you were leaving, Ganesh fired a little device loaded with an adhesive microminiature transponder. Hit you in the back.”
When she had glanced at Ganesh, he’d been holding something in his left hand, down at his side. “I didn’t feel it happen.”
“You wouldn’t,” Vikram said. “It’s low-velocity. The soft projectile weighs three-quarters of an ounce. It partially unravels and weaves itself into the fabric of your coat. Lithium battery the size of a pea. It’s trackable by satellite, just like any vehicle with a GPS.”
She said, “Jhav.”
Vikram’s eyebrows arched. “That is a Hindi word.”
“But appropriate.”
“Wherever did you learn that word?”
“From you.”
“Not possible. I would never use that word in the presence of a woman.”
“You use it all the time when you’re at a computer, backdooring your way into one place or another.”
“Is that really true? I was unaware. I hope you don’t know what it means.”
“It means ‘fuck.’”
“I am mortified.”
“It’s me who should be mortified, being tagged and not even aware of it. Jhav!”
A horn blared behind them. The light had changed.
Vikram again pointed at the roof with one finger. “The light has changed.”
“No shit?” she said as she took her foot off the brake.
“I sense you’re perturbed at me.”
“No shit?”
“Why are you perturbed at me?”
“You played me. I don’t like being played.”
“The math said it was necessary.”
“Math isn’t everything. Trust is important.”
“I trust the math.”
“I remembered you as a sweet man. I forgot the annoying part.”
Vikram grinned. “Is that really true?”
“Yes. You can be über-annoying.”
“I meant the ‘sweet man’ part.”
Rather than encourage him, she said, “So you knew what motel I was staying in.”
“Yes. But I expected you to return there in the red Honda, not on the motorcycle. Nevertheless, it worked out.”
“How the jhav did you find me in the first place?”
“Just so you know, I am not one who is turned on by women talking dirty.”
“Don’t make me have to shoot you, Vikram. How did you find me?”
“Now that,” he said, “is quite a story.”
Charlie Weatherwax leaves the blind man in the park, crosses the boulevard, and walks through the public spaces around city hall, into a residential neighborhood of tree-lined streets, and from there into the fabled shopping district of Beverly Hills, north of Wilshire. The sidewalks are crowded with moneyed locals bearing shopping bags, also with gaping tourists dazzled by the gleaming shops as well as by the countless Mercedes, Bentleys, and Rolls-Royces. They see one another and interact, but they do not know one another, these islanders of the human archipelago, and they would have it no other way, though if asked they would lay claim to all manner of communal values.
As the sky gradually darkles and the lighted windows of the closing shops radiate glamour and romance into the evening streets, he makes his way to a fine restaurant at which he has a reservation. A choice table awaits him in a corner of the elegant Art Deco bar, the design of which seems to have been inspired by the clean, highly stylized features of his face.
He is not halfway through his martini when he receives an encrypted call on his smartphone. In spite of all its vast resources in both the public and private sectors, the Arcadian revolution has taken two weeks to get a lead on Vikram Rangnekar, but at last they are ready to provide Charlie with an address. His team will be awaiting him at the Peninsula in an hour.
He must be satisfied with a less leisurely dinner than he anticipated, and a single martini instead of two. But the evening will be a lively one, with hard truths taught to the revolution’s enemies.
Riding shotgun without benefit of a shotgun, Vikram Rangnekar thought, I have never been happier. Which was amazing, considering that he had been happy for all his thirty years. According to his mother, Kanta, he had never once been cranky as a baby, and indeed had greeted the obstetrician and delivery-room nurses not with a cry of distress at being expelled from the womb, but with a sound that seemed to be part sigh, part giggle, and with a smile. His father, Aadil, called him chotti batasha, which meant “little sugar candy,” because he was always so good-natured and cheerful. There were those who resented being exposed to his unrelenting sunniness, and a few who even despised him for it; he repaid their hostility with neither anger nor pity, but with indifference, for he was not inclined to let other people annoy him.
Of course bad things had happened to Vikram. No one got a free ride in this troubled world. There were times when he was sad, but those spells were transient and almost always related to the death of someone he loved or admired. For as long as he could remember, he’d understood that happiness was a choice, that there were people who didn’t realize it was theirs to choose or who, for whatever reason, preferred to be perpetually discontented, even angry, even despairing. Most of that type were very political, which Vikram was not. Or they were consumed by envy, which Vikram was not. Or they loved themselves too much, so that they never felt the world was treating them well enough, or they liked themselves too little and wished they were someone else. Vikram liked who he was, although he didn’t think he was God’s gift either to the world or to women.
He’d had his share of romance. He wasn’t a virgin at thirty. There were some women who liked lean and sinewy guys who were gentle and treated them with respect. Of his few paramours, however, none had been fated to be with him forever. One turned out to be waiting to meet a slab of muscle named Curt, who would abuse and disrespect her, and she went off with him. Another, in her second year of graduate school, having learned that men were unnecessary social constructs, vowed to have relations henceforth only with a battery-powered device. The third, an idealistic girl named Larisa, pursuing a career in broadcast journalism, to her dismay concluded that her chosen profession was largely populated by “narcissistic, ill-educated phonies,” and left Washington, where Vikram lived in those days, to return to her hometown—Cedar Rapids, Iowa—where she hoped “to find something real.”
Fortunately,
