Guardian Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  And she was dressed in her most businesslike clothes. A grey Masaba pantsuit with a violet silk shell that showcased her figure without being revealing. She wore four-inch violet pumps with the outfit and had left her hair open, preferring to catch it at the back with tortoiseshell combs that had belonged to her older sister, Aloka.

  Even her makeup was minimal, sheer lip gloss, smoky grey eye shadow and mascara that spiked her lashes to thick. The car she’d hired arrived for the duration arrived on time and Akira left without saying goodbye to Brandon.

  There was no point in her pretending they were little more than strangers stuck together by the strangest and terrible circumstances.

  ~~~~~

  The Hall of Records was the official political ground of San Magellan.

  Built in 1954 by Francesco De La Hoya, as a mark of respect for democracy and the people who had voted him in, the Hall was a beautiful sprawling structure in the ancient Hacienda style. It housed the Supreme Court, the Party Room and the offices of all the Party members, from the lowest legislative representative to the Big Four who were the core of the Cabinet Ministry.

  And as rustic and beautiful as it looked in the morning, with the sun reflecting yellow on the marble, Akira found that the place was as well-connected as the White House, when it came to the three important things of any political hub: telecommunications, amenities and security.

  As soon as she stepped onto the vast foyer, a smartly dressed woman named Elissa, Rosella’s assistant, walked toward her. She had Latin American looks, and the voluptuous figure to go with it, but spoke fluent English.

  She took Akira in through a small side-door she explained was used for visiting dignitaries.

  Elissa stopped at a door that opened with a card swipe and ushered them in. It was a small room with a black background, and a Polaroid camera set up. Two people were talking softly against a glassed-in bank of computers further in. There were wall-mounted cameras on all four corners of the twenty-by-twenty feet room.

  “For your ID tag,” Elissa explained, as she made Akira pose for her.

  Pictures were done in seconds. One of the two computer operators came out of the glass partition carrying a plastic laminated ID tag.

  She exited exactly ten minutes after entering the ID room.

  Akira took in security measures as they walked the length of the huge lobby that led to almost every room in the Hall. There were no upper floors to the structure, apart from the Tower that held the Premier’s offices and the conference rooms.

  Closed circuit cameras were situated every fifty feet, and they roved in a hundred and twenty degree angle. There were guards outside every closed door, especially the further apart the doors became.

  And every few hundred feet - thorough body checks. Akira’s bag was x-rayed thoroughly and her phone was taken into custody every single time because it beeped.

  Security was tight and abundant, she concluded by the time she cleared the third round of checks.

  But the art and decor was stunning too. For every machine-gun toting guard, there was a genuine antique table filled with a period vase and fresh flowers. Or a statue that obviously had great value. Or, in some cases, the walls had tapestry and paintings.

  All this was for the benefit of visiting dignitaries, but she still couldn’t help marveling at the beauty of the place. It was a museum come to life, if she but knew how to appreciate art. And she was also interested in seeing the other part of the Hall, the parts where the actual workings of a government took place.

  She said as much to Elissa who replied, “If you are finished with your work today, we could arrange for a guided tour for you later. The Party is in session now, so you might get to meet more of our nation’s bureaucrats and policy makers.”

  Akira nodded enthusiastically. “I’d love that. Thank you, Elisa.”

  Elissa led her through three more marble arches and what seemed like an acre of plush carpeting before they finally came to a reinforced steel and concrete door that opened on three sides: left, center and right.

  She took in the complicated security machines placed in front of each section of the door. Elissa pressed a button on the door and a keypad opened in front of her.

  A long arm reached out and she looked it straight in the eye. It blinked green. And lastly, a blank touch screen snapped into place beside the keypad.

  Without being asked, Akira stepped back while Elissa gained access to the Cabinet’s sanctum. The lobby here was even more lushly decorated, and a huge waiting area, with four stunning ladies as receptionists, curved the middle of the room.

  Akira could see automated large glass doors that led to the minister’s offices.

  Guards patrolled here, with machine guns. The ladies spoke to them, friendly and flirting and professional at the same time.

  It was a little intimidating, staring at so many guns, especially since they underwent body checks and X-ray checks again. But Akira focused on the fact that the entrance to the reinforced steel door that led to this sanctum did not boast a closed circuit camera.

  Elissa went ahead to the receptionist’s and returned with an apology.

  “Bernard Garcia is urgently in conference, and will be down in ten minutes. I am extremely sorry for the delay.” She gestured for Akira to sit down and get comfortable on the huge leather couches kept for visitors.

  Elissa disappeared into the receptionists’ console after that.

  And since Akira did not want to invite the accidental wrath of any of the guards, she sat quietly and looked around her. Elissa came down to fetch her in minutes.

