Guardian Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  Akira dug her pointed nails into the underside of his wrist. He yelped.

  “Jesus, woman. I am sorry, I am sorry, okay. You do not have a hard head. It’s as soft as a fucking goose-feather pillow,” Brand muttered.

  She laughed. It was a quick one, finished before it got started but she laughed.

  And he was amazed. Here they were, riding in the darkness with people almost certainly going to kill them whenever they stopped driving. Blindfolded and bound and hurting and she still had the capacity to laugh.

  In the middle of this hairy situation.

  She was, he concluded, the craziest woman he’d ever had the misfortune of meeting.

  “If my head’s a goose-feather pillow, then you have shit for brains,” Akira said matter-of-factly.

  He smiled, before he could stop himself. The Jeep lurched and so did they. He grabbed her wrists and braced his shoulders ahead so that they wouldn’t roll off the back. Or to the side. It had happened before. It hurt a lot. They’d maneuvered into this position about forty minutes ago.

  And they’d been driving for about an hour now.

  “Be that as it may, I don’t think you understand, clearly, the danger we are in, Akira,” he said quietly.

  Akira sighed, dropped her head forward. He could feel it.

  “Believe me, Brandon. I understand, very clearly, the danger we are in. They’re going to kill us when we stop, aren’t they?”

  There was nothing in her voice. No anger, no resignation. She could have been talking about the weather or the movies for all the feeling she showed.

  He was angry now. Extremely. So he answered in a very calm voice, “I don’t know. I don’t know what they want from us. But it’s a possibility.”

  “So long as I understand that clearly,” she ended for him.

  They were silent then, with only the deafening noise of the Jeep’s motion to guide them.

  Brand could feel the front tires going for a turn, and he instantly braced them both for the bend. His mind was finally over self-flagellating and trying to figure out solutions for his problem, and just tuning back in.

  Taking in details. Letting his instincts take over.

  There was one other person with the driver, and he could hear the waving of the gun in their direction, every few minutes. Not that blindfolded and tied up and unarmed he was going to try for Hero of the Year.

  Who was he kidding? Yeah, he would have.

  He would have, if he didn’t know what the leader, Mr. Accent, would do to her when he escaped. He’d kill her. By inches. Just because he could.

  And for once in his life, in his miserable, lonely, largely moral vacuum of a life, Brand wasn’t willing for collateral damage to take the hit. Not when it wasn’t fair. And not when it was her.

  ~~~~~

  “Can't you work these things off?” Akira asked for the sixth time, frustrated.

  “Akira, I told you. I would if I could. But if I do, then they’re going to know what I did and they’ll shoot us and we’ll be very dead,” he explained patiently.

  “But you could roll off, right? I mean, you’re buff and scary and you have all these weird skills that you didn’t get working in front of a computer, being an ordinary security guy.”

  Brand winced because she was hitting so close to the truth, he was afraid she’d start talking about his deep-seated need for parental approval because he’d been denied Weetabix as a child.

  “Akira.”

  “What? I’m not stupid.” She was belligerent. “And I know you can get out of here, if you want to. Probably overpower the two guys currently training really powerful guns on us. This isn’t your first time in our…situation. And one of the first things I read about military combat is that soldiers act. They don’t react. You are reacting. So I have to wonder, why.”

  Brand opened his mouth, but she continued without a pause.

  “And I can only conclude that it’s because of me. I am a civilian with no real combat experience or anything, and you feel it’s your duty to protect me. I want to tell you, you don’t have to. If you can escape and get help or just get the hell away, just go.”

  “Akira.”

  “I am just saying,” Akira rolled on over his muttered warning. “I don’t expect you to guard me just because you promised you would. I mean, one dead is better than two. And it might as well be me.” There was anger and belligerence and fear in her voice.

  Of the three, he was upset only by the fear. He counted to five.

  “Akira,” he growled.

  “Yes?”

  “Shut the hell up. We are both getting out of here. Alive. Okay?”

  ~~~~~~

  And because hearing him say it like that, with anger and venom and quiet confidence and exasperation made her believe him, made her want to weep, she answered, “Alright, Brand.”

  “Thank you. Now stop talking and let me think for a second.”

  “Alright.” She was meek. “But in the event that this is my very last night on earth, could you tell me one tiny thing?”

  “Yeah. What?”

  “Where is Sebastian?”

  Brand groaned. “Seriously. You would think of your story, even now? When you are probably minutes away from dying?”

  He felt her shrug.

  “Well. What else are you going to tell me? Your family’s off-limits, which means so’s your life. Your personal life. And I know all about Nobokov and your fascination with him. That you collect Degas and love chocolate ice-cream as much as I do. If these are my last minutes on earth, I don’t want to waste my time talking about superficial things.”

