Vengeance(113)

Unsteadily at first, but with growing confidence, she clip-clopped down the street on her heels and then turned onto the main road. With her new look, she might as well have been in a different country. The same sort of male drivers who had given her dirty looks when she’d been on her bike were now slowing down to admire her bronzed legs. When a man leaned out of a van’s window and shouted, “Oi, oi! Do you fancy a portion, sweetheart?” Rukshana avoided eye contact and kept walking. She wondered if it was the same man who’d shouted “Terrorist!” at her fifteen minutes earlier.

She walked the two blocks. On the left was the bank, and on the right was a small park where the staff sometimes went to eat their lunches. Rukshana took a seat on a bench that gave her a view of the entrance to the bank. She crossed her long bare legs and looked at her watch. It was 11:55 a.m. She’d made it. A bicycle courier walked past her wheeling his bike; he clocked her legs, and she heard him whisper “Asian babe” as he went by. She smiled and looked at her watch. It was noon. She looked over to the entrance and sure enough, just as Kelly had foretold, Jeff emerged from the bank and walked down the steps. He adjusted his tie and ran his fingers through his hair a few times before trotting off and turning down a side street.

Five minutes after that, Sarah too came out of the bank. She turned and walked down the same side street Jeff had. Rukshana shook her head and whispered, “Bastards.” Then she stood up, adjusted her hair again, and walked across the road. There were hundreds and hundreds of employees in this building, so she was sure she would get away with it. On the steps of the bank, she took a deep breath and said to herself, “This is it,” before walking into the lobby.

In front of her was a security gate that you needed a swipe card to pass through. To the left of it sat Mark, a security guard, a big barrel of a man in a peaked cap. She fished around in her shoulder bag and took out her now-invalidated employee swipe card along with another one that she used for her local library. She wriggled her shoulders like her sister and giggled at Mark; he smiled back. When she got to the gate, she used her library card to try to get through. A red light flashed and the machine honked at her. She tried again. Another red light and another honk. She looked at Mark helplessly and waved her swipe card at him. Like a middle-aged knight, he got out of his chair and came over to help.

The bank had strict procedures about access. Mark’s role was to examine her card and see whether there was a problem and, if necessary, refer her to the security office. But Rukshana knew Mark well. His view was that strict procedures didn’t apply to ditzy, sexy women with long legs. And today, Rukshana was a very ditzy, very sexy woman with very long legs. Mark towered over her.

“Is there a problem, miss?”

“Oh, yes, Mark,” she breathed. “My card is always letting me down.”

Mark slipped his own security card into the machine, and there was a green light, a ping, and the gate swung open. She squeezed his arm.

“Oh, Mark, you’re such a sweetie . . .”

Mark saluted and Rukshana walked through with the almost physical sensation of his eyes drilling into her backside. She walked to the elevator and went up to the fifth floor, taking out her sister’s blue leather gloves and putting them on. When the doors slid open, she was face-to-face with Renata, a colleague who knew Rukshana as well as Rukshana knew her. Rukshana stiffened; everyone who might have recognized her, with or without her headscarf, should have been out at lunch. Renata smiled at her.

“Do you really need those sunglasses in here, dear?” For a few seconds Rukshana thought it was all over. Renata held the elevator door open for her and said, “If you don’t get out, you’re going back down.” Rukshana got out, fingered the sunglasses, and stammered, “G-got to look cool . . .”

Renata got in the elevator, smiled, and said, “You look very cool, darling. You’d better watch out or you’ll have that sleazy lecher Jeff after you.”

The elevator doors closed. Rukshana hurried down the corridor to Jeff’s office and peered in the window. It was empty. With her gloved hands she pulled the handle and went inside. She sat at his computer. On the screen was a website featuring romantic breaks for two in Paris: The city of love . . . a weekend of amour . . . for that special person in your life . . .

Rukshana had the feeling it wasn’t Jeff’s wife who would be going. She took a list out of her handbag and began typing in the web addresses of radical Islamic websites, one after another, so that a casual observer of Jeff’s computer history might think Jeff spent all his time looking up death-to-the-infidel!, death-to-the-great-Satan!, death-to — well, death-to-pretty-much-everyone-really! websites. Then she changed his screen saver from a sugary snapshot of Jeff’s wife and kids to a photo of a radical Islamic cleric.