River of Gods (61 page)

"This is the attack on the train," Mr. Nandha says. It is
already as ancient and irrelevant as the Raj.

"Yes, sir; it's army helmet cam footage. This is the sequence."

It is hard to make out any detail in the chaos of fire and flight but
he sees Thomas Lull in his ludicrous garb run towards the camera and
out of shot while Bharati soldiers take firing positions. He makes
out a line of movement against the longer, darker line of the burning
train. Mr. Nandha shudders. He knows the scuttling scurrying of
antipersonnel robots from his wars with Dataraja Anreddy. Then he
sees a figure in grey go down before the charging line and raise a
hand. The robots cease. Mukul waves a stop sign and the picture
freezes.

"This was not in the news reports."

"Are you surprised?"

"Good work," Mr. Nandha says standing up. He signs an
open-channel mudra. "Everyone to the conference room in thirty
minutes." Acceptance chimes go off inside his skull as he leaves
Mukul's office.

Oh-three-thirty, Mr. Nandha reads from the timer patch in the corner
of his vision as his investigation unit enter the conference room and
takes seats around the oval table. Mr. Nandha can smell the
exhaustion in the overlit room. He looks for a receptacle for his
Ayurvedic tea bag, tuts in disappointment to find there is none.

"Mr. Morva, any progress?"

"One of my aeais threw up an unusual purchase; custom-grown
protein chips from AFG at Bangalore; what is unusual is the shipping
docket; that unlicensed surgery in the Patna FTZ."

In his peripheral vision Mr. Nandha notices Sampath Dasgupta, a
junior constable, start at something on his palmer screen and show it
to Shanti Nene his neighbour.

Madhvi Prasad: "More on her identity too. Ajmer Rao is the
adoptive daughter of Sukrit and Devi Paramchans, also from Bangalore.
Here's the odd bit, they show up in all the civic registers and
revenue databases and public records but if you go to the Karnataka
Central DNA database, there's nothing there. They would have been
registered at birth. I'm trying to locate her natural parents; this
is guesswork, but I don't think she's come here for no reason."

Mr. Nandha: "She could be trying to contact them. We could
preempt that by searching her hotel for a DNA sample and making that
contact ourselves. Good." The ripple of disturbance is spreading
along the right side of the table. "Is this something I should
be aware of?"

Sampath Dasgupta: "Mr. Nandha, the Prime Minister has been
assassinated. Sajida Rana is dead."

Shock rolls around the table. Hands reach for palmers, gesture up
newschannels on 'hoeks. Murmurs rise to a loud chatter to a blare of
voices. Mr. Nandha waits until he hears the seeds of abatement. He
raps the table loudly with his tea glass.

"Your attention please." He has to ask for it twice before
the room is quiet again. "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, now
if we could resume our meeting?"

Sampath Dasgupta erupts.

"Mr. Nandha, this is our Prime Minister."

"I am aware of that, Mr. Dasgupta."

"Our Prime Minister has been assassinated by a mob of
karsevaks."

"And we will continue to do our job, Mr. Dasgupta, as we are
tasked by our government, to keep this country safe from the menace
of unlicensed aeais."

Dasgupta shakes his head in disbelief. Mr. Nandha sees that he has
been challenged and he must act swiftly and assertively to maintain
his authority.

"It is clear to me that Odeco, this female Ajmer Rao, and the
Kalki aeai are all connected, perhaps even Professor Thomas Lull and
his former assistant Dr. Lisa Durnau, in a most serious conspiracy.
Madhvi, obtain a search warrant for the Amar Mahal Hotel. I will
issue a petition for Ajmer Rao's immediate arrest. Mukul, please have
a file sent to all police offices in Varanasi and Patna."

"You may be a bit late with that," Ram Lalli interrupts.
Mr. Nandha would rebuke him but his right hand is up to his ear,
taking a call. "The police have put out a fugitive bulletin.
Ajmer Rao has just escaped from custody at Rajghat. They're still
holding Thomas Lull."

"What is this?" Mr. Nandha demands.

"The police pulled her in at the National Archive. Looks like
she was one jump ahead of us."

"The police?" Mr. Nandha could vomit. He is suspended over
void. This, he thinks, is the Fall of Everything he felt in the glass
elevator. "When did this happen?"

"They lifted her at about nineteen thirty."

"Why were we not informed? What do they think we are, babus
filling in forms?" Ram Lath says, "The entire network for
Rajghat District went down."

"Mr. Lalli, to the Rajghat police," Mr. Nandha commands. "I
am assuming full responsibility for this case. Inform them this is a
Ministry matter now."