  He considered the wisdom of her logic. Didn’t know if she was right.

  Brand came to a decision, anyway. “I know I am probably going to regret this, but alright. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  Surprise colored her voice. “Why?”

  This time, he shrugged. “Why not? Like you said. Time’s precious. And we shouldn’t be talking about superficial things. So all that’s left is hard, ugly facts of life.”

  “They’re not always hard or ugly, Brand.” Akira said gently.

  He laughed then. And it was bitter. “Want to bet?”

  “Where’d you grow up?”

  “In a farm town two hours away from Melbourne. We grew potatoes and raised a few cows and horses.”

  “We?”

  “Mum, dad, my elder sister Melissa and younger brother Colin.” There was longing in his voice, and anger threading through it.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing much. Precisely. I was your prototypical middle-child. A brilliant, beautiful older sister and a younger brother who went to university when I was still in high school. Don’t get me wrong, I loved them, and was okay…mostly with the raging jealousy.”

  “It must have been hard, being the ignored middle child.”

  Brand shook his head. “I wasn’t ignored. Not at the beginning. Melissa was head cheerleader and studying medicine and Colin on his way to a double doctorate, so I knew I couldn’t compete academically. Sports became my thing. And it helped that I took after my grandfather. He was tall and heaps fit too. At first, the track helped. Cricket, footie, basketball, helped.”

  “Then?” she asked softly.

  “Then I shot my knee in a game, my last year in school. Everyone was very sympathetic. Colin came and sat beside me after the operation, every day. He was fifteen. I was nineteen. And he already had a master’s degree in three sciences.”

  “That must have hurt. The knee, I mean.”

  Brand nodded. Their heads bumped. “Sorry. Yeah, it did. The one thing I was good at, my ticket away from home. And it was gone. So I took to drinking with the rehab. A couple of beers, a couple of glasses of whiskey, just to take the edge off the pain. It worked too.”

  “Alcoholism’s not the answer,” she pointed out quietly.

  “I know,” Brand said, just as quietly. “Before long I was drinking full time. On my ninet
eenth birthday, I was to pick up Colin from his dorm and bring him home. Dad and Mum had given me the car as a gift, a second-hand Nissan, and I’d promised them that I wouldn’t drink anymore. They didn’t know how much I drank. Nobody did. I didn’t have, what you call, close pals. So, I drank and drove, and picked up Colin.”

  Her silence foreboded what he said next.

  “He was excited about this date he had with this college freshman. Jessie, her name was. And I hated him, right then. He was living my life. And I wanted it so bad. I told him to shut up, cranked the music loud. It was Nirvana. And I turned to tell him what I thought of his crappy university and his stupid date, and I ran a red light and into an eighteen-wheel trailer.”

  “Oh God, Brand.”

  “He died on impact. And I walked away without a scratch. The doctors said that it was because I’d already had my tragedy with the busted knee, but I knew. I was being punished. I went home, packed up my things and joined the army the next week.”

  “And?”

  He sighed. He didn’t know if he owed her the rest of the story. “I studied pre-law for them. At Oxford. Because my entrance tests scores were off-the charts or something. Apparently, Colin hadn’t been the only genius in the family. So I did Oxford and it was too tame, so I asked for an assignment.”

  Akira murmured thickly, “Of course, you had.”

  “They trained me in Specialized Combat and all sorts of demolitions strategies, electronic surveillance and made me a damn good soldier, and I served in a Special Forces Unit for six years.”

  “Then?”

  “Aren’t we finished?”

  “Are we?”

  “Alright.” Brand nodded. “I gave up my commission when all my friends got blown up in Yemen. An internal skirmish. And when I came back to Canberra, there was nobody to bury them. We were unrecognized by our country, because when we’d been busy fighting the good fight, the government had been cutting down on defense budgets and our military branch got severed. We weren’t informed. So I came back, resigned and put my services for hire.”

  “You mean, like a mercenary?” There was no condemnation in her. Just curiosity.

  “In the crudest form, yes.” Brand sounded so cold, so alone. “I am that, I guess. I work security which includes bodyguard work and electronic surveillance and every form of protection. For governments and dictators and corporations, basically, anybody able to match my price. Now I have a team of trained professionals working for me.”

  “And of course, you kill women and children on a daily basis in your line of work.” She said it without rancor.

  “Akira.”

  “You really think I am completely dumb, don’t you? Or you think I need some kind of warning off, from you,” Akira spoke without any heat. “Brandon, I’ve seen you in action. Three hours after we met, when you saved me from a minor explosion, I was sure you were into all sorts of dangerous things. I just didn’t know what.”

