SEVEN
The next morning, I sit outside Shanti’s house in a fresh rental and contemplate how I should approach the girl and her uncle, Shivam Garuda, who appears to be her sole guardian. Since I don’t have time to cultivate a friendship with the girl, a blunt introduction seems best. I have a fake FBI badge that my contacts in the agency will back up, should the uncle call and check on me. I’m now Special Agent Jessica Reese.
The house is small, with at best two bedrooms, in a poor section of town. I have arrived early enough to catch the uncle before he leaves for work. I don’t imagine Shanti will answer many questions without him present. According to Marko’s file, she’s alone from nine in the morning until six at night every day. Her injuries keep her from attending school.
I do a sweep of the area before I knock. There don’t appear to be any assassins near the house. Why should there be? IIC has assigned the job to Marko, the best hit man in the country. When I do knock, Shanti’s uncle is quick to answer.
“May I help you?” Mr. Shivam Garuda is only forty-five but looks older. He’s extremely thin, to the point of malnutrition, with white hair and a bump on his spine that forces him to bend slightly forward.
“Hello. My name’s Jessica Reese. I’m with the FBI.”
I’m wearing a black pantsuit and skillfully applied makeup, both of which make me look at least in my mid-twenties. But it’s the tone of my voice, the way I flash my badge, my whole manner, that makes me appear older. Mr. Garuda studies my badge closely.
“What can I do for you?” he asks, guarded.
“I’m here to speak with your niece, Shanti. But I understand you’re her guardian and wouldn’t mind if you sat in on the questioning.”
“What is this about? Is Shanti in trouble?”
I nod sympathetically. “She may well be in trouble, but not with the U.S. government. Please, if I could come in and have a few minutes of your time, I think we might be able to help each other.”
My tone reeks of sincerity. Plus, I look harmless. He relaxes a notch and lets me in the house.
“Shanti is sleeping. Do you mind waiting a few minutes?”
“Not at all.”
“Tea would be nice. Thank you.”
He brings me up a cup of warm chai and heads for the back of the house. The taste brings back old memories. On the wall are paintings of Lord Krishna—as a child, with his mother Yashoda, and as an adult, playing his flute for the gopis. Of course, I knew from their names that the Garudas were probably Hindu, but it warms my heart to see they worship the same God as myself. If only they knew that I once met Krishna . . .
Mr. Garuda reappears a moment later. He looks uncomfortable. “My niece is getting dressed. She won’t be long. But I want to warn you—”
I interrupt gently. “I’m aware of her condition.”
He’s relieved I know but nevertheless nods sadly. “She was the prettiest girl.”
“I’m sure she was.” I pause. “Has she had reconstructive surgery?”
He gestures to his poor abode. “It’s all I pray for. But right now, there’s no money for doctors.”
“I understand.”
Shanti appears a few minutes later, wearing dark sunglasses and a simple white dress. In person, her disfigurement is even harder to bear. The acid did not just take the right eye but also her right nostril and a large portion of her right cheek. A large gap extends away from her mouth, revealing stained molars and a mass of scarred gum tissue.
Yet she doesn’t hesitate to take a step forward and shake my hand.
“My uncle says you are Special Agent Jessica Reese,” she says.
“Call me Jessica, please. You’re Shanti?”
“Yes.” She gestures. “Have a seat, make yourself at home. This is exciting for me. I watch X-Files reruns all the time, but I never dreamed that I would one day be visited by a real-life FBI agent.”
Like most educated Indians, her English is excellent, but unfortunately there is a faint hissing sound to Shanti’s words. It’s due to the large hole in her cheek, and perhaps nerve damage to her tongue. Otherwise, I’m sure, she would have a delightful voice. I vow right then I’ll get her the finest plastic surgeons in the land, once I know why the IIC wants her dead.
I chuckle at her remark. “This might surprise you, but that show is one of the reasons I became an FBI agent.”
