Game of Greed

by Charlotte Larsen

  De Lingua smiles.

  Far too soon, she’s back in her bungalow. On her own. The disappointment is so intense she can hardly bear it. She’s missed an opportunity, however slim, for escape. And now she has given up her single protection: her seeming unawareness of de Lingua’s killings. She knows he knows. And she needs to get away. Now.

  But even though the dinner had been a farce, a lie covering an ugly, stinking truth, at least something had happened. She is tired of playing the game of remembering her life, of conducting conversations in her mind. She is even tired of meditating. It was one thing to go into a silent retreat voluntarily. It is quite another to be forced to do so. She’s tired of waiting. And she knows that, at the very least, she has stirred the pot sufficiently to create some kind of action. Or, perhaps more conveniently, to force herself to act.

  She goes outside to sit in the lounger. The night is balmy, dark, with a dense scattering of stars. A beautiful night. A night to reclaim her freedom.

  It’s past midnight when Jo calls the household manager on the in-house telephone. “I need somebody to come by and get rid of the bugs. The bed is crawling with them! It’s really quite disgusting!” She does her best hysterical woman voice, guessing that all the staff sleeps together in rather small quarters, and hoping that the valet will intercept the call and come himself. She guesses that he has been waiting for that call since she arrived. Waiting for her to give in, to summon him. And now she does.

  She has been debating the pros and cons of using the yellow oleander seed or attempting to stun him by hand. But the oleander seed is harder to control, and she doesn’t want a dead man on her hands. She just needs him to be unconscious for a few minutes. She’s confident in her ability to take him out. That is if he shows up. She has done it a couple of times in the past, during the strenuous training she underwent years ago, where taking out people for shorter or longer periods of time was considered an essential skill. She wonders how much de Lingua and his staff know about her. She doubts they have unearthed the intensity and variety of her training, if for no other reason than it took place in a facility about which very few people know. And her absence from work at the time had been covered with a six-month stint in a private hospital to recuperate from a tropical disease, unfortunately, in quarantine. And even if they knew, their guards must be down by now since she hasn’t done anything but lose her balance one single time.

  She has already collected a handful of ants and other little bugs that are now quite happily roaming her pristine, white bed. Time to play the helpless female.

  Minutes later, she hears steps outside the wall, and the heavy door slowly swings open. He has come. And he’s alone. She judged him right.

  She’s wearing a short silk kimono, one of several provided in the closet. Just before he arrives, she slips out of her underwear. The valet enters the bedroom, and she points frantically to the bugs now crawling all over the bed.

  “It’s horrible. I don’t understand. The boys always used to spray this for vermin. But they must have forgotten to do it today. I hate bugs.” Her voice has gone up, shrilly, nervously. She acts distressed, throwing her arms around. He just stands there. His eyes follow her every move. “Look! Look!” She points to the bed, agitated.

  After a moment, she lets her arms drop to her sides and takes a step closer to him, making sure her kimono falls slightly open, revealing a glimpse of her breasts. She’s standing right in front of him. Defenseless, arms at her sides. Allowing her lust for him to fill her, to seep through her pores, to scent her sweat. Her legs slightly apart, she’s willing him to touch her. To break. She looks him right in the eyes. “I hate the thought of them crawling all over my body,” her voice soft now, throaty. She moves slowly away from him. Needs to get her back against the wall for support. He follows her, his eyes never leaving hers. But even though his eyes still hold the hatred of her, his mouth is slightly open, and she knows she‘s won. It’s just a matter of minutes. She feels the wall against her spine; leans back, stretches her arms to the sides, her legs spread wide apart, feet pointing forward.

  And then he’s at her. One hand cups a breast, another pushes hard between her legs. He’s pressing himself against her, squashing her, kissing her. She kisses him back, bends her knees slightly, and concentrates all her attention in her abdomen, tightening, tightening, tightening. Till suddenly, her right arm flies up, the side of her hand hitting him hard at the base of his neck. His body slumps to the floor.

