happened?” She reached for his hand and held it tight.
He gasped and tried to say something intelligible, but he couldn’t articulate. He moaned with pain, holding his belly; he wanted to curl up, but the ties wouldn’t let him. He mumbled some words she couldn’t understand. She turned to the crew.
“What’s wrong with him? What happened?”
“Seems to be a violent attack of cholera,” the young paramedic replied. “It can be very painful, but we’ve administered something for the pain, and we’re hydrating him. He’s got hemorrhagic diarrhea. We’re taking him to the hospital.“
Scott’s grip on her hand turned tighter, and she leaned over, trying to understand what he was saying.
“Arghhh . . . don’t . . . let . . . me . . . die . . . here,” he managed to say before passing out.
“I promise,” she whispered, holding his hand for a few more seconds. “I promise.”
“Please, ma’am, we have to go now,” the paramedic said in a heavy accented English.
“Where are you taking him?” Louie asked.
“To the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital,” he answered. “It’s the best in New Delhi,” he added, seeing how the hospital name didn’t mean much to them.
She let go of Scott’s hand.
“Go ahead,” she said. “We’ll be right behind you.”
They jumped into their Toyota and followed the ambulance through the busy city streets. The ambulance had the siren on, but no one cared. When they finally arrived at the hospital, almost an hour later, Alex was already at the van’s back doors as they opened. The same paramedic didn’t seem in a hurry anymore. She grabbed his forearm, feeling her stomach sink.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he uttered sadly, “there was nothing we could do. Your friend died ten minutes ago.”
Alex let go of his arm; she was paralyzed in shock. She turned slowly towards Louie and saw Bal’s car pull right behind theirs. Before Louie could stop her, she went straight to Bal, grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, and shoved him hard against his car door.
“You killed him!” Alex yelled. “You killed him, motherfucker, and if it’s the last thing I do, I will make you pay for it!”
Bal pushed her away, straightening his clothes. He was livid with anger.
“Know your place, woman,” he growled.
“Know my place? You arrogant piece of shit! How about your place?”
“Enough,” Louie intervened, grabbing her and leading her away from Bal. “Enough,” he whispered. “Remember why we’re here. You can’t go after him like that. You taught me that.”
She struggled to calm down. She was panting angrily, hands shaking and tears flowing freely on her face.
“They killed him,” she whispered into Louie’s shoulder as he continued to hold her. “Please tell me you know that.”
“Yes, I do know that, and we’ll make them pay, but not like this, not here, not today.”
...81
...Tuesday, August 30, 11:45PM Local Time (UTC+5:30 hours)
...Hotel Le Meridien
...New Delhi, India
As soon as the hotel room door closed behind them, Alex dropped the laptop bag on the floor and started pacing the room like a caged animal.
“I am sick and tired of this goddamn place. Sick of its smells and stupid heat. Sick of these assholes and their stonewalling. Sick of it all,” she said, struggling to control her tears. “They killed a man like he was nothing, Lou. Bal didn’t even flinch. I remember looking at him when he decided to take Scott for lunch. It was routine for him; it was nothing!”
Louie hooked up the Inmarsat to his laptop, getting ready to download the remaining module. He had found it, running his sniffer algorithm discreetly during the morning’s PowerPoint presentation, right under Bal’s eyes. The man’s all-consuming contempt for Alex made him focus solely on her, while he was able to execute the program sequences unnoticed.
“You need to calm down, boss,” he reminded her for the tenth time. “You can’t think straight like this. Why don’t you run the bug sweeper? Just to be sure?”
That gave her something to do to get her brain back into logical thinking. She sighed.
“Yep, I need to do that. How much longer with that code?”
“Just a couple of minutes, that’s all,” he said. “Then we’ll know.”
There were no bugs in this room, either.
“I got it, all of it,” Lou said, disconnecting the Inmarsat modem. “Let’s take a look.” She scrolled fast through the lines of code, looking for things that didn’t belong. “There’s something here. I almost missed it. This override component, here, you see?”
Alex looked at the code, trying to decipher how it would