Ellie needed this R&R in Colombo. The city was a welcome change from the tropical jungle Redmond had sent her into. She had three teams in the east of the island digging up bodies while she attended the human rights conference in the city. The project had taken six months of research as well as 1.5 million US dollars in funding from the Consortium of Islamic Development Organisations. USAID had provided the forensic pathologists. The Middle East had the funding to make it happen as long as USAID pursued their objective—the exhumation and proper burial of Muslims killed during the conflict.
The project gave the Agency a reason to be there, but Ellie’s team were looking for more than bodies. Forensic investigators studying the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen had matched its Semtex fingerprint with that of a bomb in Lyon. It also had the same fingerprint as the Semtex used to blow up a bus in Colombo. Bombs went off in Sri Lanka all the time, but Agency Forensics was all over this one because two American tourists had died.
The human rights conference in Colombo had hit its Day Three slump. The optimism was over, the rhetoric had reached its hyperbolic zenith, and now exhaustion was setting in. It was a well-worn trajectory.
Ellie looked at Keith Tenby, the US Embassy’s foreign aid delegate and former mission controller. He was seated next to her, diligently taking notes. Last year, when he was in charge of an operation, he had completely choked and it had cost the lives of two agents, and Tenby had finally retired early from the Agency to enter the diplomatic corps. Still well connected and respected in Asia, he was much better suited to diplomacy.
The last speaker took the podium. Sathyan Navaratnam from the Anti-Landmine Lobby, a small but earnest Canadian NGO. Ellie was expecting practical insights into landmine treaty application.
After brief thank yous, the speaker launched into an angry but articulate polemic on why US trade subsidies for weapons companies were responsible for the radicalisation of Muslims all over the world, not just in the Middle East. His voice had the clipped vowels of a local educated in the West, like her father’s. She watched the speaker at the front of the room and felt her heart rate quicken.
Sathyan Navaratnam was a young man, younger than his voice and experience indicated. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt, a pencil in his front pocket. His skin was the colour of palm sugar, his thick black hair cut short and neat. His eyes flashed with barely restrained emotion.
Ellie raised her hand. Tenby shook his head but she ignored him.
‘Yes,’ Sathyan motioned to her, thrown by the interruption. He hadn’t yet called for questions, but she had another meeting in thirty minutes.
‘Thank you.’ She stood up and saw Tenby close his eyes pre-emptively. ‘Landmines, used largely by non-state actors, kill thousands of US soldiers, militants and civilians in the Middle East every year. Reducing US supply still won’t address Middle Eastern demand. I completely agree that there are too many sellers and not enough standards. But I don’t think more non-proliferation legislation will stem the rise of all these Islamic off-shoots.’ She had redirected blame for the underlying cause of the market’s existence and deflected attention away from the use of landmines by state actors—their friends—in the Middle East. Tenby had to be happy with that.
‘Islamic off-shoots? Seriously—that’s what you’re calling them?’ Sathyan asked.
‘Excuse me if that’s not politically correct enough for you,’ she replied. ‘They are off-shoots of Al-Qaeda and they share an Islamic fundamentalist doctrine of raining down an Armageddon on America and its allies.’
He addressed the room. ‘See—this is why they hate us.’ The audience murmured its agreement. Everyone was paying attention now.
‘Yes, that must be it. They hate us because I use culturally insensitive references to the New Testament when describing their military strategy.’ Perhaps she should have called it Asymmetric Warfare instead. ‘Raining down an Armageddon’ was a bit dramatic.
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘The fundamentalists hate you because they hate everyone who isn’t like them. You gave them a big peg to hang that hate on when you set foot in their holy land and started killing their children. The rest of the Islamic world hates you because you don’t acknowledge that. And to add insult to a pretty big injury, you then lump all of them in with the crazies by calling them Islamic off-shoots. The Klan, which is alive and well, is a Christian off-shoot, just so you know.’
Fuck him. She wasn’t going to take that, no matter how irresistible his dimples were. Could dimples exist in a frown?
‘I know that,’ she replied evenly, despite the flush she could feel rising. ‘If it weren’t for the Constitution, I’d carpet-bomb their meetings, too.’
