The Lost Prophecies (43 page)

‘Some people wanted the damned thing destroyed,’ Williams went on. ‘Accidentally, of course.’ He smiled tightly. ‘Well, it’s gone now. A week ago someone broke into the museum, smashed in the watchman’s skull and stole it.’

Shiva’s mind clicked into investigative mode. ‘How securely was it kept?’

‘Very. Locked away in a combination safe. But the Black Book people probably have an expert on safe codes amongst their growing congregation. Recently they’ve been flying recruits from here and America who are specialists in all sorts of technical fields out to the Tasman Islands.’

‘They
fly
them there?’

‘As part of the Tasman Islands quota. The Black Book people have friends in government.’

‘Why do that?’

‘We don’t know. They’ve even brought some nuclear scientists, though there are no nuclear facilities or even uranium down there. The immigrants say they want to be near their leader. Pastor Smith. He keeps himself apart in some secret sanctuary, directing his political and religious activists. Incidentally, there seems to be an unusually high death rate amongst the foreign recruits. Sudden strokes and heart attacks. Usually with death certificates signed by a doctor who’s in the movement. The Black Book people are almost a state within a state down there.’

‘Maybe they think when the rest of humanity is destroyed, an educated elect would be useful.’

‘But they don’t believe
anyone
will be left. They think when the End comes they’ll be raptured, as they put it, up to heaven.’

Shiva did not reply. In the context of the struggles to survive humanity had faced, and still faced, the idea seemed unbearably repellent.

‘When they got going twenty years ago they formed a political party. The Shining Light Movement. Their support got up to twenty per cent in the 2120 election in the Tasmans, but no other party would go into coalition with them and since then support has dropped away. These days their campaigning seems half-hearted. But they are still bringing in scientific experts. They’re very wealthy, by the way: every member has to give ten per cent of their income to the Church. For poor people that takes them near the breadline, but they still do it. The Tasman government’s been wondering what they’re up to, where all that money’s going, and so have we and the Americans.’

‘A coup?’ Shiva suggested.

The commissioner shook his head. ‘They don’t seem interested in infiltrating the police or army. Although if they did take over the Tasman Islands, we could live with that. It’s very far away. But we can’t have them murdering an EU citizen and stealing that book. The End of the World, by the way, is prophesied for some time this year.’ He leaned forward, businesslike again. ‘But now a chance has come up. To infiltrate them.’

‘Me?’ Shiva asked.

‘You.’ Williams smiled tightly.

‘It couldn’t work, sir. I could never pretend to be a religious fundamentalist.’

‘You won’t need to.’ Williams bent to a file on his desk. He passed a photograph to Shiva. It showed a woman in dark clothes, wearing surgical gloves, disconnecting wires in a junction box on a wall. She was in her early thirties. Her long dark hair was tied back in a ponytail; her features, caught in an expression of fierce concentration, were the same light brown colour as Shiva’s.

‘She managed to disable the power system to that part of the museum. We also have a film of her working on the safe. She was there for three hours. We got the pictures because the museum surveillance system has a backup, a security camera with a battery that activates on movement. She missed the lens poking out of the wall. By then she’d already killed the security guard, a blow to the head from behind. The last photographs are of her taking the book from the safe and leaving.’

Shiva looked at the woman’s face. The eyes were narrowed with concentration, the mouth tight. In repose the face was probably attractive.

‘The Americans tell us her name is Parvati Karam. Family were Indian shopkeepers in San Francisco before it was inundated. Moved up to British Columbia, grandfather did well as a wholesaler. Young Parvati is a mathematical wizard; spent ten years designing security systems for the Federal Reserve. In the meantime she got herself involved with the Shining Light Movement, and two years ago they invited her to emigrate to the Tasman Islands. Government in Dunedin were happy to take her on as a security systems adviser. And so the Shining Light Movement gained another expert.’

‘Do we have back-channels to the Tasman government?’ Shiva asked.

‘A few. We’re wary. Not all the Shining Light people declare who they are when they take civil service jobs. But the Tasman government doesn’t know what they’re up to, though they think something is going on.’

‘I should say, sir, I’ve never done any political work.’

‘I don’t know if you’d call this political. We don’t really know what it is. A murder, to start with.’