  She pulls out the cell phone he’s carrying with his keys on a strap around his neck and sends the text she has rehearsed for the past several hours to Francis, giving the directions she’s been able to reconstruct and an overview of the security situation. She ends the text with the words, “Please, come get me. Soon!” Once she has sent the message, she deletes it from the “sent” box and returns the phone to its holder on his chest. She knows full well that a thorough investigation will uncover the text but hopes that neither he nor anybody else will think of doing so.

  She straightens the valet’s body out on the floor, lifts his sarong, and goes down on him. As she feels him stirring, she lifts herself onto him and slides down with a pleasure she doesn’t want to feel. He soon comes around. A confused look on his face, she maneuvers his body on top, forcing him to concentrate on what he’s doing. He quickly regains control.

  She knows he will come every night until Francis gets her out. She just hopes it will be soon.

  Chapter 19

  Dhammakarati is interrupted in his early morning practice rather abruptly by a young, flustered monk, who explains excitedly that he’s needed in reception. Right now. Very few people have the authority to break his meditation, Francis being one of them. And, not surprisingly, Francis is indeed on the secure line in the little soundproof room behind reception.

  Francis doesn’t waste time on small talk. His voice is uncharacteristically cold and measured. “I just received a text from Jo. I gather that she has intercepted somebody’s phone, which likely means she’s in even greater danger now. She provides some directions. Do you have a map of the island nearby?”

  “Yes.” Dhammakarati gets up and stands in front of a large map of Sri Lanka on which pins of various colors indicate monasteries, friendly groups, less friendly groups, Tamil attacks, and so forth. “What do we know?” he asks, his voice matching the precision, although not the coldness, of Francis’s.

  Francis gives the directions that Jo texted, word by word. Dhammakarati doesn’t need long to localize the area where Jo is held. “We have been looking in the wrong direction altogether,” he says. “While we have been searching the North Western Province, where de Lingua’s family owns most of the estates, and even going over the Central Province quite carefully, he has taken her to the south coast. Near Tangalle, by the sounds of it. It’s the most touristy area on the whole island. Except, of course, the Tigers and the tsunami have taken care of that. But then, it has always been an excellent practice to hide things in the most obvious places.”

  Both men pore over the map, each on his respective continent. Francis breaks the silence first. “If she’s indeed in or near Tangalle, wouldn’t it be viable to do reconnaissance by a small plane?”

  “That’s a good idea,” Dhammakarati says. “There are frequent tourist trips by helicopters and seaplanes. Some use set routes, but it is not uncommon for wealthy tourists to charter their own.” He pauses. “We might want to do both. We can’t go over the same ground more than once, so I suggest a well-planned helicopter ride first, where hopefully we might be able to locate the property and then take a seaplane along the coast of that area.”

  “I’ll organize it,” Francis says, for once truly grateful for his financial circumstances. “But make sure whatever images you pick up are transmitted directly to the operation room in Copenhagen. I can be at the monastery in less than seven hours, and you can’t do anything except reconnaissance before morning anyway. Too few hours of daylight left.”


  Dhammakarati says in his slow, deliberate way, “I’ll get a team together. We’ll have just enough time to go along the coastline and back before the sun sets. Not an uncommon thing for tourists to do, watching the sun set over the horizon of the sea. And if we bring some of the good gear, we’ll be able to recount and map every movement on that stretch of coast. But we might need to do some further reconnaissance after the plane rides but before attacking. Depends entirely on the visibility and how precise an intel we can gather. We’ll only have one shot at getting her out. So, we need to get it right.”

  Francis exhales forcibly. “I have been waiting for this! It’s a relief to know she’s all right. Go get her, Dhamma!”

  Dhammakarati answers solemnly, “I will.”