“Have you been one long?” Mr. Garuda asks. I’ve done my best to make myself look older, but he’s sharp-sighted and no fool.
“I’m only two years out of the academy in Quantico. You may have heard of it. It’s back in Virginia. Before I graduated, our instructors used to joke that all the newbies would be sent off to Texas. It turned out I was the only one.”
“You must feel isolated,” Shanti said.
I shrug. “Sometimes.”
“Have you made any new friends?”
These are questions I should be asking her, the poor dear.
“None that I would take home to Mother,” I say with a smile. Then I change my tone, getting serious. “I should explain the purpose of my visit. I must warn you ahead of time it will shock you.”
“In a good way or a bad way?” Shanti asks innocently.
“I’m sorry, I wish I was here with good news.” I lift up the file I took from Marko’s house and pass it to her. “Shanti, can you read?” I ask.
“Yes. With these glasses on.”
“What is that you’re giving her?” Mr. Garuda asks.
“Once again, please brace yourself. This file was taken off a notorious hit man known to the FBI as Marko. He has a reputation as a killer for the Mob. But in this case, for reasons unknown to us, he’s been assigned to kill you, Shanti.”
Mr. Garuda gasps in fear, but Shanti remains remarkably calm.
“What did I do to him that he would want to kill me?” she asks.
“You misunderstand. He’s been hired by a third party to kill you. He’s a professional. He murders people for a living. He has no personal interest in you.”
Shanti holds up the picture. “This must have been taken recently.”
“How recently, do you think?” I ask.
“The dress I’m wearing in this photo—I only bought it last month.”
“Are you saying this Marko is going to come to our house?” Mr. Garuda demands.
I raise a hand. “There’s no danger of that. Marko has already been taken out of action. He won’t be harming anyone else. But we still have a problem. We don’t know who hired him to kill you.” I pause. “Do you have any idea why someone would want you dead, Shanti?”
She slowly shakes her head. “No. I mean, there’s Juna. He’s the one who . . .” She has trouble finishing the sentence.
“He’s the man you were engaged to?” I say carefully.
She nods. “But that was two years ago, in India. Juna’s a poor shopkeeper who makes his money rolling bibis all day.”
“Cigarettes?”
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“I’ve traveled in India. So you feel Juna is an unlikely suspect?”
“Yes.”
I turn to her uncle. “Mr. Garuda, do you have any enemies?”
“None that I know of.” He stops to wipe at his eyes. “I’m sorry, this is very disturbing. Shanti has been through so much, and to think there is someone out there who wants to hurt her again . . .”
Shanti strokes the man’s arm. “Don’t worry, Baba. The FBI is here to protect us. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
The girl’s calm courage impresses me.
“What Shanti says is true,” I say. “I’m going to assign a team of agents to this house so that Shanti will be guarded 24/7. Should a second contract be taken out on her life, no harm will come to her. Any professional hit man who approaches this house will quickly see how well she’s guarded and immediately leave town.”
“Why do you think there will be a second contract?” Mr. Garuda asks.
“Because they arrested the man who was supposed to kill me,” Shanti explains to him before turning to me. “Is that true, Jessica? Whoever wants me dead will just hire someone else?”
“Yes. Assuming they’re anxious to have you killed. And that appears likely given the fact they hired Marko at the start. Until he was caught, he was considered one of the deadliest hit men in the country.”
“I must be more important than I realized,” Shanti says.
“To someone,” I say. “We come back to our original question. Is there anyone you can think of that would want you dead?”
“There’s no one.” She gestures to her face. “Because of my injury, I seldom go out. Never mind enemies, I hardly have any friends.”
“Do you work, Shanti?”
She hesitates. “No.”
“You don’t have a part-time job that you might do from home?”
She glances toward her uncle. “There’s a small job I have, but I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
Mr. Garuda interrupts. “The company that employs her has a strict privacy policy. I’m sure you can understand.”