  “I have done things. For money. Just for the money. Hard, ugly, brutal things.”

  “And because it’s right. Tell me you haven’t killed somebody who didn’t need to be.”

  “That’s not the point.” He was getting angry again, and he’d just promised himself he would be patient. He would answer her questions and that would be that. End of conversation. End of story.

  But of course, it was never going to be that easy.

  “It is so the point. Taking a human life is the highest sin there is. And not because we have all kinds of Holy Scripture that says so. So tell me, in all good conscience that you have killed people just because somebody paid you?” Akira was intractable.

  ~~~~~~

  “No,” he conceded reluctantly. “I tried to avoid situations where innocents were harmed. But sometimes, it can't be helped, can it?”

  His mind winged back to one of his earlier merc missions in Chad, Africa. After a while, the places started to blur together. Until only the faces remained. The faces of the dead and the gone.

  He’d known that children, hardly boys, were being used as soldiers, but he’d never had to face one of them. Then in Chad, one night, their team had been overtaken by a group of twenty boys, the oldest of them couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

  These boys had been armed to the back teeth - Kalashnikovs, hand grenades and a piss-poor attitude towards life brought on by hard circumstances.

  His team had held on for as long as possible. But in the end, it had been kill or be killed.

  In a career that comprised regrets and death, those boys’ deaths were the ones that weighed most on his conscience. He still woke up with sweat pouring down his back, while hearing the screams of little boys dying in machine gun fire.

  Yes, the facts of life were hard and ugly and brutal.

  Her voice intruded on his reverie.

  “No, it can't. And while I didn’t know you back when you were a cocky gunfighter, I am reasonably sure that whatever you did, you did because your back was to the wall. Not because you enjoyed it. And certainly not for the money,” Akira said simply.

  Brand turned his head sideways then, and she did too. She’d managed to shock him with her response. Verbal and non-verbal.

  “You’re very weird, you know that?”

  “I know I am, but why do you think so?”

  “Because. Most people would either condemn me out of hand, which my parents and Melissa did. Or romanticize what I do, which some of my girlfriends have. You just take it on the nose and come to conclusions about my character without having the first clue as to what you’re talking about.”

  She understood the empathy that sneaked through her when he mentioned his estrangement from his family. But not the jealousy and anger at the thought of him with other women.

  He wasn’t hers to begin with, so she had no stake here. Or so she told herself.

  “Brand, my mother’s main ambition in life for me is to get me married to some upcoming politician or investment banker or scion of industry. And breed little politicians or bankers or scions. She doesn’t understand the dangers or the necessity of my job or its value. Believe me when I say, I know where you’re coming from.”

  When he said nothing, she continued in the quietest, bravest voice ever. “I know there is nothing romantic about what we do. Nothing wrong in it either. Because, the simple truth is, someone has to do the job. And in this case, it’s me. It’s you. It’s us. Whether you want to see it or not.”

  Brand was saved from replying because the Jeep jerked to a halt finally and they were almost thrown out of the vehicle with the force of impact.

  Time, she knew, was up.

  Thirty

  “I hate this,” Akira said, for the twentieth time, while she prowled the room that she’d been shoved into about four hours ago.

  She’d been blindfolded the minute the Jeep had stopped and wrenched away from Brand because guns had been trained on them, the entire time.

  A female someone had taken one of her arms, and nudged her up a steep path or hill, she wasn’t sure, and they’d walked for about twenty minutes. It was hard going, with Akira falling down a lot.

  They’d finally stopped somewhere, and the female someone had shoved her in through a door. Akira had stopped asking questions when the female someone had hit her on the cheek with the gun she carried for the third time.

  They weren’t hard bruises, not the violence she’d seen in the leader’s eyes, but they were effective enough to shut her up.

  Once inside the structure, safe house, whatever, the female someone had made Akira strip off and tossed her new clothes. A flimsy cotton skirt and a tank top. Hardly attire that would be useful while mounting a full-scale attack on guerrillas toting guns.

  She didn’t know where Brand was. She hadn’t heard any gunshots, but then again, knife wounds could cause death too. A hundred different things could.

  She’d been shoved into a small room, about ten by ten, the blindfold ripped from her and all her other restraints gone
as well. Not that she could do much in her current situation.

  Moonlight pouring in from the high-ceiling circular window showed her the contents of the room, such as they were.

  An old-fashioned oil lamp illuminated the room. A scarred wooden table, etched with markings. The single bed, full of white wooly stuffing coming out from the mattress, and she’d rather die than spend a minute there. Also, the john was a wooden bowl with a pull-chain flush that didn’t work.