  As the sun is nearing its descent across the sea, the helicopter cruises slowly along the coastline, low enough to skirt the treetops. The words emblazoned on the belly and side of the helicopter in garish blues and reds are the best cover they could hope for: “Rickson’s Fun Rides.” Its passengers are dressed in colorful Hawaiian shirts or T-shirts with visible logos, caps, and sunglasses. They are stereotypical tourists from the American Midwest. Not that there have been many of them since the tsunami and the proliferation of Tiger attacks all across the island.

  Dhammakarati has assembled a small team of highly trained warrior monks local men, who, for various reasons, have not found sufficient solace in the way of the Buddha, being too intelligent, too gifted, and much too bent on stopping the suppression and tyranny in their country to accept a life spent in meditation. That these men were picked up by bando masters traveling the island, and not by the Tamil Tigers’ recruitment officers, is no more than a coincidence. Men like this fight for a cause and they fight well as long as they can justify the cause to themselves; Tigers or bando is a matter of degree in a gray zone in which survival is the goal.

  Apart from the tourist gear, these men carry equipment capable of recording every sound and movement, every leaf on every tree, every open window, and every conversation carried out in a normal voice within a three-hundred-yard perimeter of the helicopter. All data is stored on a number of laptops aboard the chopper and fed real-time to the monastery’s communication unit, to Francis’s jet, and to the research team in Copenhagen.

  The coastline of the Indian Ocean is laid out below them like a pretty picture of blue waters, stretches of white beaches, and dense greenery. Dhammakarati is scanning the area southwest of Tangalle, where a secluded, crescent-shaped, sandy beach is set among coconut groves, approximately ten kilometers from Tangalle Village. Buildings are scattered throughout the hills, the nearest being at least twenty minutes by car from the main road.

  From the plane, Francis is doing the same. Except he’s viewing not only the images transmitted from Dhammakarati’s helicopter ride but comparing them with highly detailed satellite maps forwarded by Thomas.

  “This looks like it!” Francis says over the cell.

  Dhammakarati confirms it. “Isolated, yet close enough to a domestic airstrip. Secluded on three sides by forests and right on the sea. Easy to protect. We need to go in there when it gets dark and get a better idea of the layout before we make our move. My team is ready.”

  All that Francis says is, “Okay. Be in touch. I’ll be waiting for your call.” It is no longer his game.

  It is nearly three, and most people are deep asleep in the small town of Tangalle and its surroundings. Dhammakarati and his team are wide awake, waiting in a closed van in the vicinity of the estate. Two of them made the rounds of the estate earlier, soundlessly and invisible. In a little under one hour, they covered every bungalow and building and mapped out which bungalows seemed occupied and which did not, judging by the positions of the guards. They have a pretty good idea where Jo and Wharton are being kept since two bungalows each have four guards positioned on the three sides of the houses. They know the bungalow of de Lingua by its size and decoration and confirm that he sleeps alone with a single guard outside his front door. They have located the servant quarters and determined how many there are. They are fairly certain that the only weapons would be handguns and knives. But they plan not to give anybody the opportunity to use either.

  The men know what they are doing, and they are ready.

  The team is dressed in black cotton, Ninja-style. Wide-legged pants are laced tightly under the knees and around the ankles, so as not to catch on things. Short kimonos are wrapped tightly across the chest. A piece of cloth is tied around the head, knotted in the back, leaving only eyes and nose free. Gauntlets in a tougher material cover forearms and the backs of hands. They wear soft boots, the special tabis, with one toe separate to ensure maximum grip and soundless movement. Unless they are confronted by someone closer than a few meters, they won’t be spotted. They are trained to stay out of sight, to move soundlessly, and to attack uncompromisingly. They move with the stealth of the cat, unseen, unpredictable, and completely without ego during the times of attack. They have been trained to silence foes and render them unconscious, but only to kill as the very last measure. Their skill in rendering any human defenseless in the space of seconds and without a sound is next to none.

  Dhammakarati finally gives the signal at 4:00 a.m. sharp. Eight black-clad men silently spread out in the direction of the estate, shadows crossing the moonless ground.

