she was struck by her friend’s undeniable beauty. There were good looking people, there were people who worked hard to fine tune their appearance, and then there were unselfconsciously beautiful people, people who caught and held the eye like magnets without even meaning to. With her delicate features, radiant skin, and fierce sense of presence, Aafreen was one of these rare creatures, a falcon goddess in human form. No wonder Li Jie had had such a crush on her in high school—the awkward mix of infatuation and veneration dooming it from the beginning.

  Even from across the lounge, Zia could see the coiled energy in Aafreen’s posture, her gorgeously embroidered headscarf, the way that even the carefully managed attention of Zia’s security team couldn’t help but skirt Aafreen’s event horizon. After Zia had dumped Tommy when he’d made his intentions clear, he’d pursued Aafreen in an unrequited campaign that had made Zia jealous despite herself—which had probably been his ultimate goal anyway. Years later, once he’d taken his rightful place in the SaudExxon corporoyal court, he had spearheaded the New Malé contract in what Zia suspected was an effort to win over Aafreen and benefit his career at the same time. But Aafreen had politely dismissed his advances and was now the Maldivian minister of foreign affairs, traveling with bodyguards of her own.

  Zia walked over to greet her friend.

  “I didn’t think we were going to get to see each other!” Zia pulled Aafreen into a tight hug. “Weren’t you supposed to be in a meeting with the prime minister? This is fabulous. You have to have some tea with me while we wait for Galang. We can take a selfie of the three of us for the group chat. Sorry to be stealing him away, I promise you can have him back.”

  Aafreen squeezed Zia hard, holding on as if she were a life raft.

  “I’ve missed you, sister,” said Zia.

  “You too,” whispered Aafreen, voice cracking.

  “Look at you, getting all emotional,” said Zia, heart swelling. “Be careful, it’s contagious.”

  Aafreen heaved a deep sigh on Zia’s shoulder.

  “Hey,” said Zia, taking a half step back to get a real look at Aafreen. Her friend’s face bore the carefully neutral expression of someone accustomed to public scrutiny, but there was something feral in Aafreen’s eyes. Zia’s chest ratcheted tight like cable under a lever winch. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

  Aafreen swallowed.

  “Let’s sit down,” she said.

  As they walked over to the table, Zia noticed Dembe conferring with Aafreen’s security team out of the corner of her eye, spurring Zia herself to check that nobody was within earshot of their nook. They sat in front of the half-empty cups and Zia wondered what she had failed to glimpse in the swirling eddies of cream.

  “I don’t know how to say this,” said Aafreen.

  “Just say it then,” said Zia, palms sweating.

  Aafreen bit the corner of her lip, let out a breath, and met Zia’s insistent gaze.

  “Galang’s dead.”

  “What?” asked Zia flatly.

  “He’s dead.” A flurry of micro expressions stormed across Aafreen’s face like a gale. “Galang is dead.”

  Cold, numb disbelief. That couldn’t be. Galang was going to fly back to Santiago’s island with Zia. He was going to break the story of the century. He was going to walk through the door in a few minutes with a dirty grin on his face and reveal that this was all some big misunderstanding, or maybe a prank to tease out just how much they cared about him.

  “How?”

  Aafreen took a deep breath. “They found his body in a brothel early this morning. Single gunshot to the back of the head. Execution style.”

  “A brothel?” That wasn’t like Galang at all. He could wrap a man around his finger in a heartbeat. Paying for sex wasn’t his style.

  “I know,” said Aafreen. “Maybe he was there to solicit a source or something, I’m not sure. Nobody’s sure of anything yet, forensics is still on site.”

  “Murdered,” said Zia weakly.

  “Certainly appears that way,” said Aafreen with forced calm. “Hard to shoot yourself in the back of the head.”

  “Fuck,” said Zia.

  “Fuck,” agreed Aafreen.

  You’re an angel, he’d told her in Chhattisgarh. And you’re the best kind of devil, she’d responded. Vertigo swept Zia away. The amorphous paintings surged off the walls and into three dimensions.
The potted plants grew impossibly fast, filled the cavernous room with desperate, grasping tendrils. The skylights blazed like the magnifying glass with which Zia had ignited an ant as a child. Galang. Sweet, sly, cantankerous, gossipy Galang. Zia sucked in a shaky breath and tried to ignore the kaleidoscopic barrage of color on the inside of her eyelids. Aafreen was leaning forward, had taken Zia’s hands in hers.