‘Where is Karam now?’

‘Back home, I’m afraid. The monthly flight to Dunedin took off the night after the book was stolen and she was on it. By the time our internet systems identified her, she was back in Dunedin.’

‘Has the Tasman government been contacted?’

‘Yes. But meanwhile Hardacre at internet decided to run an ancestor search on Karam, just to see what came up. And the system flagged up a connection to you.’

‘But I’ve never done any ancestor research,’ Shiva said.

‘We have.’ The old man smiled. ‘On your behalf. We realized years ago that if we could find an ancestral connection between one of our undercover people and someone we were interested in, it would be a way of getting into their confidence. It’s happened a few times, and now it’s happened with you. Your great-great-great-great-grandfather and Parvati Karam’s were brothers in the same Indian village. Both families emigrated in the 1940s, during the troubles when the British left. They were Hindus in the Muslim area. We want you to go out there, get to know her.’

Shiva nodded. But he did not feel the
frisson
of excitement that a new case normally gave him.

‘We’ll fly you to Dunedin on the next monthly flight. A transworld flight – I envy you that. You’ll be a diplomat taking up a post at the EU embassy. Cultural attaché, tried and tested cover for spies. Contact her via her ancestor site e-mail, say you’ve been researching and found you were related, and ask to meet her.’ The clipped, peremptory tone was back.

‘When did she do her search?’

‘That’s interesting. Only a year ago, well after she joined the Shining Light. They discourage ancestor research. May indicate a vulnerability on her part.’

Shiva looked down at the photograph. ‘She doesn’t look vulnerable.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve never gone undercover to trap a woman before.’

‘Will that be a problem?’

‘No. It’s just a question of . . . thinking around it.’

‘Do that.’ The commisioner nodded. ‘When Karam was in Birmingham she stayed at a guesthouse in the suburbs. Witton. See what you can find out from the landlady. She’s the only one we know who actually met her. I’ll give you her file, and over the next couple of weeks you’ll get some training about the Black Book and the Shining Light. I’ll see you again.’ He paused. ‘You were brought up a Hindu, weren’t you?’

‘I was brought up in the old traditions. But my parents weren’t really religious.’

‘You’ll have quite a bit to learn.’ He studied Shiva. ‘Yes, it’s hard to pretend serious faith. We think when you meet Karam you should be sceptical but not hostile.’

‘If she wants to meet me.’

‘It will be very helpful if you can make sure she does.’

‘And the Black Book? If I find it?’

Commissioner Williams’s face darkened. ‘Destroy it.’

Shiva had been given a guest apartment at the Commission. Tomorrow, books and papers would arrive, about Parvati Karam, the Black Book, the Shining Light Movement. His room was small, high up in the building. He had set the statue of Shiva on his dressing table. In the old days not many Indian boys had been called Shiva, but his parents had liked the statue. Shiva looked at his face in the dressing table mirror. It looked tired. It was a thin face, bony, clever – delicately pointed, Alice had once said. He looked at the statue. Sometimes he felt all the weight of India on him. Destroyed, massive inundations drowning half the Ganges valley in two years, while in the rest of the subcontinent the summer heat had risen to forty-five, forty-six degrees, more than humans could bear. There was no way out for the people; to the north lay only the bare Himalayas. What Indians were left now were scattered around the world, accepted or discriminated against in various degrees, depending on the country. Shiva thought of meeting this woman, another Indian. An enemy. He stared at the statue, trying to lose himself in its symmetry. The god’s face was enigmatic as he danced, protecting the world, his foot on a demon from the underworld.

A week later Shiva walked out to the inner-city suburb of Witton. He left early, dressed formally in a cotton suit and wing-collared shirt. Shopkeepers were opening their shutters, the arterial roads filling up with bicycles and horses and carts and the electric cars of the rich. With a quarter of a million souls, Birmingham, high above sea level, was one of the few populous cities left in the world. It had been chosen as the new European Union capital over Berlin, now a coastal city still threatened by the rising seas.

For all that it had shrunk to a cluster of islands half its original size, Great Britain had fared better than most countries. It had an abundance of fertile land, only the Scottish and Welsh mountains requiring serious soil enhancement. No need in Britain for intrepid parties to brave burning deserts to raid the old cities’ landfill sites for organic refuse to make artificial soils. Britain’s island status, too, had protected it from the worst of the migrant wars.

