Arjuna parked the car outside the house in Colpetty and killed the engine. None of the lights were on. When Ellie had left the Cricket Club, her first call had been to Sathyan. No answer at home, work or his mobile phone. Her next calls had been to this house, with no answer either. She kept trying until they pulled up outside the gate.
The gate was open, its lock broken.
Arjuna removed the gun from his ankle holster and chambered a round. He gave it to her, then took his primary weapon from his shoulder. ‘Can I depend on you?’ he asked.
She took three deep breaths. ‘I’ll take the front.’
He nodded and broke away from her, heading down the side of the house.
The front door was open. She nudged it wider with her foot, both hands on the gun to keep it steady, her arms tight and outstretched.
The corridor was lined with suitcases, packed and waiting like sentries in the darkness. She walked down the corridor and pushed the first door open. Moonlight cast a milky film over the study. Drawers were open, books and papers piled in haphazard columns.
The study had been searched.
She kept walking. A sudden noise made her turn, gun ready, hands shaking. Nothing. The living room was large and empty. A few paintings had been taken down from the walls and wrapped, resting on each other.
She left the living room and headed down the main hallway towards the staircase.
A shadow appeared at her flank. She swung around again.
‘Careful,’ Arjuna said. ‘Bottom floor clear. Nothing in the kitchen or servants’ quarters. The message bank is full. Diary on the kitchen table says the taxi is booked for seven pm—in half an hour. Upstairs?’
‘I’ll go.’ Three deep breaths again, and this time she let her body relax. There was power and strength in the state, if you trusted it.
‘I’m right behind you.’ He followed her up the stairs. The first door opened into the master bedroom. The bed was covered in clothes, one last suitcase open and half filled. The air held a distant scent, frightening in its familiarity and consequences.
There was another door at the far end of the room. Its lock had been shot through. She pushed it open.
Shirani’s body was collapsed in a corner of the bathroom, her head turned away as though she was burrowing into the unforgiving walls for safety. Blood poured from three bullet holes in her back, soaking her shirt and fanning onto the tiles, channelling into the floor drain.
Shoes sparkled under Shirani’s body.
‘Oh God,’ Ellie cried. She tucked her gun into her belt and ran to pull Shirani back. The journalist’s eyes were open and frozen. Ellie let her slide to the floor, her head hitting the tiles with a dull thud.
She lifted Renu’s jaw and desperately felt for a pulse. Her skin was still warm but there was no heartbeat.
‘Call an ambulance!’ she screamed at Arjuna. Her hands were slick with blood. She wiped them on her trousers and checked for a pulse at the child’s wrist. She put her ear to the small, still face and listened for breath, but couldn’t hear anything over her own ragged breathing.
Arjuna touched her shoulder and she jerked around, slipping in the pool of blood. Shirani’s blood—and Renu’s.
‘We need to keep moving. I’ve called it in but we need to get out. There’s nothing left here, Ellie.’ He pulled her up and steadied her.
She looked at him. His face was contorted by grief as well as the warp and weft of damaged skin on his face.
She focused. She had seen something else in the room.
The open suitcase on the bed had a Canadian guidebook in it. Ellie opened the first page. It was inscribed.
Dearest Shirani,
You are my best friend.
All my love, Ameena.
She flicked urgently through the book. The pages fell open at a photograph of the two women. Younger, arms around each other, unguarded and unconditional.
She kept flicking through it and stopped on a receipt used as a bookmark. She crushed it into her pocket and returned the guidebook to the suitcase.
‘Ready.’ She followed Arjuna out the door, back down the staircase and into the corridor lined with bags. Her eyes blurred.
A screech of jeeps and police cars pulled up outside the house.
‘That was fast,’ she said to Arjuna.
‘Too fast,’ he returned, troubled. ‘Put your hands high in the air, Ellie. No sudden movements. Not one.’ He followed his own instructions and walked out slowly with his hands up. He spoke clearly in Sinhalese and English. ‘Do not shoot. My name is Arjuna Diwela. I am US Embassy security. I am carrying a weapon that is holstered. Above us,’ he pointed to the sky, ‘is an American drone. They are watching me, my colleague Ellie Harper, and you. Do not shoot,’ he repeated.
Ellie kept her arms raised. The soldiers circled them. Arjuna told them where their weapons were in Sinhalese. Two men stepped forward, confiscated their guns and then searched them roughly for more.