  “I know, honey,” murmured Aafreen. “I know.”

  Zia took a deep breath, bundled up her heart like a parent swaddling a child, and opened her eyes. There were shadows under Aafreen’s eyes and tight lines around her mouth. Her hands were dry but cold around Zia’s.

  “I’m sorry,” said Zia, squeezing back. “You’re going through hell. What can we do? How can I help?”

  “Not a lot at the moment,” said Aafreen. “The police are investigating but the case is so fresh I don’t expect to hear much for a while yet. What I’m trying to figure out is who might have done this and why. Galang is too savvy to have gotten himself randomly murdered and we both know he wasn’t there for a quickie. Can you think of anything that might be relevant?”

  Zia frowned. “He told me he was working on the black market resettlement story, using your second cousin as a primary lead. What if someone in the ring found out he was digging?”

  Aafreen’s gaze sharpened. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” she said. “Who knows what people are capable of when they think their back’s to a wall? I’m having my people look into it, officially and unofficially. If there’s so much as a peep, I’m going on the warpath.”

  Galang’s Pulitzer-winning headlines cycled through Zia’s head like a newsreel. “He’s made a lot of enemies over the years, hasn’t he?”

  “That he has,” said Aafreen. “Motive doesn’t narrow the field much.” She glanced over at Dembe who was still consulting with Aafreen’s security team. “He said you were coming to pick him up for a story?”

  Everything came rushing back like air into an airlock. The island. Santiago’s secret geoengineering program. Could whoever have kidnapped Zia somehow be involved with Galang’s murder? Had her father’s hubris killed her friend?

  “Yes,” said Zia. “It’s complicated, and—it makes me enough of a target that I need suits.” She nodded to Dembe. “But Galang didn’t know any of the details.”

  Aafreen gave her a long look that exerted gentle pressure in the way only a longtime friend could. “Want to talk about it?”

  The secret filled Zia up like water behind a dam, currents seething as they reached for the crest. Aafreen was a minister in the cabinet of a country that had been literally flooded by climate change, a brutal reality Zia had seen up close. The Maldives were a poster child for the future Santiago wanted to avert, and it was likely thanks to his project that anyone still managed to eke out a living on these remote atolls. More importantly, Aafreen was a friend. A patient, brilliant friend who would at least give the program a fair hearing before passing judgement. Zia had been impressed by the careful machinations of Aafreen’s analytical mind since they were Latin study buddies.

  But as a friend, Zia could see that Aafreen was already pushing herself to the limit. And it wasn’t just being woken up in the middle of the night by a crisis. It wasn’t even the vicious infighting to come. It was that Aafreen had invited Galang here, passed along whispers of corruption, and introduced him to her cousin. She had set him on a course that might very well have led to his killing.

  Just like Zia.

  It was better to get out in front and control the narrative. That was the moral of the story Zia had told her father. What would President Kim do in this situation? Acknowledge that this wasn’t the right place or time. You didn’t broach a geopolitical scandal to people who had just become embroiled in a homicide investigation. There were too many variables, too many conflating factors. And with the nightmare her friend was already facing, unloading on Aafreen under these circumstances wouldn’t just be imprudent, but cruel.

  Zia let out a long breath. “Thank you,” she said, “but no. At least, not yet.” She paused, and Aafreen waited her out. “It’s not impossible that there is some connection to whatever happened here. I’m going to need to do some digging of my own.”

  Aafreen gave her a curt nod, equal to equal, and Zia was absurdly grateful for her friend’s unconditional trust.

  “I’ll keep you apprised,” said Zia. “You’ll be the first to know if I find anything.”

  “I’ll do the same,” said Aafreen.

  Thoughts stampeded, impossible to corral. From nothing, you could extrapolate anything. If she hoped to make sense of any of this, she needed more data, and the place to find data wasn’t in the whorls of her own mind, but right in front of her.

  “What about the newsroom? Do his bosses know?” asked Zia. “Maybe they’re aware of something else he was working on that would make him a target.”

  “My staff is talking to them now,” said Aafreen. “I came straight here after notifying the family.”