"Boss." Vik lifts a hand, staying Mr. Nandha at the door.
"You got to see this. Your biochips? I think I know where they
ended up."

An image clicks up over the timer in the corner of Mr. Nandha's eye.
He has seen these blue skull-ghosts before: quantum resonance
detector images of the biochip debris Mr. Nandha's India-attack had
left inside of Anreddy's head had been key evidence in convicting
him. Even as Maha of Datarajas, Anreddy had never worn an array like
this. Every fold, every convolution and evolution, every chasma and
stria and thelium is crusted with biochip jewels.

The bad men ride into town in the rain straddling their hot hot
Japanese trail bikes. Chunar is everything Dataraja Anand promised;
parochial, muddy, inbred, and closed for the night. The only action
is the decrypt call centre, a translucent cylinder of inflatable
polythene on the cheapest edge of cheap-town. The bad boys slide to a
dirt-crunching halt beneath the Chunar Fort. Like most old things it
is bigger and more imposing close up. For imposing read: pretty
fucking unassailable on its river crag. Like something out of one of
those Pak revenge movies where the guy gets even for the murder of
his wife-to-be by taking the fat bad guy and his baradari in their
clan keep. Shiv peers up through the slanting rain at the
European-style white house set at the edge of the parapet. Floodlit
by the whim of Ramanandacharya, it is a beacon for kilometres up and
down this dreary looping stretch of the Ganga. Warren Hastings
Pavilion, according to Anand's Rough Guide. Warren Hastings. Sounds
like a name they'd make up for you in a call centre.

From this junction four ways lead. Behind to where they're from.
Right to the pontoon bridge. Left into what there is of Chunar; a few
muddy galis, one Coke sign, and a radio somewhere tuned to a filmi
station. Ahead, the cobbled road curves behind the guard towers and
up through the arched gate into Chunar Fort.

Now that he is here, beneath those crumbling sandstone towers—now
that he has seen all his plans work through one by one to their only
possible conclusion—Shiv realises he absolutely has to do this
thing. And he is afraid of those guard towers and the path curving up
where he cannot see. But he is more afraid to let Yogendra see that
when it comes to it, he is not a raja. Shiv fumbles a little plastic
bag out of his light-scatter combats, shakes out two pills.

"Hey."

Yogendra wrinkles his nose. "Take the edge off it."

The pills are a hero's send-off from Priya, when he finally ran her
down to club MUSST. Bodies turning in the stream. Tassled garial
boots falling into the big blue. At the foot of the fort in the rain,
Shiv swallows both pills.

"Okay," he says twisting the throttle, revving the sweet
little Japanese engine. "Let's do it."

"No," says Yogendra. Shiv double-takes him and it is not
the drugs.

"Say?"

"Go this way, we die." Shiv switches off the engine. "We
have a plan. Anand."

"Anand knows fuck. Anand is a fat kif-head thinks movies are
life. We go that way, we get shot to pieces."

Shiv has never heard so many words in a line from Yogendra. The kid
has more: "Bikes, tasers, in fast, out: James Bond shit. Fucking
Anand and girls in catsuits. We do not go this way."

Priya's little helpers are making Shiv feel ballsy and immortal and
don't-give-a-fuck. He shakes his head at his apprentice and balls a
fist to smack him off his bike. Yogendra's blade flashes in the
floodlight.

"You hit me again, I cut you, man."

Shiv is numb in astonishment. He thinks it's astonishment.

"I tell you what you do. We find another way in, back way in, we
sneak right? Like burglars. That way, we live."

"Anand."

"Fuck Anand!" Shiv has never heard Yogendra's voice raised
before. "Fuck Anand, this time we do it Yogendra's way."