  “Senhor Garcia is on his way down, and requests your company in his office.”

  A second later, the concrete door opened again and a bevy of men entered. In the middle of the ten-man army were four men.

  Akira had an excellent vantage point to watch the convoy walk past the receptionist area and beyond it.

  Two of the men were tall, one was of average height and one was short and rotund. The short man was talking now, rapidly. In the local dialect, a mix of Spanish and Portuguese. They were all dressed in formal clothes and had closely shorn, graying hair.

  They didn’t look like they were in their prime, age-wise.

  But she’d had seen newsreels of each of these men, interviews and such-like. There was no doubting their capability to make decisions that impacted a country. And she knew she’d done the right thing by coming here.

  To this place.

  The short man was Alfredo Moya, Minister for Industry and Telecommunications. The two tall men, distinguished by a pencil thin moustache and lack of one, were Geraldo De La Hoya and Bernard Garcia. They held the portfolios of Defense and Finance and Foreign and Interior Affairs, respectively.

  The averagely tall man, nodding gravely to whatever Alfredo had just said, was Tony Romero. He was Justice General and Premier of the State of San Magellan.

  Traditionally, the Premier had held the post of Foreign Affairs minister, because it was just better for him to deal with all the diplomatic dignitaries that eventually became a part of democracy and politics.

  But when Sebastian Delgado was elected, he’d joined the Internal and Foreign Affairs portfolios together and taken up the mantle of Justice General himself.

  Tony, who wasn’t actually a lawyer, but knew the ins and outs of the Party Agenda that also served as Constitution, had yet to make significant changes to his Cabinet. Rumor had it that he wanted Industry to be his portfolio, quite naturally because of the impending legislations that would bring an oil-strike to the fore of the country’s prosperity.

  Akira had appointments with all of them. Hour-long windows for Alfredo, Geraldo and Bernard and a precious thirty minutes with the Premier, Tony Romero.

  These appointments were covered over three days. Bernard Garcia, Minister for Internal and Foreign Affairs was for today. Later, on she would talk to his executive assistant. Tomorrow was Tony and Alfredo.

  And on the last day was Ger
aldo, Francesco’s son and Minister for Defense and Finance. Perhaps, the two most important and coveted portfolios. Akira was particularly eager to talk to him.

  Elissa touched her arm and smiled, “Shall we begin, Ms. Naik?”

  Akira gave her a toothy smile as she prepared to interrogate Suspect Number One. “I can’t wait.”

  Twenty-Three

  Bernard Garcia had witnessed a lot of Sebastian’s eccentricities. He’d managed to work around them, with them and often ignore them if it interfered too much with his own policies. Bernard and Sebastian had graduated from the same law school twenty-odd years ago. And they’d been friendly enemies since then.

  He grieved his friend, but he had a government to help run and this was apparent from the very second that Akira sat down for a chat with him.

  Garcia was perfectly polite in offering her beverages and breakfast. And he answered all her questions with a degree of honesty that she hadn’t expected from him.

  He was also remarkably fluent in English.

  So their interview was conducted in English.

  Akira’s interest in Bernard lay primarily in asking about ownership of the oil strikes. Since ownership was the bone of contention that led to both militia factions burning and looting so much of the country.

  “It’s a lumber cutting company,” Bernard said. “A foreign one, with no ties to the administration. Either this one or the last.”

  And he talked extensively of all the proper rules and procedures that had been followed by the government and the principal claim owner, the lumber company.

  “After the first strike had been found, various teams were sent in. Geologists. Meteorologists. Geopolitical experts. And a team of structural, civil engineers and more,” Bernard shared.

  “And what about the reports submitted by these teams?” Akira followed up immediately.

  “I’m sorry. They aren’t available for public consumption. But I can show you these instead.” Bernard pulled out but three documents signed by Sebastian himself that did prove the existence of crude oil in the northern terrain of the Santa Boronias for a rough perimeter of a hundred square miles. This was one tenth of the country’s total mileage.

  And it was very inexplicable that oil had been found on ground above sea-level. But, after extensive surveys had been done, there was no doubt about it. It was there.

  Crude oil. The thing that ran economies.

  “And so then came the contractors…” Akira prompted. She named three prominent Middle Eastern and Western oil corporations which wanted sole ownership of mining and using their off-shore rigs for processing the crude oil into petroleum and natural oil.

  Bernard smiled. “I’m impressed, Ms. Naik. Your research is astounding.”

  Akira shrugged. “Which one was actually given the tender in the end?”

  “Only one company NERVU,” Bernard said. “It’s an off-shoot of a known private conglomerate, Mantisse Corp. NERVU was willing to put up the funding for a rig right on the Strait of Magellan. So they got the tender. This was before the militia got involved, of course.”