  “Oh, Aafreen, I’m sorry,” said Zia. The family. Galang had always had a tortured relationship with his parents, but he and his sister Kemala were close. Zia couldn’t imagine what it must have been like telling them what had happened. Thank heaven she hadn’t further burdened Aafreen with her own confession.

  “It’s okay,” said Aafreen with a tired half-smile. “For better or worse, this job has given me practice at breaking hard news. It doesn’t get easier. But you do get used to how difficult it is.”

  “Fuck,” said Zia.

  “That’s about the size of it,” said Aafreen, pain moving behind her face like kelp under a shifting sea. Zia wanted to spare her, to break down in tears, to scream denial at a deaf cosmos. She remembered the minty smell of her mother’s body wash and the way Miranda would sing along to old cumbia songs under her breath. Why did fate take the good ones?

  “Look, Zia,” said Aafreen. “I know you want to help, but—”

  “No, I get it,” said Zia, shaking her head. “You don’t need a close friend of the deceased barging in to interfere with the details of a police investigation without any intuition for local politics. Don’t worry, I won’t be the bull in your china shop. The windmills I need to tilt at aren’t on New Malé anyway. The best way for me to help is to go back and tease out any clues of a connection to the reason I’m here in the first place.”

  Sorrow and relief suffused Aafreen’s voice. “Thank you,” she said, her voice raw. “Of anyone, I hoped you’d understand. You remember how it was during the storm.”

  Zia nodded, wishing those memories didn’t poison her dreams. “The only thing that matters is finding out what really happened,” she said. “I’ll get right back on that plane and get out of your hair. But promise me that when you find out who these bastards are, we take them down together.”

  Zia had never seen anything as beautiful or terrifying as the sublime expression that crossed her old friend’s face.

  “You have my word,” said Aafreen.

  One of the Interstice drones circled high above the island, long wings glinting, giving them a landing window. Their plane touched down and they disembarked. It was a clear day and the peak of the volcano rose jagged and alone into blue sky. Steam evaporated off the hot tarmac. As they crossed it, Zia pulled Dembe aside.

  “I’m worried that the people who tried to kidnap me killed Galang,” said Zia after a moment’s hesitation. “I know it’s a long shot. But can you think of anything that might test that hypothesis?”

  Dembe ran a hand over her braids. “Sorry, boss. That isn’t really my area. I’m a tactics gal.”

  “Then what can you tell me about their respective tactics?”

  They walked in silence for a few moments. Seabirds cackled overhead.

  “They had a four person team for the kidnapping in India,” said Dembe. “Professionals. They knew what they were doing. If we hadn’t already been shadowing you, or if they knew we were, you would’ve
been toast.”

  +

  22

  +

  Zia could see movement through the pepper tree, hear footsteps coming up the alley toward her hiding spot, feel the arm lock around her neck.

  “The New Malé hit though…” Dembe shook her head. “I was talking to your friend’s security team and—well, it wasn’t squeaky clean.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Zia, trying to suppress nausea as she imagined Galang crumpled on the floor of a cum-stained brothel love nest, eyes empty, limbs at odd angles.

  “Well, for one thing, if you decide to off someone, why make it obvious?” Dembe shrugged. “Like, if you just want them dead, you invite a lot less suspicion if you make it look like a suicide or an accident. Or you make them disappear altogether.”

  Zia shivered. “So if you make murder look like murder, you do it to send a message.”

  “Exactly,” said Dembe.

  “But what message?” asked Zia. “And to whom?”

  “That’s above my pay grade,” said Dembe.

  They parted ways at the edge of the tarmac, Dembe to report to security headquarters and Zia to climb the hill to Santiago’s redoubt.

  “Hey, thanks,” said Zia.

  “No problem,” said Dembe. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  Zia started up the pedestrian path, crossing a threshold from the industrial sprawl of the airfield into the embrace of encroaching jungle. Insects buzzed. Light dappled the flagstones. Sweat dripped down Zia’s spine as she ascended the winding steps.

  Maybe one of the corrupt Maldivian officials was trying to intimidate anyone who might blow the whistle on the ring. Maybe the people behind Zia’s kidnapping were escalating to assassination to prove their seriousness. Maybe a powerbroker from the long list Galang had disgraced was exacting revenge.