Yogendra spins his bike, throttles, and takes off left up through the
dark, muddy back streets of Chunar. Shiv follows past yapping pi-dogs
and the skeletal spines of papaya trees. Yogendra stands up on the
footpegs as he bumps the bike up flights of shallow steps, scanning
the dark walls rising above the shops and lean-tos for weakness. They
follow the twine of streets up on to the flank of the bluff.
Yogendra's instinct is true. Like a Cantonment society bibi, Chunar
Port maintains an imposing elevated front but it's all gone to shit
round the back. The dirt road skirts the foot of the crumbling
masonry revetments; rusting tin signs and sagging wire mesh mark this
section of the fort as an old Indian army base, abandoned since
nationhood. Finally the walls give way altogether into a gaping
entrance, once the main access to the military camp, now roughly
seated with corrugated iron and barbed wire. Yogendra kicks his bike
to a stop and examines the metal. He rattles a sheet, tugs a corner.
Steel screeches and gives way. Shiv helps, they heave, together they
bend and tear a raja-sized gap. Inside Yogendra flips open his palmer
to check GPS readings against Anand's map. The Warren Hastings
Pavilion glows like a Christian wedding cake in the distance. The
badmashes crouch by the foot of the wall while Shiv breaks out
nightwatch goggles. The dark dark night turns into an antique
black-and-white movie like one of those worthy Satyajit Ray things
about poor people and trains. The Pavilion is as bright as the sun.
Yogendra locates the nearest security camera. It's on a stanchion on
the wall against the base of the well tower in the south, a good
two-hundred-metre dash through the rain-dripping black-and-white
world. The roofless shells of the former Indian Army barracks give
fine cover. Lightning still breaks to the west, over the sangam of
Allahabad where three sacred rivers, Yamuna, Ganga, and invisible
Saraswati come together and armies confront each on the dark plains.
Each flash blinds the nightwatch visor's circuits but Shiv just
freezes in position. While the camera is looking the other way Shiv
and Yogendra sneak up into its blind spot. Shiv pulls the emp grenade
and arms it. He flexes his fingers one at a time on the firing pin:
no time now for cramp. Shiv drops the grenade. He squeezes his eyes
shut as the pulse overloads his night-watch but even so painful tears
start. Purple paisley patterns swirl inside his lids. Yogendra shins
up the stanchion like a monkey and patches the special palmer into
the com feed.

"Promised you, didn't I?" Anand had said tossing the palmer
in his hand. "Switch her on, stick this spike into the main com
line. My little djinn inside, she's sweet. Once she's in, the cam can
be looking right at you and all the aeai'll see is background. Cloak
of invisibility."

"You get it?" Shiv whispers. Yogendra taps him twice on the
back. Shiv and Yogendra work around the base of the tower to the
southern, tourist gate but Shiv still holds his breath as they step
out in front of the spy-eye, expecting the wail of an alarm; the
drone of the hovercam coming up over the battlements with neurotoxin
darts armed; the sudden rattle of automatic fire; the rasp of the
killing machine drawing its blade.

The ground drops underneath the tower to the southern path. Below it
is a small overgrown graveyard; Christian from the shape of the grave
markers. The resting place of the Angreez soldiers who once held this
fort. Fool them, Shiv thinks. Worthless place to die. Beneath the
little wooded cemetery are a couple of hardscrabble houses, dhobi
ghats, and the river curving out of sight. The climb down to the
tourist gate is treacherous, the sandstone slippery in the rain. Most
fool of all; Bill Gates for dreaming his money can beat death.

The plan calls for Shiv and Yogendra to double back along the wall
over the main gate to the northern parapet overlooking the bridge,
from where it is an easy drop down to the Hastings Pavilion, but as
the two raiders crouch beneath the battlement listening through the
distant thunder for sounds of security, Yogendra taps Shiv on the
arm, makes a screwing gesture by the side of his visor. Shiv rarchets
up the magnification, breathes a small curse in the name of his small
gods. In monochrome vision he can clearly see two security bots flank
the main entrance, gatling turrets slung between their two legs.
Behind the killing machines is a dazzlingly lit security post. Shiv
can make out the military grade assault rifles slung on the wall
behind the dozing sentry, boots on the desk, television screen a
plane of white. It is defiantly not a girli in a red catsuit.

"Fuck Anand," Shiv whispers. They can't get out that way.
Grinning beneath his big visor, Yogendra gives him a savage
thumbs-up. His knotted pearls glow in Shiv's enhanced vision.
Yogendra's thumb jerks the other direction. The long way. At the foot
of the collapsed wall by the tourist gate Yogendra suddenly throws
Shiv to the ground behind a pile of rubble, drops on top of him. A
curse comes automatically to Shiv's lips, then he sees Yogendra stab
a finger at the tourist gate. Glowing like a minor deity in enhanced
nightwatch vision, the defence robot stalks patiently into the gap.
Its sensorhead, studded with bright spider eyes, turns to take in
every aspect. Com rigs crown it like a divine diadem. The robot
halts, raises its weapon pods. There is sufficient and varied
firepower on its four arms to kill Yogendra and Shiv five times over
in five different ways. Yogendra pushes Shiv's head down behind the
rockpile, presses himself as flat as he can on top of him. Shiv holds
himself down for a forever. Yogendra's weight is small but the stones
are sharp. His ribs are cracking on the sharp stone points. Then he
hears what alerted Yogendra in the first place: the faint hiss of an
ill-maintained shock-absorber. They watch the monster move out of
their line of sight behind the curve of the well tower, then break
from cover for the south battlement.