Tenby’s mouth twitched nervously, knowing she was serious. He moved his knee towards her, in an attempt to nudge her into silence. She stepped casually to her left, just out of reach.
Sathyan didn’t laugh. He looked her straight in the face and said, ‘The key rights in the US Constitution that protect those motherfuckers are also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’
And that was it. Something about the way he said motherfuckers made her want to kiss him.
The crowd laughed and she could see the man to Sathyan’s right shake his head with a ‘Don’t bite the hand that funds you’ expression on his face. Must have been his boss, used to his outbursts but hopeful he could reign them in.
She loved that he couldn’t reign them in. She understood that.
•
At the end of the seminar, Ellie hurried after Sathyan, touching him lightly on the arm so he turned around.
‘I didn’t catch your name,’ she lied.
‘You didn’t listen to most of the presentations.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘No, you didn’t. You appeared to be catching up on work.’
‘You noticed,’ she smiled.
‘I’m indiscriminately observant.’ He shrugged and turned back towards the door.
‘You still haven’t given me your name.’
The man sighed. ‘Sathyan—Sathyan Navaratnam. “Raining down an Armageddon?”’ he quoted. ‘A bit dramatic, but better than “Asymmetric Warfare”, I suppose.’ He didn’t wait for a reply.
‘I’m Ellie Harper.’ She followed him out.
‘Ellie Harper.’ He turned the segments of her anglicised name over, looking for the real name it masked.
Ellora Rachel Harischandran.
In a migrant’s attempt to assimilate, her father had changed his name from Surya Harischandran to Sam Harper when he moved to Australia years before she had been born.
When she escaped Australia on a university scholarship to the States, she’d in turn changed her name from Ellora to Ellie.
And Rachel. She loved the middle name that honoured her American mother.
‘Are you stalking me, Ms Harper?’ Sathyan asked.
‘Have lunch with me,’ she blurted, thoughts of her next meeting forgotten. They were blocking the path, and people around them were muttering. She was knocked too close to him. She could see where he had cut his neck shaving. He moved back, politely shaking his head, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
She waited for the dimple to reappear.
‘Is your social strategy much like your military one?’ he asked. ‘You know we don’t want you, but you come anyway?’
Before Ellie could reply, Sathyan headed off, out the sliding doors and into the midday heat. He was untroubled, his eyes focused on the traffic, his right-hand twitching when a tuk-tuk approached. He looked back at her, then seemed to change his mind, heading briskly down the street.
‘Lunch, please. Don’t make me beg,’ she said, a step behind him. ‘You could berate me some more about the failures of US foreign policy.’
‘Appealing but pointless.’ He kept walking. ‘You’ve heard it all before.’
‘Dinner, then.’
Later, she would reflect on that first meeting and wonder why she had chased him. Sure, she initiated relationships, but she never chased.
‘Definitely not,’ he replied.
He darted quickly through the crowd for three more blocks, before finally slowing to take a left into an alley. He stopped at a small diner.
It was a Hare Krishna cafe.
‘Is this where you bring all the … friends you want to hide?’ she asked. There was a large mural on the wall of the blue god holding a flute, a young girl in a sari standing beside him. There were quotes from the Bhagavad Gita all around the cafe. ‘It’s a nice place,’ she said, taking a seat opposite Sathyan.
‘It is. Cheap and cheerful. And I didn’t bring you here, you followed me.’
‘Cheap and cheerful? That’s a very British thing to say. Did you study there?’
He shrugged. ‘All Sri Lankans have weird British-isms. We talk like an Enid Blyton book.’ He put the menu down and called the waiter over.
Ellie nodded. Her father’s vocabulary was the same. ‘I’m pretty sure Enid Blyton never said motherfucker, though.’
Sathyan grinned reluctantly and she caught her breath. She wanted to make him laugh again, to see the spontaneous eruption of dimples in his cheeks and the furrowing of his eyebrows. He tilted his head a little, his body rocking back into the chair.
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘You look Tamil, maybe mixed, with a name like Ellie Harper. Your accent … a lot of time on the west coast, perhaps?’
‘You’re a linguist?’ she asked, suddenly afraid he might work for an agency instead of the Canadian non-profit. That would be complicated.
‘No, I watch a lot of American television. Where are you from?’ he probed.