“On the contrary, I can’t think of a single American company that warns its employees not to talk about the firm they work for.” I pause. “We’re talking about IIC, aren’t we?”
Shanti and her uncle look surprised. “How do you know about them?” she asks.
“Let’s just say the FBI is very interested in them. In fact, we suspect IIC might be behind the contract on your life.”
“That’s impossible,” Mr. Garuda says. “They’re an investment firm. They have done nothing but help Shanti. I can’t believe they’d want to kill her. It makes no sense.”
“It makes no sense to me, either. But then, I don’t know what your niece does for IIC.” I pause. “How do they help you, Shanti?”
She hesitates. “They send me a check for one hundred dollars every month.”
“Why? Because you’re handicapped?”
“It has nothing to do with my face.” She stops and puts a hand to her wound. “At least, I don’t think it has anything to do with what Juna did to me.”
“Explain.”
She lowers her head. “It’s silly.”
“Tell me anyway.”
She raises her head, yet this time her eyes don’t go to me, but to one of the paintings of Krishna on the walls. She stares at it a long time before she answers.
“When Juna threw the acid in my face, the pain was unlike anything I had ever imagined. I felt as if someone was holding a blowtorch to my head. The burning wouldn’t stop, even when my friends washed away the acid. It just kept burning and burning. They took me to the doctor and he bandaged me and gave me pills for the pain, but still the burning stayed. I felt I would go mad. I couldn’t see then, nothing, and the doctor told me the blindness would be permanent. I didn’t know what to do. My mother and father—they felt sorry for me. Yet they also felt I had disgraced our family by refusing to marry Juna. My own father had the nerve to say that what Juna had done to me was my karma.”
“Damn him to the deepest hell,” Mr. Garuda whispers.
“Please, Baba, don’t curse. It doesn’t help.”
“He’s my brother, and I’ll curse him till the day I die.”
“He’s still my father. I have to respect him. I owe him that.”
“You owe him nothing. In this life or the next.”
It appears to be an old argument between them. Shanti shakes her head. “My whole life was pain and darkness. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t eat. I could barely drink. I thought I might die, and a part of me prayed for death. But then . . . this will be hard for you to understand.”
“Not at all. Then you started to pray to Krishna.”
She stared at me. “How did you know?”
“I pray to him as well.”
“How? I mean, why?”
“I’m not from around here, but that’s a long story. Please continue.”
“It’s hard to explain. In India we have what we call mantras. The mantra of a deity is supposed to be identical to the deity. Just saying Krishna’s name is supposed to bring his blessing. But we have a sacred book in India called the Bhagavatam that contains secret mantras that Krishna taught those close to him. One has always been very dear to me. I would repeat it for hours even before Juna attacked me.” She pauses. “This must all sound like eastern mysticism to you.”
“Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya.”
“That’s my mantra! How did you know?”
“I’ve studied the book you refer to.”
“But it has other mantras in it. How did you know I use that one?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know, maybe Krishna told me.”
Shanti continues to stare at me. “You are not like a normal FBI agent.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Go on.”
“What happened next was a miracle. The vision in my left eye returned, and I was able to move around without help. And the pain began to go away. It didn’t stop completely, but then, I didn’t pray for everything to heal.” She smiles. “You must think me stupid.”
“Not at all. You found that when you were suffering, it was easy to think of Krishna. You were afraid that if all your suffering was taken away, you would no longer think of him as often.”
Shanti is astounded. “How can you know these things?”
“Let’s just say I have suffered as well.”
“And you worship Krishna?”
“‘Worship’ is such a big word. I think of him, that’s enough for me.”
Shanti nods. “I’m happy the FBI sent you instead of another agent. Maybe Krishna had something to do with your coming. When I was healing, and the IIC man came to my door, I thought perhaps Krishna had sent him.”
“Why?”
“Because he told me I could earn a hundred dollars a month doing next to nothing. If you’ve been to India, you must know how much money that is there. Suddenly I had enough money to take care of myself, although my father tried to claim it for himself.”