Shiva stopped at a roadside stall to buy a coconut from a vendor. The tanned young man expertly sliced off the top with his machete. Shiva drank the cool milk gratefully, for after an hour walking on the dusty road his throat was dry. He walked on to Witton, an area of old back-to-back terraces, with south-facing windows now converted to solar panels. There was a small lake in the centre to take the monsoon overflow of the river Lea. The water was low at this time of year and lines of chimneypots from submerged houses broke the surface. Children were swimming in the brown water, calling out to each other in Brummie accents.

Around the lake new earthhouses had been built, and Shiva headed for one of the larger ones, two storeys high, the thick walls and the frames of the solar panels painted bright blue. A sign was nailed to the wall by the door.
GUESTHOUSE. VACANCIES
. He knocked on the door and a small terrier began a frantic barking. A large, grey-haired lady opened the door. She wore a shapeless yellow dress, sweat-stained under the arms.

‘Good morning.’ The woman looked tense, worried. A Jack Russell ran up behind her, barking angrily. ‘Sit,’ the women snapped. The dog obeyed. Shiva stared at it; pets were an unusual luxury.

‘Mrs Ackerley?’ He gave her his most winning smile. ‘My name is Inspector Moorthy. Wonder if I could ask a few questions?’

Her broad shoulders slumped. ‘Come in. Sam,
away
!’ The dog walked obediently off. ‘It’s about that woman, I suppose,’ Mrs Ackerley said heavily.

‘Afraid so. Expect you’re tired of being questioned about her.’

‘I had three officers on different days, asking me the same questions. They won’t tell me what she’s done.’

‘Last time, I promise.’ He smiled at her again.

She sighed and led him into a lounge, where canvas chairs surrounded an old wooden coffee table. The shutters were open, large windows giving a good view of the lake. The computer was on, a documentary about Antarctica. Five-mile-wide rivers crashed through a landscape of stone worn as smooth as glass by vanished glaciers. Mrs Ackerley bent stiffly and turned down the sound. ‘You’d better sit down,’ she said.

Shiva looked at the screen. ‘Look at those rivers.’

‘We’ll all be drowned yet.’

‘No, the ice sheet’s nearly gone. The sea can’t rise much further.’

‘So the politicians tell us,’ she replied darkly. She sighed again. ‘Please, ask me what you want. The guests are out at work. I don’t want them coming back to find the police here again.’

‘Thought they would be out at this time of day. That’s why I came now. It’s mostly businessmen and officials visiting the city that you take in, isn’t it? It’s a nice house, nice view.’

She wasn’t mollified. ‘Aren’t you a bit young to be a police inspector?’ she asked.

‘Thirty-six. Older than I look. Now, I don’t want to trouble you by going over the whole ground again. I just wanted to ask what you thought of her. Miss Karam? As a guest. As a person. Your insight.’

The old woman seemed a little mollified. ‘She appeared nice enough when she arrived. Very polite. But private. Didn’t mix with the other guests.’

‘Self-contained, then?’

‘Guests have a right to be private. Though I would have liked to talk to her,’ she added regretfully. ‘Coming from so far away. I wanted to ask what the Tasman Islands were like. What it was like to fly, looking down on all the old dead places. But I could tell it wouldn’t be welcome.’ She shrugged. On screen a man in a jersey stood on the bank of a great river, a tiny dot, chunks of ice the size of houses sweeping by.

‘I may be flying myself soon,’ Shiva said, to engage her. Mrs Ackerley’s eyes lit up with interest.

‘How exciting. Is it to do with this case?’

‘No. Something else. Tell me, what did she say she was doing over here?’

‘A conference on computerized power systems. To help conserve the electricity.’ Mrs Ackerley settled back into her chair, relaxing. ‘The only real conversation I had with her was a few days later. She’d been working in her room and came down to make a cup of tea. I asked about her family. She said they were in Canada; she hadn’t seen them for years. I told her my family had lived in Brum since the industrial times.’ Pride entered her voice.

‘Did she wear a cross?’ Shiva asked. Most of the Shining Light people did, chunky wooden ones painted silver.