‘My father was originally from Jaffna, but this is my first trip to Sri Lanka,’ she said, truthfully. ‘I used to live in the Bay Area,’ she added, vaguely. Her American accent was solid, the Australian tones of her childhood locked away when she was on the job. ‘Now working for USAID in DC,’ she said, seamlessly setting out her cover legend.
‘That’s a surprisingly unadventurous job, although you are here. In search of adventure in Sri Lanka? And am I a little local adventure?’
The waiter came over and Sathyan ordered for both of them, then turned back to her, waiting for an answer.
‘This is not where I’m supposed to be right now,’ she said instead. ‘The Emir of Qatar is a key funder, and his eighth son is hosting a lunch. I should be doing a meet-and-greet with them.’
Sathyan showed no sign of being impressed. Instead, he asked, ‘Are you meeting the Key Performance Indicators of your grant?’
‘Mostly. My KPIs are about bodies exhumed. Yours?’
‘Limbs saved. I work for the Anti-Landmine Lobby.’
‘I know, I was listening. I like your voice.’ She smiled. He had a beautiful voice.
Sathyan laughed and looked down at the redundant menu.
‘No, really,’ she assured him. ‘When you speak, I want to listen to you.’
A slow blush was creeping under his dark skin. ‘How long are you here for?’ he asked. ‘I mean—’
‘I know what you mean. I’m here for as long as it takes, or as long as we can get funding.’
‘Gulf funding is good, and they’re pretty serious about returning their brethren to Allah the right way.’
‘They are. I’ve been here for four months. Before that, I was setting up a USAID team in Pakistan.’
‘Same thing? Looking for bodies?’ he asked.
‘No. My work varies from country to country. Looking for different things.’
‘And do you like Sri Lanka? Is it everything you thought it would be?’ His eyes were cast down as he blew onto the surface of his tea.
Ellie hadn’t even noticed the waiter arrive with it. She needed to concentrate.
‘Do I like Sri Lanka?’ she repeated with a smile. ‘It’s hard to answer that quickly.’
‘Try. This is the only time we’ll eat together.’
‘Harsh! Sri Lanka is a difficult place to understand. My mother was white, so we didn’t grow up connected to a Tamil diaspora the way some people did. My skin is brown but I might as well be white, too. So, I experience this country—your country, not mine—from the outside,’ she replied.
‘That’s not an answer. That’s a methodological approach and an excuse. Try again, Ellie,’ he said.
She gave it another go. ‘People do things to each other here, terrible things, as they do all over the world. But there is a silence around it. It’s almost as if it’s not too impolite to take thousands of lives, but it is too impolite to talk about it. Grief, loss, truth—these things are buried as deeply in the ground as the bodies. That’s no way to live, and no way to die.’
‘You’ve understood us well, Ellie. So, answer the question—do you like Sri Lanka?’ he asked again, his tone gentle this time.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I like you—does that count?’
‘A little.’ He smiled slowly, his dimples reappearing.
When Sathyan had gone to the cafe bathroom, Ellie took his diary from his backpack and scanned through his upcoming engagements. He would be attending a dinner for the UN World Food Program hosted by the Norwegian Embassy tonight. Two phone calls later, so was she.
•
Ellie checked the table in the Embassy lobby for Sathyan’s name tag but couldn’t find it. He must already be somewhere inside. She lingered, noting the names from the Australian High Commission, and steeled herself for passive aggressive comments about patriotism, wrapped in boring job offers that would take her back home to Sydney. She was about to enter the ballroom when she saw Sathyan heading for the exit.
She called his name, and he turned and smiled, before remembering his earlier irritation with her.
She quickly closed the gap between them, caught his hand and held it tightly, drawing him towards her. She kissed him on the cheek, her lips grazing his earlobe and then pulled back. ‘Leaving so soon?’
He waved his name tag at her. ‘My boss has seen me. I’ve done my networking, and now you’re cramping my quick getaway.’
‘I’m only here to see you. If you leave, you’ll cramp my plans.’
‘How did you know I would be here?’
‘All the conference delegates were invited to this one. The Norwegians are religiously un-elitist. And the pickled herring canapés can really pull a crowd. Stay a bit,’ she cajoled. ‘You can introduce me to tedious people as punishment—and as a reward, I’ll get you fifteen minutes with the Under Secretary to the US Ambassador so you can talk to him about the landmine treaty.’
