Back at the hotel, Ellie opened the mini-bar and took out a small bottle of whisky. She opened it with shaking hands and poured the contents into a glass. She set it down on the table, next to the Lonely Planet guide, and stared at the book through the oily filter of the amber liquid.
‘Are you going to drink that?’ Arjuna asked.
She shook her head. ‘Do you know who they were?’
He reached over and drained the glass, wincing as the whisky hit the back of his throat. He coughed. ‘Not personally. Generic hired thugs in a white van, same plates as the one at the crime scene. You should open that.’ He motioned to the guidebook. ‘The suspense is killing me.’
She found her medication in her toiletries bag and took a double dose of the beta-blockers. The effects of the adrenaline would take hours to subside without it. She opened the tattered cover of the Lonely Planet and flicked through its pages. The middle segment had been removed and replaced with a notebook, its pages a little smaller than the rest, its spine firmly glued to that of the guidebook. She prised it out and opened the first page. Handwritten notes cascaded across the lined paper and along the margins, words heavily underlined, numbers, question marks, arrows between parties and more question marks.
On the inside front cover, it read: Ameena Fernando, December 2008—6 out of 6.
Sathyan had given her a way into Ameena’s mind. He had tried to understand it himself, but as he had cautioned her that afternoon, the notebook was hard to understand without the key.
‘Six out of six?’ Arjuna asked.
‘Perhaps the sixth notebook out of six.’ Had Ameena suspected this would be the last?
‘The other five?’
‘Gone—presumably confiscated with the rest of her work.’ She leafed through the pages. ‘There are multiple references here to Narada.’
‘Who’s that?’ he asked. ‘Aside from the character in Hindu mythology, it’s not a common name.’ He took another bottle of whisky from the mini-bar and poured it into his glass.
‘Code name perhaps. There are dates, times of meetings. Notes from Narada about MNW.’
‘The Chinese arms company?’
‘Yes.’ She pointed to handwritten lists of letters and numbers. ‘What do you think these are?’ There were pages of them. They looked like serial numbers. ‘Account numbers maybe?’
‘Not Sri Lankan accounts. Those always start with SLN.’
She opened up her encrypted laptop and punched in some of the numbers. Nothing came up. She searched the name Narada and read aloud from the description of the mythological character. ‘Says here he’s closely associated with Vishnu, the Hindu god of protection, and he’s an all-round troublemaker. Spreads bad news and tells scandalous stories. Good code name for a source.’ She reached for the whisky but Arjuna moved it away.
She called Scott on her satellite phone and put the phone on speaker. ‘Scottie, I need you to run a couple of searches.’
‘Sure, I’m not doing anything important in the defence of our great nation. What do you need?’
‘The name Narada. Check our databases, see if we get any hits. Check Chinese and Indian businesses too, as well as foreign agents. Ameena Fernando’s informant might have belonged to another agency.’
‘First hit is an Indian energy storage company,’ Scott replied. ‘Then a Romulan mining vessel in the new Star Trek movie. There’s an Indian exec who owns a beach house in Galle. I’m sensing they’re not who you’re looking for.’
‘Thanks, Scottie. Maybe the exec. A full search on him and the energy company please, just in case. Now some serial numbers, see if these are more meaningful.’ She read five of the numbers to Scott.
‘Nothing, sorry, Ellie. Where are you getting these from?’
‘Just a scrap of paper from Ameena’s office bin. Someone forgot to take out the trash. They could be encoded numbers, too.’
‘I’ll try our encryption programs and get back to you. Hey, those photos of the handprint you sent me?’ Scott asked. ‘From the crime scene, the driver’s side of the car …’ he prompted.
‘Yes.’ There was something about that bloodstain that she couldn’t insert into the timeline of the kill. Why would an assassin place his hand there, in that way?
‘We got a hit on the print. It’s Ameena Fernando’s. Not your killer, I’m afraid.’
‘Thanks, Scottie. I just wanted to make sure.’ Something still didn’t feel right. She turned the pages of the notebook quietly until she found what she was looking for. ‘One last thing, Scottie.’
‘Only one?’
‘MNW—Ming-Na Wu Holdings. It’s a Chinese weapons and agri-business.’ She could hear Scott typing rapidly. ‘Ameena investigated the company for an arms deal brokered with the Sri Lankan government. Can you get me anything on MNW? Who owns them, who’s in charge, who are their representatives here? Cross-ref Eric Kwan, the new cultural attaché. He’s ex-military but I don’t know about his corporate affiliations. This could be one of them.’
‘I’ll get you what I can. I’m still working on everything else you asked for, Jethro Gibbs.’
‘That’s Special Agent Gibbs, to you. Mark Harmon is a hottie, Scottie, and one hell of an investigator. Plus, he married Mindy from Mork and Mindy, so what’s not to love about that man?’
‘Quite right. Your NCIS-inspired search query has yielded something I want to flag with you. I’m emailing you an address now. Ameena made frequent payments to an account registered to it. The payments were relatively small, one thousand US dollars each time, but that’s worth a lot more here. They started eight months ago and they don’t fit her spending profile.’
‘Her spending profile?’
‘We all have a spending profile based on an algorithm that—never mind. Just trust me when I tell you that this isn’t a bookstore or stationery wholesaler. It seems to be a residential address in Colombo 7.’
