by Shamim Sarif
“It’s smashed. And your number is in it.”
“Smashed? How?”
She hesitates. “Listen, can you come over to my place? Something is happening but I can’t figure out what.”
Before we hang up, Riya gives me her home address. Hala refuses to let me go there alone in case Riya is in trouble or being coerced into something.
“Well, it’s better she doesn’t see us together,” I say.
“I know,” Hala replies. “You can go in without me. I’ll wait outside in case you get into trouble.”
While she waits, Hala will update the team on the developments with Sunil. I’m doubtful that what we saw is enough to press charges against him. Who knows what extracurricular work a police detective can get up to in this city without consequences? But Sunil’s late-night bonfire still felt like it involved getting rid of evidence.
I chew on all this while Hala does the driving. Nighttime softens the edges of Mumbai. Small fairy lights wind around temples and trees. Naked lightbulbs illuminate men taking cups of tea or liquor at street stalls. Car headlights sweep past the prone bodies of the homeless lying under scraps of tent on the street. I look away. There never seems to be a time when the city is completely asleep, but it’s getting late enough that at least some of the main roads are not so jammed with cars. It doesn’t take long to reach Riya’s home—a long, thin apartment block in Andheri West. Hala pulls the car into a driveway that leads up to the block and parks up by the entrance to an underground garage that seems to serve its residents.
“Switch on your comms if you need me,” she tells me. “I’ll be here.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Keep your doors locked.”
“Are you afraid for me, or the idiot who tries to mug me?” she says, with a glimmer of a smile.
I smile back and close the door.
Coming into the building foyer, I find only a bored-looking porter downstairs. It’s easy to walk briskly past him and head into the elevators, where I follow Riya’s earlier instructions to go to the tenth floor. She opens the door almost as soon as I knock, as if she’s been standing around waiting. Behind her, the television plays some American superhero show. For a moment, I just take Riya in. In jeans and a soft green shirt, she looks fine, unhurt, not jittery. I feel the fear and tension that I’ve been carrying around all night drain out of me.
“Well, listen,” I say, coming inside. “Thanks for sending me over to a morgue while you hung out at home and binge-watched trash TV.”
I smile and she laughs but then winces, doubling over in pain.
“Don’t make me laugh,” she breathes. She straightens up, slowly, her face creased with pain.
“What happened?” I ask, shocked. “Riya?”
“I’ll explain.” Walking gingerly, she leads me into a galley kitchen, where a kettle is just starting to boil on the stovetop. She reaches up to get cups off a shelf, but she stops mid-movement—even that is too much for her. I grab the cups, switch off the stove to kill the insistent whistling of the kettle, and take her arm gently.
“What happened?” I ask again.
In reply, she lifts up her shirt and I flinch. Her stomach and torso are covered with red marks—early bruises, by the looks of them. I’ve suffered so many over the past year or two that I’ve gotten to know these marks intimately well. The bruises look like they were inflicted very recently, no more than an hour or two ago.
“Let’s get you to a doctor,” I say. “What if you broke a rib?”
She waves off my concern. “No, I broke a rib once. This is not like that. I think I’m fine.”
“Well, you need ice,” I tell her.
“I’ve been using the frozen veg,” she says, indicating a defrosting packet of sweet corn on the countertop. There’s a small freezer on top of the fridge behind me. I pop some cubes out of a plastic tray, wrapping them in a damp tea towel. She takes it and holds it under her shirt.
“Who did this to you?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I was home, and it was driving me crazy, being stuck here, not being able to question those men we arrested at the lab. Anyway—late in the afternoon, I called in to speak to Maneesh, one of my colleagues.”
She putters about while she talks, going for the kettle. I take it from her and make some tea, while she continues her story:
“Maneesh is a good guy, we get on. I asked him if these men had confessed anything. And he told me they were dead. Both of them. He didn’t know much more than that, so I told him why I thought it was important to the case. I asked him to find out more.”
