The PuppetMaster (3 page)

I knew better than to teas
e her much about her psychic powers, but I couldn’t resist a few innocent jibes. “So, this prediction, Sahr, are you sure you have the right Bhimaji? Tall man, very neat, blond hair, twenty-seven years? Rents a nice villa near the river with a perpetually irritable cook? You’re sure you have his correct birthday? That could cause some serious miscalculations you know, having the wrong birth date.”

Her eyes narrowed and, with her hands still clamped like lobster claws at her hips; she pulled her shoulders back thrusting those mountains of bosom towards me. Just shy of five feet, she suddenly looked taller. “Oh yes, Sahib”—she only used that title when I was in trouble—“I have the correct man, a stubborn ferenghi who pays too little attention to matters of the heart, wades in the Ganga at the wrong hours of the night, and walks alone without a hat in the wrong hours of the day. He loses his writing pen too often from forgetfulness and doesn’t send letters to his mother often enough. Yes, I have the correct Bhimaji. He is the very fortunate young sahib with a cook who sees to his every need, and that cook would weep to the end of time if he were ever hurt from his own foolishness. Oh yes…his birthday is the sixth of October.”

Damn. She’d gotten it right, all of it. “Sahr, can you tell me how it will be dangerous for me to ride in an autorick with a seventy-four year old pundit, stroll through an airy cave, have a picnic, and return that afternoon?” I really hoped that was the way it would be.

She peered at me just as the sun rose above the top of the mango. Squinting, I saw her expression. She was truly troubled. “I consulted my bhuta last night, Bhimaji. The spirit told me that it is not the journey itself.” Her voice trailed off. “It is what you will find on the journey that will be of danger to you.” Seeing me squinting, she stepped to one side and added, “It will be of danger to you and many others. I have been told.”

Not exactly a convert to her methods, I was nonetheless not a total skeptic. She had been correct on too many occasions for me to ignore it. I dropped my teasing manner.

“What sort of danger?” I also wondered how she knew of my trip a half day before Soma had come to the gate. That I chalked up to the best communication system in Uttar Pradesh--gossip, known thereabouts as gupchup.

“That is not being revealed, Bhimaji, only that your journey will bring you and others into grave danger.”

“And which of your esteemed agents told you of this peril? Megadhuta the Parrot? Your cards? Tea leaves? Or maybe Durgabal, the all-seeing ghost of the Ganges?”

She didn’t smile. She set her fingers upon the pulse of my wrist and looked at me anxiously. “All of them, Bhimaji. All of them”

I sighed and turned from the intensity of her gaze to stare out the window. In the street a figure passed slowly by my gate. The face turned in my direction and I recognized it. It was the face of a young man I hadn't seen for more than three years. I remembered it from the first night I entered the city, couldn’t attach a name to it, but that face had left an indelible impression on me.

Habitually I reached for the thin cord that circled my neck--my namaghanda, the name string the man had given me as he announced that I would no longer be called Martin Scott. I would be known only as Bhim. The string and the name both remained.

Absently, I tuned back into Sahr’s voice. “And in case you haven’t heard the latest news, there was another bombing yesterday. It is in the morning paper I set on your desk.”

I glanced at the newspaper folded trimly on my desk and squeezed my eyes shut. “Mother of God, where now?”

“A hundred miles down the rail line, outside Lucknow. The Varanasi police have pulled in people for questioning, mostly Muslims leaving the Gyanvapi Mosque. Imam Nomani is protesting it loudly, claiming it is another attempt to harass the good followers of Islam. But even worse, that fool Quereshy is ranting again, this time calling for a march down Luxa Road on Monday.”

I groaned. The news of the imam’s complaints didn’t concern me much. His messages were, by and large peaceful, often with the goal of trying to bring Hindus and Muslims closer together. Protests were part of the expected rhetoric of a religious leader tending to the affairs his mosque. Udmir Yakoob Qereshy was another matter entirely, and his rants did concern me. He was a hothead, a Muslim cabinet member in the provincial government with enough influence to be quoted in the newspaper once a week. He could cause problems.

Neither of their reactions was as important as my next question. “How many died this time?”