Behind them there was shouting in the house as the bodies of Shirani and Renu were discovered. The soldiers turned back to Ellie and Arjuna, rifles poised. There was a blow to Ellie’s back, the sharp stab of a rifle butt. She sank to her knees and focused on pulling air into her lungs. The receipt was still in her pocket.
The soldiers cuffed her hands in front of her and dragged her with Arjuna to the waiting jeep.
•
The vehicles stopped at the gates of the Criminal Investigation Department. The soldiers spoke to the guards, repeatedly motioning to Ellie and Arjuna. The guards flashed torches in their faces and waved them through.
She still had her phone, which meant that Scott knew where she was. He had found her once before, he could do it again.
There was supposed to be an HKR team on her twenty-four seven and extraction teams on standby at the Embassy, loaded up and ready for this exact situation. Solomon didn’t like her, but he would have scrambled a rapid response unit immediately and woken up the Ambassador. Standard response time was three minutes to exit the Embassy, and at this time of night, eighteen minutes to intercept, max. They should have arrived at the CID building by now.
The jeep doors flung open. ‘This doesn’t look good,’ she said to Arjuna. She was dragged out and shoved against the bonnet of the car.
‘No talking,’ the soldier commanded, before he drove a fist into her gut. She fell to her knees, gasping. Something rose from her stomach into her mouth and she swallowed it back down, gagging. She dropped onto her side on the dusty cement of the car park, knees curled up to her chest.
He jeered and said something in Sinhalese to the others who laughed. Ellie caught the words American and lawyer. The soldier grabbed her arm and tried to lift her, but she was heavy and slipped out of his hands. He tried again but she lay still and unmoving on the ground.
He retracted his foot, ready to deliver another blow to her gut. The shiny black boot came towards her. She caught it in her cuffed hands, lifted her body into a sitting position and twisted his foot around at the same time, using his own momentum to topple him next to her.
Another soldier cocked his rifle and pushed it into her face.
‘I insist that you call the US Embassy,’ she said calmly. ‘Ask for Bill Solomon. He’s the Embassy’s Head of Security and a friend of Mahinda Rajapaksa.’
The soldier pulled Ellie’s cuffs roughly towards him. ‘President Mahinda Rajapaksa,’ he said. ‘Your embassy has been called. We’ll see if they come.’
They would come. She was still under Solomon’s protection and he left no one behind.
Ellie and Arjuna were dragged through several corridors, past locked doors. Soldiers came in and out of the cells. In one, she saw a naked man tied to a chair, his head hanging forward against his chest. His skin was striated with long, thick welts. A soldier stood over him, a leather belt slung over his shoulder. The buckle glistened with blood.
The soldiers stopped at a cell door and Ellie and Arjuna were pushed inside. Ellie was forced into a chair, her cuffs unlocked, her arms twisted behind her back and re-cuffed painfully. Arjuna was shoved into the seat beside her. He laced his feet around the legs of his chair.
‘I’m not very good with torture anymore, Ellie,’ he said to her in Spanish. It was one of their shared languages, alongside English and Hindi.
‘Todo va a estar bien,’ Ellie whispered rapidly in return. ‘No te preocupe.’ Everything will be all right. Don’t worry.
A soldier stepped forward and punched him.
‘I’m an American citizen—’ she shouted.
A voice behind them. ‘You’re an American spy.’ An older man emerged from the shadows wearing the markings of a Sri Lankan general. ‘And you’ve been investigating the death of Ameena Fernando.’ He walked around them as he spoke.
She willed herself to keep her eyes forward.
He leaned down behind her. ‘We’ve learned the science of enhanced interrogation from the CIA, Dr Harper. What shall we extract from you first?’
She closed her eyes and braced for the pain but it didn’t come. He stood up and gave instructions to the soldier, who rolled up his sleeves and undid his collar.
‘Tell me about your illegal investigation.’
She thought about Scott, and the team that was on its way. If she could just buy him some time. ‘I’m here to help USAID draft the terms of our aid package. Once the war is over, you’ll implement a transitional justice program. There are many parts to that program that we can fund, but we need to be sure what that funding will be used for. I’m reviewing your existing aid infrastructure so we can build on it.’
Please, Scottie, she thought.
