Warrior Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  And her heart plummeted to her toes.

  What was she doing with this alien, exciting, strange man?

  Ziya shook her head and clipped on subtle marcasite earrings she’d bought on sale at the supermarket where she’d picked up the dress. “I have to wear my shoes and then we can go.”

  ~~~~~

  He took a covert survey of her outfit, the slim but strong legs invisible in the long dress, dress and the discreet earrings she was wearing with them. He wondered why she’d kept her red highlights on for such a somber occasion but was unsure of how to ask her about them.

  She touched the red ends, now fading to a dull copper, self-consciously and met his eyes squarely in the mirror.

  “Red sets off beautifully against black. Noor said,” she said quietly.

  He nodded, not wanting to remind her that Noor would never say anything again and just touched her on the shoulder.

  She smiled wanly, as she clipped on the other earring and then pushed her hair back behind her ears.

  He slipped an arm around her neck and drew her against him, so that they made a portrait image in the cracked and dusty mirror. The lovely face and quiet grey eyes and red hair the perfect foil against his hard, masculine beauty.

  “God, you are beautiful,” he breathed.

  She clasped both hands around his hand and said, “I do what I can with what I have.”

  “Thank god you don’t have more.”

  She chuckled, then stopped abruptly.

  Her eyes clouded, he could see it happening instant by instant, so he stepped back and informed her in a business-like manner. “Harold wants us to come back to London. They are setting up new HQ; the op has now attained manhunt status. It is not cold anymore.”

  She nodded, gave him a grateful look.

  He tried, once more to change her mind.“You should go back to Goonj, Ziya. It would be good for you to go back home.”

  She didn’t answer, just slipped on her shoes and slung her tiny purse around her shoulder.

  “Are you ready?” she asked, at the bathroom door.

  Krivi looked at her.

  A slim woman in a black dress and the fire of vengeance burning in her eyes, if you but knew where to look. And knew he had lost her before he could think of wanting her. All he could do was, protect her at all costs. With his life if it came right down to it.

  So he closed off his own pesky emotions, those sneaky bastards and nodded.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m right behind you.”

  ~~~~~~

  Wood paced the length of the hotel room floor again, for the fiftieth time.

  Where the fuck was Tom? They had a flight to catch in two hours, and Wood was impatient, itching to get out. This whole cloak and dagger tactic was utter bullshit and Wood wanted out.

  There were places to go, people to be killed.

  The little taste in London had only whetted Wood’s appetite for more.

  It had been so long…too long…

  The door to the hotel room opened and Wood whirled around, snatching the 9mm Sig Sauer off the jean’s waistband with an economic, but deadly-fast motion.

  Tom walked in and raised two brows at the two-handed steady grip.

  “Are you going to shoot me for being late?” he asked, mildly.

  Wood pocketed the weapon, dissembling the Sig Sauer absently, and putting it back together with quick motions.

  Tom watched out of the corner of his eyes with fatherly pride. Yes, he had taught this child well. Maybe too well, but that couldn’t be helped. Genius was never easy to live with.

  “You’re late,” Wood announced, unnecessarily.

  “I know. I had to leave the whore where no one would find her. That kind of disposal takes time, and you know it.”

  Wood thought of Helena, beautiful, lovely Helena, who had had to die because she knew Wood. The hours of pleasure and peace Wood had found with her. Sharing trade secrets and late-night meals. Just watching her move, sometimes had been enough. Wood had never had that before.

  And to lose it, lose her…

  It was business, it was protocol, but it still hurt. For the first time, it hurt.

  Tom smiled faintly, as he slung a smart laptop case over his Zegna overcoat that was overkill in Mexico but that concealed a variety of weapons he wanted concealed. It wasn’t exactly gangster squad but it did the job.

  “Is that regret I see, kid?”

  Wood smiled, and it was filled with a tinge of regret.

  “She was…” Wood hesitated. “Lovely. Inside, she was lovely.”

  “And if she had been allowed to stay alive, our enemies would have found her somehow and made her sing like a goddamn canary. You know this,” Tom ended bluntly.

  “I do.” Wood slung on a slouchy denim jacket and hunched one shoulder under it, exactly like the lead character of Notre Dame.

  Instantly, Wood’s gait changed, became a more shuffled, hesitant step and the disguise on Wood’ face was, as always, complete and thorough. There was even a bulbous thing on Wood’s neck that had been stuck on because attention had to be given to the name on the passport Wood was traveling in.

  But not attention of the interrogation kind.

  Tom nodded at the spore that looked ready to burst at any second.

  “That looks disgusting,” he commented.

  Wood grinned. “I know. It’s supposed to. The airport officials won’t wait to pass me through.”

  “You’re devious, kid.”

  Wood slung a friendly arm around Tom’s shoulder. All the regret over Helena washing up somewhere on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico had disappeared under the sheer excitement of the most important meeting about to take place in under a month’s time.

  The bomb was about to be unveiled, and Wood wanted it. Tom had promised Wood would get to look at it. And what Tom promised Wood, he delivered.