“Nine,” she answered quietly. Her fingers touched my wrist again. “Take caution, Bhimaji.”

Three

Sutradharak, the Puppetmaster, squatted on the floor of a small loft near Beniya Park on the Lahurabir Road. The attic, located above a furniture warehouse, had a single window on the east side. It was interminably hot and coated with dust, but suited his purposes well. The building below was a disorganized mass of charpai cots, tables, and woven lamps, but normally empty of people.

The loft also had a wired Internet connection, four chairs and a table made of raw board.

He read the two lines on his laptop again, committed them to memory, and with a tap on the keypad, deleted them. The message contained no data that could connect his employers to him, no names, no subject, only a date and an amount in dollars moved into a corporate bank account in New Delhi. The planning and implementation of the next bombing, like all previous ones, would be left up to him. His employers granted full autonomy and conceded his ability carry out their objectives. Indeed, over a fourteen-month period, Sutradharak had orchestrated five bombings without detection or capture--his most recent being the explosion the previous day that had killed nine people near Lucknow.

His employers had been pleased with the results, but the PuppetMaster considered them trifling. As always, he envisioned something larger.

His fingertips slid over the letters of the keyboard and hovered as if above a Ouija board. The message had come to him less than a minute earlier, so the details weren’t even considered yet, but he had a date, and the details would come. They always did.

The Indian media, based primarily on reports provided by the intelligence agencies, declared that he was an Islamic extremist—the leader of a fundamentalist Pakistani unit operating along the rail lines between Delhi and Kolkuta. The Research and Analysis Wing—RAW—India’s foremost investigative agency, issued a statement after the third bombing declaring he was the leader of Taweel Churi--The Long Knife. Many doubted this for the simple reason the group had never claimed responsibility for any of the attacks. Computer bloggers theorized he was everything from a Maoist Naxalite to an Al Quaida insurgent. One blogger even suggested he was a renegade CIA agent operating with a Special Ops team. That drew the best readership and most comments, but it was all speculation. What was clear to everyone was that he was well funded and had excellent resources. No one could describe him physically, but everyone could described his psychiatric profile correctly. He was, as they stated, an exceedingly vicious murderer. In that respect, they were all correct.

Sutradharak imagined himself differently. An masterful opportunist, geinus of disguise and diversion dwelling in the center of the flock. A bird of prey with a shadow no one saw even in the brightest sunlight.

He snapped the computer shut, disconnected the wires, and reset the baseboard that hid the high-speed connection behind the wall. Then he slid the laptop into a zip-lock, water-tight envelope and into a goatskin pouch. It appeared—for anyone caring to investigate—to contain only goat’s milk. Clever design, he thought to himself.

He rose quickly from the floor and stepped to the shuttered window. The loft was vacant of furniture other than the table and chairs, decorated only with cobwebs and the ubiquitous dust. Sutradharak hated the loft, as he hated the city, the noise, the stench, and all the people that moved like cattle within it. But hatred, like money, was an acceptable, if not desirable, commodity. Hatred created purpose.

Through the slats he peered down at the crush of humanity below. A corpse wrapped in shrouds of orange floated by on a platform of shoulders, the loved ones singing dirges and spreading flower petals along the path. With a turn to the east, the funeral snaked down a lane to the Ghats and the river. The PuppetMaster sneered. Another foul procession to the pyres. He had the urge to spit, but thought better of it. The less one left behind, the less one could be traced.

Just another rotting corpse. A rare smiled etched his lips. Well, he thought, soon there will be more, hundreds, perhaps thousands.

With that thought, he placed a felt hat upon his head and a jerkin about his shoulders. He lifted the goatskin pouch and climbed down the ladder to the warehouse.

Four

I saw my teacher well before he saw me.

Master Devi was bent over a rosewood cane on the sidewalk beneath a withered acacia tree on the left side of the Grand Trunk Road. He wore a white dhoti folded into his waist to reveal two knobby knees and a pair of hideously green plastic sandals. A white kurta and a black vest, shiny from use, hung on his shoulders. Foot traffic flowed like river on the sidewalk behind him. He paid no attention. He was peering into every black and yellow autorickshaw that sputtered down the road, and as usual, he wore an expression of impatience.