The general nodded to one soldier, who punched Arjuna in the face. His head snapped back, rocking the chair back. The soldier put a foot on Arjuna’s knee, steadying it. ‘You need to understand something, Dr Harper. While I can’t hurt you just yet, I can hurt him. And look at him.’ The general put his hand in Arjuna’s hair and pulled his head roughly back, inspecting the distorted skin. ‘Look at this monster. What’s a few more scars? Would anyone notice them?’ He dropped Arjuna’s head and walked back around to her. ‘You were saying?’
‘I … I’m investigating the death of Ameena Fernando, on the instructions of the State Department.’
‘On the instructions of State, or outside the instructions of State?’ he asked.
She swallowed hard. Who had he been speaking to? Would Solomon betray her? He had told her to stay alive. ‘Ameena has family in the US. They petitioned our government to look into it.’
‘The Sri Lankan government is already looking into it. Any American investigation has no jurisdiction or authority. You have no jurisdiction or authority.’
The soldier flexed his hand and balled it into a fist again.
‘Wait,’ she shouted. ‘I wasn’t supposed to do a full investigation. I was supposed to confirm the findings of the government’s investigation and reassure the family that every effort was being made here to identify her killer.’
‘And why have you disobeyed your orders?’
That was a good question. In the past, she had never disobeyed the CIA. She had gone beyond what was required of her, but never against it. This was different.
‘I’m not sure why,’ she answered honestly.
The general nodded and the soldier hit Arjuna again. He groaned and spat blood on the floor.
‘Ameena’s partner Sathyan was … is a friend of mine,’ she offered reluctantly.
‘Sathyan Navaratnam. You were lovers once.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you lovers now?’
‘No, not now.’
‘You’ve been diligent for your ex-lover. And what have you found out? What has your investigation yielded? Was it the Sri Lankan government? Perhaps the Chinese? What did Shirani Dennis tell you before you killed her?’ He motioned to her bloodied clothing.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ she replied, knowing this to be a lie. The woman had been thirty minutes away from a cab ride to the airport, to freedom and safety. Shirani and Renu, with the sparkling shoes and the High School Musical pencil case. It was Ellie’s fault.
She was conscious of the receipt in her pocket. The soldiers had ignored it when they searched her for weapons.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ she repeated. ‘I went there tonight because I thought she was hiding something. I wanted to talk to her again before she left.’
‘It’s a shame she never made it.’ The general pulled a chair in front of her and sat down. ‘Shirani Dennis and her daughter, sweet little thing. What did she tell you?’
‘Nothing, nothing useful.’
Another soldier stepped forward, swinging his rifle at Arjuna, this time a blow to the side, sending his chair toppling into Ellie. His bloodied face against hers, his breathing ragged in her ears. She pressed her lips to his scarred face in silent apology, tasting sweat and tears. Tasting his blood.
‘Try harder, Ellie,’ the general suggested.
The first soldier grabbed Arjuna by the shirt and pummelled his face with three quick blows to the nose. She heard bone crack as blood gushed down Arjuna’s shirt.
‘Stop it, please,’ she cried. ‘Shirani thought Ameena was working on another story—a secret story. Ameena hadn’t told her about it, at least that’s what she said. I thought if I could find out what it was about, I could work out who killed her …’ Her mind was racing. Where was Solomon? Where was the HKR team? They’d let her down twice today—something was horribly wrong. She needed more time and she needed the soldier to stop hurting Arjuna.
‘It’s too late now,’ she said. ‘I don’t know much more than when I started. Ameena was investigating the Sri Lankan and Chinese governments. Maybe they killed her, but I have no proof. The only person who might have known more is dead.’
The general nodded to the soldier, who lifted Arjuna’s head again. A purple bruise radiating across the smashed bridge of his nose, his face sticky with blood. He pushed Arjuna’s head back with one hand and curled the fingers of the other.
‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘Wait! I’ve told you everything I know!’
The soldier raised his fist high.
The door opened.
‘That’s enough, gentleman,’ said Tenby. ‘Jesus Christ.’ He looked at Arjuna and shook his head. ‘You’ll hear from the Embassy about this.’ He extracted a folded piece of paper from his pocket. ‘I have a release request from the Ambassador.’
The soldiers huddled around Tenby’s paperwork.
He signalled to two US soldiers behind him, who stepped forward and lifted Arjuna, dragging him easily to the door.
Ellie felt the cuffs fall from her wrists. She brought her trembling hands to her lap and rubbed them hard.
Tenby offered her his arm but she shook her head.
‘Where the fuck were you, Tenner?’