“The bastard,” Mr. Garuda muttered.
“Baba!”
“He’s a thieving bastard!”
“I’m afraid I must agree with your uncle on this point,” I say to Shanti. “But you keep dancing around my question. What do you do for IIC?”
“I close my eyes and answer questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“I don’t know. They don’t really make sense. Usually the man on the phone will spell out a list of letters and then ask for a yes or no. But I don’t answer by speaking aloud. I just push one for yes and two for no.”
“If you don’t know what the question is about, how can you answer at all?”
“I asked that when they hired me. They told me not to worry about what was being asked. They said I should just say what came to me in the moment.”
“How often do you answer their questions?”
“Once a week.”
“Always on the phone?”
“Yes. They gave me a special phone with headphones so I can listen to the questions without having to hold the phone to my ear. They said that way my arm wouldn’t get tired.” She pauses. “It’s real easy to do. Most of the time I feel like I’m doing nothing. The only hard part is when it goes on for a long time. Then I get restless. But that doesn’t happen too often.”
“Let me get this straight. Once a week they call and you put on your headphones and listen to a series of questions that make no sense. And you answer yes or no by pushing either one or two on your phone?”
“Yes.”
“Could these strings of letters be stock symbols?”
“I thought of that. I’ve never recognized any of the groups of letters. But that doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know much about the stock market.”
“Shanti, have you ever heard them talk about something called the Array?”
“No. What’s that?”
“We’re not sure yet, but it’s somehow connected to IIC.”
“They always send the check on time,” Mr. Garuda says. “They’re never late. To be frank, the money has been a blessing. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to take Shanti to physical therapy.”
“Whoever comes on the phone is always friendly,” Shanti says. “It’s hard to believe they would want to hurt me. I mean, I could see why they might want to fire me. I don’t know if I get many of their questions right. But why would they want to kill me?”
“I have no idea,” I say honestly.
We have reached a standstill. I don’t know what else to ask, because I have no idea what IIC’s up to, other than accumulating tons of money and targeting people for assassination. It appears unlikely Shanti has anything to do with their Array or their success in the market. Likewise, it seems ridiculous to think Shanti poses a threat to them.
Yet they want her dead.
Plus they see me as a threat, or at least as a “person of interest.” It’s possible—likely in fact—they sent the superhuman assassin to take me out. However, if they have access to killers like that, why do they hire men like Marko to do some of their dirty work? It’s difficult to see a pattern in their behavior. They’re clearly rich, powerful, but they seem to be kind of crazy.
I stand and check my watch—eight forty-five a.m. I have already made up my mind. I’m going to California, to Malibu, to have a talk with the principals at IIC face to face. It’s a weakness of mine, this impatience, to suddenly barge in where angels fear to tread. But I can’t help myself.
“I told you I’m going to assign agents to guard this house,” I say. “If you go out, Shanti, they’ll follow you at a discreet distance. They’ll work in shifts, and I’ll make sure they introduce themselves to you when they first arrive so you know who they are. But after that you’re to ignore them. Don’t feel you have to feed them or to let them use your restroom. These people are professionals. It’s their job to take care of you. They’ll be armed, but don’t let that intimidate you. They’re all highly trained. Like I said before, if a hit man checks out this block, he’ll see how well guarded you are, and he won’t be able to get out of town fast enough. You will be in absolutely no danger.”
Shanti also stands. “Will you find out why someone wants to hurt me?”
An overwhelming need to protect her sweeps over me. I’m not sure why. I squeeze her shoulder as I speak next. “I’m going to do nothing else but work on this case. I promise you, I won’t rest until it’s solved.”
Shanti hugs me. “Thanks, Jessica, and go with Krishna’s love. I feel he’s the one who brought you into my life.”
I remember how Krishna spared my life five thousand years ago.
“You might be right,” I say.