Colombo 7 was an exclusive neighbourhood, populated by the moneyed classes, politicians and diplomats. ‘Did you—’
Scott interrupted her. ‘Yes, I also watch NCIS. I cross-referenced it against all of her known associates, including family—nothing. Then I checked it against her mobile phone tracking. She started visiting the location eight months ago—and made a payment each time afterwards.’
‘Thank you, Scottie. That’s great work.’
‘She visited the address twice in the week before her death.’
‘I’ll check it out tomorrow.’
‘Take a responsible adult with you, please. By that I mean you, Arjuna.’
‘God damn, Scott, how’d you know I was here? Are you watching Ellie’s room?’ Arjuna asked.
Scott scoffed. ‘Nothing so Orwellian. I track your phones so I know you’re safe. I can see that either you’re together or she stole your phone.’
‘It’s possible. She has some weird habits.’
‘You were moving a little too quickly this afternoon. Do I need to upgrade your security classification, Ellie? Assign you a team?’
‘Not yet, Scottie,’ she said firmly. ‘You know I don’t like company. I’ve got Arjuna. Send me the mobile phone tracking for the week before Ameena’s death, please. And call me back as soon as you can on MNW.’
‘You know, Solomon wants me to log the time I spend on your investigation. He wants to see what searches I run for you.’
‘He said that?’ She chewed her lip. Solomon was a creature of protocol and process, but he wasn’t a micromanager.
‘Tenby told me. He’s really worried about you, too. Please watch yourself, Ellie. No trouble this time, okay?’
‘Promise.’
Scott sighed and ended the call.
‘You didn’t tell him,’ Arjuna observed.
‘What?’
‘That you have one of Ameena’s notebooks.’ He tapped its cover.
‘The notebook doesn’t tell us much if we can’t decode it. But someone wanted all of these. Only Sathyan could have given it to me, and I’d rather keep him out of this.’
‘He’s already in it. You can’t protect him.’
She paged through the notebook again. ‘I’ve never been able to do that.’
Ameena’s script was elegant but scrawled quickly. Truncated words and symbols were used consistently in her own shorthand. One page was a diagram, a family tree of sorts, connecting MNW to the Sri Lankan government with a question mark above ‘MNW—parentage uncertain’.
Her eyes fell on initials that pricked the edges of her memory. ‘What’s this about? Here—’ She pushed the notebook towards Arjuna and showed him the words:
Narada 12/8/2008: $ for completion of HM port from PRC $ needed for resett. of local SN ppl, highway project to the deep north. How much palm sugar?
‘HM—Hambantota,’ Arjuna suggested. ‘It’s the President’s personal electorate in the south. The development of a new port started in early 2008, but it’s already over budget.’
Ellie pulled out her own notebook from her bag and flicked through the pages, stopping when she found what she was looking for. ‘Ameena was being sued by Dilshan Perera. She accused the Under Secretary of taking bribes from the Chinese in relation to the port. It’s in your neck of the woods, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Namalie complains constantly about the trucks and the traffic. The port is called the Magampura Mahinda Rajapaksa Port.’
‘The Supreme Overlord named it after himself?’
He nodded. ‘Of course. It’s cost Sri Lanka billions of US dollars in soft loans from China. The President wants to turn his home town into the commercial centre of the country. You know, golf courses, resorts, cricket stadiums. A sort of Dubai-meets-Shanghai.’
‘Tasteful.’ She looked again at Ameena’s shorthand. ‘And then this could be “resettlement of local Sinhalese people”.’
‘That makes sense. He couldn’t just push the local residents aside the way he has in the north and the east. The south is a Sinhala stronghold and his voter base.’
‘What if he moved them north?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, what if the People’s Republic of China also built a highway for the Sri Lankan government? A highway going north after the war ended. It could be used for access, for the Army and trade and the “resettlement of local Sinhalese people”.’
Resettlement and reconstruction, and the overlooked R of post-conflict nation building, reconciliation.
‘What about the Tamil people who are there now?’ Arjuna asked. She could see from his eyes that he already knew.
Ameena had known too. And maybe it was a plan worth her killing for.
•
Ellie shut the door behind Arjuna and checked her watch. It was lunchtime in DC.
‘I was expecting you to call earlier,’ Redmond said. He sounded like he was eating.
‘We had a little trouble,’ she replied.
‘You okay?’
‘Sure. Arjuna was with me.’
‘Good man.’ Redmond had worked with Arjuna in Mumbai.
‘Solomon said he warned you not to send me back here,’ Ellie began. She didn’t know what she wanted to know from Redmond. He had been her recruiter, her handler and her mentor.
‘He did warn me. He thinks you’ll never recover. “Unhinged by trauma” was his expression.’
‘Why did you send me back, Mike? Tenby will finalise the aid package eventually, with or without me. He’s doing as well as can be expected. Solomon has made it clear there’s no point investigating Ameena’s death and angering the Sri Lankans. The Sri Lankans have made it clear that my presence is … not welcome.’
She waited for Redmond to respond.
‘Hello? Are you there?’ she prompted. ‘Why did you send me back?’
‘Why did you agree?’
‘I asked you first.’
‘I sent you back because there’s no such thing as a great secret agent, Ellie. That’s a myth created by James Bond and perpetuated by Jason Bourne. There are only two types of agents. Dead ones and living ones. You are neither. You are stuck in limbo, working for USAID and recovering from the CIA. I want you to choose a side.’
‘Choose a side?’ she repeated. She had chosen a side once, and then she had made a mistake and it had cost more than one life. That was the job. To subordinate all lives to protect the state. God bless these United States of America. God forgive her.