“How is showing up with a team of Rambos discreet?” Military guys put Shanti on edge with their chauvinism, their guns, and toxic levels of testosterone. She knew only too well the devastation they could cause. “Do they have to be armed?”
Bram grinned as if she’d said something funny. “If they’re any good, they’ll insist on it.”
Bram was her boss and a brilliant human-rights attorney, but it had been a long time since he’d met face to face with victims of brutality.
“I don’t want the sight of armed men to re-traumatize these people.”
Bram’s expression changed, his brow weighed down by sadness, his blue eyes sympathetic. “By asking them to recount their stories, you’ll be making them relive it all. You know that. I think this is personal for you, and I understand why.”
Okay, inconvenient truth there.
Bram changed the subject. “How much Bangla do you remember?”
“I understand a lot, but I can’t say much—just basic things like ‘hello’ and ‘thank you.’ Bangla won’t help me in the camps anyway. Rohingya is its own language.”
That’s why she’d asked the UN to find an interpreter.
Shanti had been born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to a Bengali Hindu father and an American mother. Her parents had met on the campus of Dhaka University, where her father was a professor of economics and her mother studied Hindu literature. They had fallen in love, gotten married against the wishes of both families, and were happily married still.
Sectarian violence had led her parents to relocate not long after Shanti was born. They had ended up in Ithaca, New York. She’d grown up speaking English. Although she had visited her grandparents in Dhaka each year, they’d spoken English to her, too.
Still, those visits had shaped her in so many ways. She’d heard the story of her grandparents’ narrow escape during the genocide of 1971. Not all of her relatives had made it. And, although her family was quite wealthy, Shanti had also witnessed unspeakable poverty. That stark inequality, along with her family’s tragic history, had driven her to study law.
“Can we at least ask them to wear street clothes and hide their weapons?”
“Ask for whatever you want, but don’t expect them to agree to all of it.”
Denver
Connor glancedaround the conference room table, head throbbing, cup of coffee in his hand. The only one who didn’t look hungover was Shields.
Derek Tower, one of Cobra’s two owners, stepped inside, grinned. “Hard night?”
“He grabbed Shields’ bum.” McManus was clearly still angry.
Tower’s eyebrows rose. “Sorry to hear that, Shields. Is he still alive, this asshole? I’m surprised I’m not bailing you all out this morning.”
Connor grinned. “We defused the situation.”
“Good.” Tower sat, turned on the wall-mounted flat-screen monitor. “We’ve got a last-minute job. Another security team backed out on a prosecutor from the International Criminal Court who is headed to Bangladesh.”
A blurry image of a pretty, dark-haired woman filled the screen. Or maybe it was Connor’s vision that was blurry.
“This is Shanti Lahiri, a prosecutor with the ICC. She’s got dual US-Bangladesh citizenship. Her father is Bangladeshi and a professor at Cornell. Her mother is American and teaches poetry at Ithaca College. Ms. Lahiri studied at Harvard Law and graduated top of her class. She has a brother. Never married. No children.”
The image on the screen changed to a man in a green military uniform.
Shields made a face. “Oh, look, it’s General Asshole.”
Tower pointed toward the screen. “This is General Min Thant Naing. He is believed to be the driving force behind the massacres of Rohingya people in Rakhine State in Myanmar. Shields, can you brief us on the history?”
“Southeast Asia isn’t my area, but I’ll give it a shot.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Ethnically, the Burmese and Rohingya are different—Southeast Asian and Indo-Aryan, respectively. They also speak different languages and worship different gods.”
“Let me guess.” Cruz stood, poured himself more coffee. “Despite everything they have in common, they just don’t get along.”
“Imagine that.” Shields told them how, when Japan invaded what was then Burma during World War II, the Buddhist majority sided with Japan, while the Muslims fought with the British. “The British promised the Rohingya an autonomous state but didn’t deliver. The Rohingya view Rakhine State as their homeland because they’ve lived there since at least the fifteenth century, but the Burmese ethnic majority see them as illegal immigrants—unwelcome foreign invaders with a different language and religion.”
McManus grinned. “What a pity it is that Lilibet knows so little about it.”