  Akira knew what happened after this. Before the talks could be taken any further, two things had happened.

  The people, who would be displaced if an entire mountain was going to be dug for oil, decided that if anybody was benefiting from the situation, it was the government. They took their case to the International Human Rights Commission, which decreed that unless proper ownership could be established, there was going to be no rigging, no oil.

  And, secondly, the UN stepped in too. To invite San Magellan aboard as a member of its Security Council. This invite brought extremely negative reactions in the form of rebel factions on Sebastian and his party and made him a target.

  Two facts stood out for Akira.

  Fact one, the International Human Rights Commission had formally issued an injunction against the government. Which had come to light only a month ago, when Reuters had broken the news.

  And fact two, the names of the corporations that had connections to the government and the ruling Party. Mantisse Corp and NERVU.

  Bernard was totally above board in his talks and he spoke very fondly of the late Sebastian Delgado. Ari didn’t want to stir a hornet’s nest here by mentioning the possibility that he could be alive, because she sensed that Bernard was a man who took his work and his actions very seriously and he wouldn’t tolerate such unproven allegations from her.

  Bernard’s assistant was his son, Bernard junior, tall and swarthy like his father. And he proved invaluable in the ways he inducted her into Party history.

  Right from the time of formation by Francesco to the time when Sebastain had gone on a manhunt against all the corrupt bureaucrats of the Party. He also told her that all the important records of the so-called coup staged by Sebastian were in the vaults.

  When Ari expressed a desire to see them, he arranged for the documents to be brought up and she spent a full hour looking through old documents and legislations that had made Sebastian so unpopular among his Party members and so popular with his people.

  The day ended with a full tour of the Party halls.

  A meeting was in session and Elissa let them sit in on it, and after recording fifteen minutes of fifty legislative representatives talking at the same time, Akira knew it was time to call it a day.

  Plus, she had research to do. On Mantisse Corp and its daughter company, NERVU.

  Twenty-Four

  Alfredo Moya was preoccupied but cordial the entire time that he spoke to her and the interview proceeded without any new information being shared.

  Akira didn’t waste much time on preliminaries with either Alfredo or the Premier, sticking to her approved list of questions. She asked them pertinent questions about the oil claims deeds, and they all said the same thing.

  The land was government property, because the villages were not in the vicinity of the strike. And the inhabitants of the proposed strike area were offered, even now, huge amounts of compensation for making their homes elsewhere in the country.

  Both also named Mantisse Corp and NERVU and showed her documents that supported Bernard’s claim that they were carrying aboveboard operations. And, for the most part, she didn’t doubt them. She couldn’t. The proof was all there, which meant only one of two things.

  She was gigantically wrong.

  Or someone was going to a lot of trouble to keep everyone in the dark.

  Akira’s eyes felt gritty. She’d already logged in hours on the Web trying to find out all she could about Mantisse Corp, and even with Lexis Nexis she couldn’t come up with anything that could dispute everything the ministers and Premier had told her.

  It was a totally legit company with reaches everywhere. In the last ten years it had grown more proliferate in South America and was now reporting tremendous profits. A list of concerns was listed on the company website under the Mantisse Corp. umbrella.

  NERVU was one of them.

  She diligently tracked every single concern. This included infrastructure, mining, shipping, aviation and packaging. They had pharma concerns in Brazil and Venezuela and were caught in some minor drug charges Colombia, but no pending lawsuits.

  They took the Corporate Social Responsibility side of things pretty seriously, trying to better the infrastructure wherever they placed stakes.

  In San Magellan alone, since their entry four years ago, they had built hospitals in Lucre and Selena Domingo; improved the roads into the jungles leading to Santa Boronia. And built two new ports around the Strait. Providing thousands of people with incomes and livelihood. On paper, it all sounded perfect.

  The CEO of Mantisse Corp. was an Australian, Arthur Bernhardt. But he was settled in the UK now, where the company headquarters were situated in Edinburgh. And the Board of Directors all checked out.

  Ditto for NERVU. The COO of NERVU was Bernhardt’s son, Cobalt, so it was predictable to assume that Mantisse was a family-run corporation. But nepotism didn’t necessari
ly mean bad business.

  And she couldn’t figure out where she could lead with this. It’s not like she could ask someone to send over company records pertaining to land deals that had been made with the San Magellan government prior to the oil strike.

  But the more Akira read, the more she was enraged. Especially when she read about the massacre of a village called Santa Lucia, the one Akarshdeep had referred to in the very first conversation she’d had with them.

  The bare bones of the incident were listed in newspaper articles. A village of hundred and fifty inhabitants was set fire to, in medieval fashion, when the menfolk of the village had gone hunting and lumber-gathering. The women and children were unprotected.