  “Well,” Wood drawled as they locked up behind them, leaving behind no evidence of having occupied the room at all. Everything was wiped down, everything was clean, even housekeeping couldn’t have done a better job if it had tried.

  “I learned from the best, didn’t I, dad?”

  Tom permitted himself a small smile and they opened the fire exit doors that led to the stairs because only civilians took elevators and risked getting caught on tape.

  And Tom was neither a fool, nor a civilian.

  ~~~~~

  The funeral was scarcely attended; only close family members of the victims. The location was undisclosed because no one wanted the press and the media to wind up getting news and arriving in hungry hordes.

  The service was mercifully brief, with the present celebrant saying a few brief words before the body cloths were lowered into the twin graves in the plot at the cemetery just outside of London that Krivi had secured pulling official and unofficial strings. There were pots and pots of roses, Noor’s favorite flowers at the site.

  Krivi was a pall-bearer because he had requested to be one. Even though there were no official bodies to be buried.

  Sam’s military regiment had sent in the Indian Flag that his mother clutched to her chest while sobbing uncontrollably.

  Fallen officers usually got the flag only if they were killed in the line of duty, but again, Krivi had made Harold pull the necessary strings to have Sam’s effects flown over from the Srinagar Regiment back to London. Along with the flag.

  A badge of honor, if ever there was one.

  The coldest consolation in so many other ways.

  Ziya hugged Noor’s parents and Sam’s folks, dry-eyed and white-faced, because she felt dizzy.

  Dada Akhtar had flatly refused to come because he couldn’t understand the enormity of what had happened and because Krivi, in a cryptic call had as good as told him not to.

  She felt unnaturally upset and as if her insides were going to spill out of her if she tried to take anything more than a breath at a time. So she just hugged everyone, promised them a safe trip back home to Kashmir, because Krivi
had firmly and implacably insisted on Ziya not telling anyone exactly what she was going to be doing for the foreseeable future.

  It might be potentially dangerous for everyone concerned if she did.

  Besides, he had reminded her with the cold, dead eyes she had accused him of having: a secret between three people was only safe if two of them were dead.

  ~~~~~

  So, at the end of the hour-long ceremony, when the rest of the two families, got into the waiting limousines, Ziya got into the backseat of the idling Ford, the unmarked sedan that Harold sent for them and waited for Krivi to join her.

  He stowed their meager belongings in the back of the car and got in with a whisper of movement, the cuffs of the jacket rolled back along with the shirt to reveal muscular, dusted-with-curling-black-hair forearms.

  She saw the way the veins stuck out under his skin and thought about blood. The infinite amount of it and what could happen if blood got spilled. Then she thought about the kind of death that was even more terrible.

  A bloodless death…like the one Noor and Sam had suffered.

  “I want to see blood spilled, Krivi,” she said, in a toneless voice. “I want rivers of blood to be spilled for what I…what they had to go through today.” Her voice didn’t waver one atom.

  Krivi reached over and squeezed her cold hands while the car started forward. “I know.”

  Then she turned to look at him, a warrior’s sure knowledge of death in her gunmetal grey eyes.

  “I am going to be there when it does. And I don’t care if it makes me less than human too.”

  ~~~~~

  He didn’t reply to her fierce vow, but he knew, he would die before he let her become anything other than the proud, kind, beautiful woman that she was.

  It was the vow he made to himself.

  And he intended to keep it.

  Thirty-Two

  The headquarters designated for Operation Hellsgate, dramatic as the name was but fitting, was located in the heart of South London.

  The seedy, the derelict lived here and a warren of these seedy, derelict buildings had been bought by a shell corporation which had ties to an organization that was directly funded by the British Secret Service.

  In the last decade or so, with world peace at stake, defense spending had increased manifold in practically every corner of the world, even though public outcry demanded the exact opposite.

  Hence, the need for shell corporations and other channels of funding.

  As Ziya was ushered into one end of the labyrinth of graffiti-painted structures with the paint peeling on the walls and the door almost coming off at the hinges, she was struck by such a sense of being Alice in Wonderland, she was tempted to step back.

  Scramble back as fast as her two-inch heels would allow her and go back to the regular, admittedly unsafe world that she knew.

  Lived in.

  This world, with its myriad computer terminals, and wires snaking everywhere, with the military personnel walking briskly up and down dimly-lit corridors, carrying heavy weaponry that she just knew were deadly and accurate, with the people in suits scurrying around with printouts or talking into their earphones or on their cell phones…

  She didn’t understand this world.

  But, then she glanced at Krivi, who was clipping on a badge to the front pocket of the black formal jacket, and sliding what looked like a firearm into the waistband of his pants. And a different sort of dread filled her stomach like lead.

  She might never understand this world, but this man; her lover, navigated this world with ease. This world was his home.

  Not the other, real, safe and comfortable one.

  And she wondered how she had ever thought the twain could meet.

  ~~~~~

  Krivi had not even graduated university when Harold, his International Politics professor, had asked him to meet for a coffee in a local café and put forth an extraordinary proposition.