Jatanaka Devamukti, Devi as I called him, had an uncanny resemblance to a bird of prey, more specifically, a vulture. His nose was large and curved like a bow from the center of his eyes to a point just above his upper lip. With bifocals, it gave him the appearance of a bespectacled condor.

His face drooped from eye sockets to his chin, all of it framed by massive ears that folded forward like a pachyderm’s. Fortunately the over-sized ears and the enormous proboscis offset one another just enough to keep him from looking completely outlandish.

The inequities of his appearance, however, were quickly forgotten when one looked into his eyes; they bored into you with the disdain of the truly brilliant. He was unquestionably one of the greatest Sanskrit pundits in all of South Asia.

Bony hands and delicate fingers gave him an appearance of frailty. He wasn’t. At seventy-four he had the stamina of a much younger man, and ostensibly the semen to match. Twenty-two years earlier, at the age of fifty-two, he had fathered Sukshmi. And the gods, clearly noting his features, had taken every precaution to prevent them from besmirching his daughter. She was one of the most beautiful young women in the city.

I tapped the driver of my bouncing tin can on the shoulder and motioned him towards the curb. Masterji, seeing my silhouette in the back, looked immediately at his watch. The autorick swerved left and jolted to a stop in front of his sandals. “You are late, Vidyarthi.” No 'hello.' No 'how are you today,’ just the reprimand.

My teacher, one learned quickly, detested modern innovation and most forms of machinery. Definitely all forms of technology. Gadgetry, he fumed, was the clearest testament the world was galloping headlong to its final days. The only post-Victorian invention he deemed worth a damn was the well-aged Timex secured to his wrist with blue plastic straps.

On occasion I had gone with him to market and watched as he slapped his cane about like a machete, clearing paths through the human jungle in front of him. He would glance impatiently at his watch and mutter nonstop about the tardiness of the merchants. His Timex, he boasted, gave the correct hour down to the second. I knew better. It was stem wound, needed adjustment every two days, and crept into the future like an H. G. Wells contraption. This kept the entire world lagging two minutes behind Masterji. My watch, being a few decades newer and of the quartz crystal variety, was a tad more accurate, but rather than contradict him as we idled in the street, I asked my driver, “Bai, what hour is it?” Drivers lived by their watches. His was hanging from a plastic garland at eye level.

With a wag of the head he pronounced, “It is six fifty-seven, Sahib.” He looked with hesitation at my teacher and added, “I have set the hour this very morning when I went to temple.” That added precision to his claim and a certain religious element that even my teacher couldn't dispute.

Devi wagged his head in grumpy resignation. “Humph . . . very well.” Then, pitching a bundle onto my lap, he settled onto the narrow seat next to me and leaned forward to point across the young man’s shoulder. “Take us by the Azamgarh Road northeast fourteen kilometers, then six more to the entrance of Imperial Mining. Do you know it, my man?” He then added that he himself knew the route and not to try anything circuitous.

“Yes, Sir. Indeed.” With a wrench of the throttle the autorick lurched into the Sunday traffic, spilling us backwards and sending two cyclists swerving wildly.

I lifted my knapsack from the seat to offer more space, and as we were now rolling somewhat cheerfully along, asked, “Master, where are we headed exactly? Soma only said that we are going to a cave somewhere past Sarnath. Do you have a nice day hike planned for us?” I was joking about the hike and fishing for information.

His eyes locked onto the back of our driver’s head to be sure the man was attending to the road and not our conversation. He lowered his voice to an unnecessary whisper--the coughing of motor caused enough racket to thwart any attempt at eavesdropping. Masterji also spoke in English, which our driver knew less than twenty words of. Turning to me with an odd gleam in his eyes, he said, “There has been a most fortuitous discovery, Bhimaji. It could be quite significant if it is what we think it is.” I waited. That was usually good policy with my teacher; wait until things were explained in his own time and manner. “Only C.G. Chandragupta and I have had the opportunity to view it, and I only from two hasty sketches C.G. made three days ago. That is why I wanted you to accompany me today, so that we might look at it together. You have brought your camera, yes?” I nodded enthusiastically and waited for more.