She leads me back out to the living room, where I leave our cups of tea on top of a day-old newspaper that sits folded on the dark, polished coffee table.
“And then?” I ask.
“He called me back, right before I messaged you. He’d overheard Sunil taking a call from the police commissioner, and he thought Sunil was going to the morgue. And so I decided to go over there myself and find out what was going on. Confront Sunil if I had to. But I never made it. I sent you the location pin to start with, thinking that I’d call you on my way, to explain. But when I went down to the basement garage, as soon as I got near my car, two guys jumped me. One put a hood on me and held my arms, the other one punched until I collapsed on the ground.”
I feel sickened at the idea. “Did they do anything else? Hurt you . . . in any other way?”
“No, nothing like that,” she says, but her eyes don’t meet mine. It feels like she’s holding something back, but I plow on with questions.
“Did they say anything?”
“They warned me to stay off the case. Or I would die.” She shrugs. “That was all they said.”
“In English?”
“In Hindi,” she says.
“Did you see them?”
“No. I mean, the guy punching me had gray sneakers on—I could see his feet, looking down, where the hood opened.”
We both know that’s not much to go on.
“What happened at the morgue? Did you find anything?” Riya asks. I recap my encounter with Sunil, both by the furnace and later in the car.
“So everything he said holds up?” she muses.
“It seems that way,” I admit. “But there’s still something rotten going on here. I just can’t figure out what it is.”
Again, her eyes drop, away from mine. I pass her some tea and she holds the cup. There’s a long pause. We both watch slim tendrils of steam curl off the top of the liquid and disappear into the air. She sips at the tea and shifts a little.
“What are you keeping from me?” I ask, out of the blue.
She looks at me. “What?”
“When I asked you if they did anything else to you . . . it felt like you were hiding something.”
She puts the cup down and pushes back her hair, out of her eyes. Then she ties it back. Then she gives all this attention to a loose button on one of her shirt cuffs. Lots of fidgeting and zero eye contact. My gut fills with misgiving.
“It’s not what you are thinking,” she says. “They didn’t really touch me other than the punches.”
“Then what?” I ask.
She gets up and opens a window, even though just that movement must be painful, then sits back down beside me. Outside, thunder simmers, crouched and grumbling. The scent of coming rain hangs there between us; metallic, intense. Then, suddenly, she reaches over me to switch on another lamp, and the light is soft and warm, and the sudden, fresh scent of her is right there, all around me. I don’t know how it happens, but I just lean across and touch my lips to her neck. Her skin is warm and soft against my mouth, and I close my eyes and kiss her again, just there. Riya’s hand comes up to caress my face, to look at me, and her eyes go to my mouth. Without thinking about it, I move closer, toward her mouth, to kiss her.
Riya pulls away, fast.
I sit back, away from her, wishing that the ground would open up and just swallow me whole. Anything to get me out of there.
�
��I’m sorry,” I say, flustered. “I’m an idiot. I don’t know what I was thinking. . . .”
Her hand goes to mine, taking hold of my fingers.
“It’s not that, Jessie,” she says. “Really, it’s not. It’s just that—they did do something else to me.” She reaches for her cup but her hand shakes so much that she puts it back down.
“They gave me an injection,” she continues. “That was when they told me I would die if I didn’t drop the case. I don’t want to kiss you, Jessie, because I don’t know what I have, how it’s transmitted, or when it will kill me.”
24
THE SORROW IN RIYA’S EYES, the belief she has in her impending death, breaks my heart. My first thought is that she needs an immediate blood test. But there’s no reply at the lab, and so I take the liberty of calling Ajay on his cell phone. He answers sleepily and listens while I explain my concern.
“We have the blood you both provided to us when you brought in the vial. But Riya will need a new test, since this just happened,” Ajay says. “My people are working, but the technicians don’t answer the phones at night. I’ll come over, let you in, and we can take her blood for analysis. For safety, we should get yours checked again too.”