  Work for the government.

  See the world, learn new skills, seduce women and serve the civilized world.

  A noble occupation.

  James Bond never had it as good as the spies of today’s generation.

  Krivi, like a schmuck, had fallen for the whole serve the greater good bit and signed up with MI5. Not the best or the smartest career decision he could have made, but, as he grew into his skin at the company, he did discover he had a rare aptitude for it.

  The world-traveling, the learning of new and deadly skills, two key words Harold had conveniently left out in his moving spiel. And the seduction of women.

  But, there was only one thing he had turned out to be really good at.

  Trailing, extracting. Being a bloodhound on the scent till he got his man. Every time.

  The Woodpecker was his and, by extension, Harold Wozniacki’s failure and that was because their resources couldn’t all be used, all at once to bring the terrorist down. There were many such names on the list and they all were coded Top Priority.

  If The Woodpecker had not struck close to the heart of Krivi and taken Gemma out, he doubted he would have gone after him with everything he had. And the thing was, as the years passed and the trail got deader and deader, he had become accustomed to feeling nothing. Wanting nothing.

  It was easier, certainly, it was safer and he had nothing to lose if he didn’t give a damn about anything, especially himself.

  He had convinced himself it was because he was grieving for Gemma, and maybe, in the beginning it had been about that, but for the last year, since he met Ziya, Krivi had had to rethink that notion.

  Would he have lived the same way if Ziya had died? If it had been her he had lost?

  And the answer was as simple as it was complicated.

  No, he would never have given up on life and did the worst possible damage to himself if it had been her. He would have gone after the person responsible for taking her away from him and he would have annihilated him, but after that he would have…

  Lived.

  It was a scary notion.

  Life, because he had never thought of Gemma being the reason he didn’t want to live. Or Ziya being the reason that he did.

  It was ridiculous and scary that an evil named The Woodpecker was responsible for both events.

  ~~~~~

  The network that was in place when Operation Hellsgate began had been slowly and carefully built in place for the last five years.

  The Woodpecker had been of international interest for a long time, ever since post 9/11 and the bombings in Syria but the British machinery had never paid much particular attention to bombers till 7/7.

  That had changed in a hurry; every day after that particular heinous day had ended.

  The Woodpecker had, in a way kick-started their vigilance by planting the first series of bombs in Joe Pendleton’s car and killing him and his pregnant wife. Because, fate, coincidence or a threat, the bastard had targeted one of their own.

  And that kind of message needed to be answered with swift retribution.

  Or, if not swift, as it turned out, then at least brutal retribution. The end, when it came for The Woodpecker, and it would come… on that Harold was very clear, would be brutal and hard.

  The Woodpecker would pay for everything he had put them through.

  But this takedown depended on several things being exactly right. Serendipity, a good amount of it had to be prayed for if they had to get the target.

  The first thing required was solid, actual intel.

  Details like location, description, habits, anything that could be used. And they had literally nothing, apart from the thoroughness and planning and end result of all the jobs he pulled with chilling efficiency. It was as if he was a wraith, who appeared when he wanted, where he wanted, did his thing and then disappeared like so much smoke.

  It was downright embarrassing that no one could exactly pinpoint so much as a birthdate for the terrorist.

  The second was to build up a spider web of informants, a
nd that was easier said than done.

  There were no witnesses, no ground crews and no weak links for them to find and break.

  For close to six years, all they’d had was hearsay, half-sightings and plain untruths.

  There was no eye witness; everyone had different versions of the same sequence of events until The Woodpecker began to take on mythical properties.

  He was uncatchable because he left no witnesses anywhere.

  He was untouchable because he made no mistake.

  He was thorough, every single goddamn time and that was the rub in the ointment.

  He was a ghost, a shadow, a phantom and a wraith and catching him would require an Act of God.

  And Krivi Iyer didn’t believe in the existence of God at all.

  Until, the day Harold turned up with a grin on his face and showed him a DVD he had gotten from one of his network of informants.

  The DVD was about a young man named Hank Sturgeon who didn’t possess a nose anymore.

  The Woodpecker had made a mistake.

  Finally.

  ~~~~~

  Harold had taught Economics and International Politics at Edinburgh University, and he taught the same two subjects at River House too.

  Krivi had been one of his brightest and best students who remembered the cardinal rule that every economist followed: When you have nothing else to follow, follow the money.

  So he started a paper trail that crisscrossed every known and alleged associate of The Woodpecker and looked into their finances. It was a hard, thankless job because there were about ninety-five names, as many aliases and each of their credit and life history had to be accessed digitally before he could proceed to their finances.

  The other agents on the network and in the op were deployed trying to put a name and face to The Woodpecker, and were tapping into whatever sources they could find in order to do so.

  But, the money was the key; Krivi realized that on day one itself.

  Maybe, four years out of the job had given him a kind of clarity and coolness of mind he hadn’t possessed before but he knew that one way or another, he was going to find The Woodpecker.