  Francis has finally arrived and is now pacing the communications room in the monastery, keeping an eye on a wall of monitors. The research team is working frantically in Copenhagen, enlarging the images downloaded from Dhammakarati’s surveillance and searching for clues on Jo’s exact location: for guards, for weapons, or in short for anything that might help the rescue operation. Even though the information is coming to him nearly as soon as the team assembles it, Francis knows that whatever the research team might come up with, the rescue team on-site has far more precise intelligence, and there is really nothing he or the Copenhagen team can do to help out. All he can do is wait for Dhammakarati’s call. Still, it eases his anxiety a little to keep busy. Passive waiting is intolerable.

  Why did it take us so long to find her? Francis wonders. How could I be so stupid as to only look in one direction, rather than spreading the net out wide?

  Thomas pops up on one of the monitors and interrupts his thoughts, but not his foul mood. “Why did nobody think to check out the south coast?” Francis snaps. “We have never left any of our operatives out of sight for so long. How the hell did that happen?” He continues in this vein for a while, shouting at a man sitting on the other side of the world. Shouting meaningless accusations, ranting, enraged like an injured animal.

  Thomas doesn’t answer.

  Half an hour passes. Francis still paces the length of the room. One monitor shows Thomas sitting casually by a table, tapping a pencil against the surface. If he’s anxious, he does a good job hiding it. Francis lashes out at the switch, sending the image of Thomas into oblivion.

  Another half hour passes. Francis feels he’s about to explode, that he can take it no more. The level of frustration isn’t like anything he has experienced before. For all his well-developed cynicism and rationality, the heady mix of guilt and desire, fear and hope, and most of all powerlessness is almost killing him. A small part of his mind realizes that nobody has ever seen him lose it like this and he wonders briefly what Thomas makes of it. Flashes of images pass through his mind. Images of Jo, of de Lingua, of Dhammakarati. Somehow, these key players are at the center of the universe, while he, the puppet master, the great strategist, the mind behind the operations, is obsolete. At best, he is a spectator to the drama unfolding. He recognizes that this is exactly what he’s always feared: being left out at the crucial moment. This is not just something that is happening now; it is the very drama of his life, the thread that runs through it. Francis may set the scene, call the players, direct, and instruct, but once the ball is rolling, he’s no longer in the game.

  Is this acceptable? Is this a worthy life? Is this all
there is for him? Being instrumental in pulling the strings and yet, when it really matters, when life and death and ideals and love are at stake, he’s just stranded on a beach, belly-up, gasping for air, useless to anybody. Of course, his team makes sure to treat him as if he’s indispensable. But he knows better. They know better. When the shit hits the fan, he’s just excess baggage.

  He chose this lifestyle freely, although without knowing what he took on. But who ever knows that when embarking on his or her destiny? You plan for the best and hope to survive. Francis was not far into his twenties when he realized that the life of a playboy was unsatisfactory, the realm of ordinary business was excessively dull, and that a life of happiness or even contentment was beyond his reach. It wasn’t a particular event that produced this insight. Rather, it was a slowly building realization that somehow just matured one day. But it wasn’t until a late-night conversation with his mentor, an old friend of the family, that he knew he needed a cause. Be it women, war, ideals, politics, or aesthetics, a man needs something to focus his energy upon and use his intellect to achieve. A man needs something to fight for, the older man had said.

  The cynical side of Francis knew that the older man was right and that it didn’t matter what the object was, as long as he would be able to generate sufficient passion and dedication. He knew then that it isn’t the cause itself that creates a meaningful life but the enthusiasm one brings to it. Then one morning the idea presented itself to him, and he never looked back.

  But now doubt has presented itself. Here in his regal isolation, with Angela in New York, his research team in Copenhagen, Jo presumably held by de Lingua, and his team of warrior monks on the way to crash de Lingua’s little party, he’s all alone. Suddenly, Francis finds the meaning of life very, very hard to locate. Even if he intellectually can recite his lifelong mission of battling corporate greed, he certainly can’t feel the significance of it right now.