Over our comms, I explain the plan to Hala. She heads home while Riya and I take a taxi to the lab, where Ajay arrives just minutes after us. He takes Riya through the whole decontamination ritual again just to be super safe. Once our blood tests are done, I drop Riya home and finally, around 1 a.m., I make it back to my hotel.
Up in my room, I’m too keyed up to sleep. I run a bath and try soaking in it, breathing, trying to release the tension in my neck and shoulders. Getting into bed, I close my eyes, which are gritty with tiredness, but sleep evades me like a shadow I can never put my hand on. I pull up the sheets and turn onto my back. Thin slats of streetlight filter through the blinds on the windows, painting bars of pale yellow onto the ceiling above me.
I check my phone again, hoping for some word, some outcome. Ajay promised that his team would work around the clock on those samples we brought in from India Laboratory, and also on the next round of blood tests for the girls and now Riya. But those tests involve advanced equipment and they will take time. Staring at my phone won’t make that time go faster. What does come up, though, is a message from Amber, on my Athena handset. It’s marked green, meaning it’s not super urgent, but I call her up on our video link anyway, wanting something to think about other than Riya, the schoolgirls, and what might be floating around in their bloodstreams. Amber answers straightaway, and Li comes into the picture, settling into the chair beside her. In front of them both are numerous boxes of Amber’s favorite Thai takeout.
“So, those contacts Jingo gave you are indeed relatively low level. But terribly helpful,” Amber says. “One of the lawyers is Muslim—and Muslims form a minority in India but a majority in Pakistan. That made me focus on him and, sure enough, he has a bigger office in Pakistan, in Lahore. And that office has links to both Imran and a General Khan in the Pakistani army.”
It feels like progress, but I can’t see what kind of progress yet. “How does that help us?” I ask.
“I won’t bore you with the details,” says Amber.
“First time in history,” I cut in.
“Very amusing,” she continues. “Without real evidence, we’re working on the theory that this general could well be one of the top people in Family First. So far it’s panning out.”
“Can we bring him down?”
“If our investigation continues to stack up, then yes.”
Li chips in. “But, Jessie, that would take weeks and months, waiting for local governmental and secret service process to complete. That still leaves us vulnerable to Family First in India, especially if they elect a candidate like Jingo, and especially if his medical company is involved in something underhand.”
“Got it. So you want me to go full steam ahead,” I confirm.
“Yes, but I’ve reviewed your sleep data for the past week,” Li adds. “It’s highly unsatisfactory. I recommend you try to meditate now and get a few hours of quality sleep.”
“I’ll do my best,” I reply, resisting the urge to salute.
Li makes it sound so easy. I hang up and spend some time riling myself into annoyance at Li’s placid logic, which leaves pretty much no room for emotion, tension, or stress. Then I try using a meditation app on my phone. I remember doing a lot of deep breathing but I don’t remember falling asleep until an insistent knocking on my door wakes me. I force my eyes open against the bright sunshine pushing its way in through the window blinds. Shuffling to the door while grasping for the hotel robe, I open up for Peggy to sweep in. She looks so perfectly put together that I can only imagine she’s been getting ready since dawn.
“The lab has something for us, but they won’t discuss it on the phone,” she says. “Can you be ready in ten minutes? We’ll go over there together.”
Clutching an iPad, Ajay is standing outside the lab door to greet us as soon as we arrive. If he wasn’t wearing a different suit and tie, I would have sworn he’d just stayed there all night, standing to attention and anticipating our arrival. It strikes me that I’ve yet to meet an Indian who believes in nine-to-five work hours.
Peggy greets him warmly and we all move at a fast clip through the foyer and into an elevator made of glass that rises up through the building, giving us a cool view of the labs that are arranged out from the center of the building like spokes on a wheel.
We emerge onto the top floors, a light-flooded oasis of white corridors. A younger man meets us as we leave the elevator. He holds open a lab door and we enter to find an impressive array of equipment lining the counters, and high ceilings studded with LED lights.