To her delight, he laughed. ‘You’re on.’
They walked through the lobby and up the sweeping staircase to the main ballroom. Ellie was wearing a sleeveless black satin shift dress with black sequins around the neckline. It was her standard gala outfit because it was uncrushable at the bottom of her suitcase. Unlike most of the men, Sathyan wore casual trousers and a tailored shirt, not a tuxedo.
He motioned for her to follow him, weaving through the crowd until he stopped at the person he was looking for. She recognised his boss from the conference and smiled when she saw the elderly gentleman he was talking to—her friend, Dougie Vanderstraaten.
‘Kulen, this is the lady I was telling you about—my stalker, Ellie Harper, from USAID. Ellie, Kulen Thirarasa.’
Ellie shook Kulen’s hand. ‘Lovely to meet you, Kulen. Sathyan has described you to me far more generously.’
‘Lovely to meet you, too,’ Kulen replied, smiling warmly.
Sathyan tried to retreat, but Dougie herded him back into the circle with his cane.
‘Delighted to meet you …?’ Dougie extended a hand.
‘Sathyan,’ he replied.
‘Dougie Vanderstraaten.’ Dougie placed his cane down. ‘From the Tea Council.’ He was actually an agent under nonofficial cover. Espionage was a lifelong hobby befitting a man of his station, and he had no real ties to the British government he served, beyond his Etonian accent and Merchant-Ivory dress sense. He reached for Ellie’s hand and brought it to his lips. ‘My sweet. You look unusually clean.’
‘Thank you, Dougie. You look typically ravishing. What brings you here?’
‘The pickled herring. You?’
‘The same.’
Sathyan looked between them, bewildered and annoyed. ‘Kulen, Ellie would like to know about the new German landmine detection technology, which no country that actually has landmines can afford to buy. She has a technical mind and wants to know everything.’ He turned to leave, but again, Dougie blocked his path.
‘Stay,’ he said, lightly rapping the younger man’s shins with his walking stick. ‘I’d rather drown in a vat of pickled herrings than listen to this, but she’s more than a match for you, young man.’ He turned to Ellie and dropped a quick kiss on both her cheeks. ‘I’ll see you at the next ball.’ He bowed quickly and left them.
‘Wonderful.’ Kulen said, clearing his throat. But before he could speak, Ellie turned to Sathyan and said, ‘The challenge with wartime technology is to develop something that helps the victims of war, not its perpetrators. Even with German sweepers, it would take four hundred and fifty years to clear the world’s landmines. Maybe the new technology could improve the speed.’ She shook her head. ‘So, reduce that to two hundred years. That’s still a lot of dead children.’
She had exhumed ninety-six bodies in the last four months and they had barely scratched the surface of the jungle’s fermented earth. Sathyan had asked her if she liked Sri Lanka. She was repulsed by it and drawn to it, in equal measure.
Ellie wanted him to know that. She wanted to say she was more than another foreign aid worker with a danger pay uplift and hostage insurance. She wanted to tell him that the broken bodies and broken Conventions were starting to get to her. He seemed like he would understand.
‘The landmines used by the Tigers are mostly recycled Russian-era models. They admit that,’ Sathyan said. ‘But the government secretly scatters the RN340s from the sky. Both are prohibited by the Mine Ban Treaty.’
‘So how do you address the use of a weapon that the government doesn’t acknowledge exists?’ Ellie asked no one in particular. There was no answer.
‘Do you work in the landmine sector?’ Kulen asked.
‘No, she’s probably an arms dealer,’ Sathyan said. He seemed upset with her, or perhaps himself.
Kulen took his words as a joke, Ellie did not. She could have been an arms dealer. In her experience, they never looked the way you expected. ‘I develop post-conflict human rights frameworks. To implement justice after a conflict, you need to understand the conflict in the first place. What needs to be fixed is usually based on what went wrong.’
Sathyan’s eyes were serious. ‘What went wrong? As you’ve already observed, in Sri Lanka, we don’t talk about that.’
‘Maybe you and I could talk about it anyway?’ she asked softly.