“My name is Raj,” the doctor introduces himself. “Ajay asked me to oversee this case and put myself at your disposal,” he adds. “I’ve also heard personally from the Indian ambassador in London that I should make myself fully available.”
Good old Peggy and her contacts. Never more than two degrees of separation from someone useful and, we hope, trustworthy. It feels like Raj is looking for us to reciprocate on the introductions, but Peggy just thanks him effusively and once she is finished, we both watch him, waiting for information. He gets on with it.
“The vial you brought in from India Laboratory—by the way, not a real lab, with any real credentials—contains a toxin.”
“What kind of toxin?” Peggy asks.
“It’s a neurotoxin. But it is made very difficult to detect because it is so tiny. You see, the toxin is encapsulated in a nanoparticle,” he explains. “This has the effect of making it untraceable with regular blood tests. Even the centrifuge is not stable enough on particles so small. But we used an electron-transparent support on the vials you brought in, and it showed up.”
He turns to a desktop screen and jiggles a mouse around to wake it up. What he shows us is a computer-generated image that looks like an egg.
“The toxin seems to be a virus, and a virus generally looks like this—a shell with DNA inside. The shell is sticky. It seems that whoever made this concentrated the virus into a nanoparticle to make it more potent.”
Peggy’s worried eyes flick to mine, then back to Raj.
“Are the girls carrying it?” Peggy asks him.
Raj looks at Ajay, who steps forward, with his iPad at the ready. On it is a list of names and, I presume, test results.
“I am sorry to say that the girls are all carrying it,” Ajay confirms. “When we knew what we were looking for, we knew how to find it. The good news is that your blood test was clear, Jessie.”
“Thank God,” Peggy breathes. But I’m not relieved.
“What about Riya?” I ask.
Ajay hesitates and my heart sinks. “She has it too.”
Take a breath, Jessie. Think.
“So why aren’t the girls sick, if they’re carrying a powerful virus?” My voice sounds unnatural in the unfamiliar atmo
sphere of the lab.
“Good question,” replies Raj. “The protein moiety that allows the virus to work is currently ‘hidden’ by a molecular structure attached to the nanoparticle.”
Seriously? How is it helping to talk to us like we’re advanced medical researchers? I look at Peggy in frustration, and Peggy gently asks Raj if he could explain it in a simpler way. He apologizes, embarrassed, then quickly goes on:
“Basically,” he says, “there is a structure sitting on the nanoparticle that is preventing it from passing through the blood-brain barrier. That’s the border that protects the brain from foreign substances.”
“So, the girls are safe?” I ask.
“At this moment, yes. Right now, the virus is dormant. Until the structure is displaced. That would expose the moiety, so the nanoparticle could pass the blood-brain barrier.”
“And then?” Peggy asks.
“And then—the toxin would attack the brain. There is no cure. And it would probably work very quickly. Within seconds. Possibly a minute or two.” He hesitates. “Quicker would be better. It would be a traumatic way to go.”
Peggy places her hand on the lab bench behind her, looking for support. For a moment, a tense silence settles on the four of us, there in the clean, white lab. I pull out my phone and show Raj the pictures that I took of the bodies outside the furnace. Even he blanches at the sight of them.
“Could it look like this? The virus attack?”
He nods. “It’s hard to know the exact symptoms, but yes. That looks like something brain-related.”
Peggy paces the room. “You said that the protein thing . . .”
“Moiety,” says Raj.
“Thank you,” says Peggy. “You said it needs to be displaced for the virus to work. What could cause that displacement?”
“Any one of hundreds of triggers,” he says.
I think about the two guys who I just watched get incinerated at the morgue. Somehow, they were “triggered” with perfect timing before they could give any information to the police. And now over a hundred girls and Riya are exposed to probably the same thing. My hand slams down onto the desk before me, hard enough to make Raj jump.
