Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (13 page)

She turned to me, her eyes glistening, tears bright in the rays of the sinking sun.

“You really should leave,” she said. “I’m telling you this as a friend. As someone who likes you and respects you and doesn’t want to see you get sucked into something you may not be able to get out of. It’s too late for me, probably. I’m in too deep. I’m compromised. You’re not, not yet. Quit while you still can. Just tell the Trinity you’re done, time to go. I can’t see them objecting. Part on good terms with them and go back to your life and enjoy the money you’ve made and don’t think about any of this any more.”

“You’re serious.”

“As cancer.”

“But... What
is
going on here, Aanandi? What am I missing?”

She tried to rise. She failed twice but managed it the third time. “I can’t tell you. Won’t. For your own good. Just take my advice. Please, Zak.”

She sealed the request with a clumsy kiss on my forehead, and then she was gone, shambling down the beach with the beer cooler tucked under one arm, and I just sat there, puzzled and nonplussed, watching her walk off.

I had been given a warning. Unambiguously.

But about what?

Doubts were niggling at me. As though I’d sensed all along that something was off-kilter at Mount Meru, that the whole setup here was fundamentally unsound, but I had chosen to ignore my misgivings until now. The phrase “too good to be true” came to mind. And “gift horse.”

With the Dashavatara, the Trinity were perpetrating a kind of lie, letting people believe they were one thing when they were actually another.

In which case, what else might they be lying about? Aanandi seemed to have been hinting that there was more than met the eye here, that there were secrets to be worried about. Was that why the Pakistani planes had harassed the
Garuda
? Did the Pakistani government have intelligence about Mount Meru that was giving them cause for concern?

The sun swelled and bloated. A palm swayed nearby in the cooling onshore breeze. Waves lapped at my feet. My brain churned.

Suddenly I was not happy at all.

Nothing seemed right.

Paranoid in paradise.

15. THE OZYMANDIAS SOLUTION

T
HERE’S A SEQUENCE
in
Watchmen
– the graphic novel, not the movie – where a bunch of writers, artists and scientists are on a remote Pacific island, working on what they have been led to believe is a Hollywood movie featuring some kind of spectacular special-effects alien creature. It turns out that what they’ve instead been doing is creating the giant tentacled psychic monster thing which Ozymandias, the book’s messianic nutjob baddie, uses at the end to shock the US and the USSR out of their brinkmanship and pull the world back from imminent nuclear Armageddon. Before that, though, the freighter on which the writers, artists and scientists are having a wrap party is blown up, killing them all. They are witnesses to Ozymandias’s plan, potential liabilities. They could blow the whistle on his audacious hoax, and so they must be got rid of.

This scenario played on continuous repeat in my head. Could it happen here? Were the Trinity ruthless megalomaniacs like Ozymandias, and once we Mount Meru minions had fulfilled our purpose would we too be cold-bloodedly eliminated?

Leaving the island was nigh-on impossible. Other than the cargo seaplane which brought supplies twice weekly from Malé, and of course the
Garuda
, there was no form of transportation on or off. What’s more, nobody I knew of had actually left. I presumed this was because nobody had asked to or been invited to yet. Would consent be granted if anyone did want to go? Were we all being kept here in a gilded cage,
Prisoner
-fashion? Were we sitting complacently like sheep, happy in our pens, blissfully unaware of the coming slaughter?

I spent days in a state of dire anticipation, wishing I had never read
Watchmen
.
¹

I suppose I could have gone to the Trinity and let them know I was thinking about escaping, although of course I would call it “heading homeward.” But here’s the thing. They were pretty much inaccessible. They had apartments at the hub of Mount Meru, in its tallest central section. They ran the show from there and seldom ventured out into the complex’s surrounding rings, at least not any more, not since the Dashavatara had gone public. They’d been in the habit of popping over to visit us lowly subordinates, show their faces, rally the troops, once a day on average. But not now. Now they were remote and hard to reach. Even the odd email I sent them went unacknowledged.

And the inner reaches of the complex were
verboten
to the majority of the workforce, including me. Past the middle ring of the seven you needed a special swipe card to gain access. I found this out the hard way while roaming one afternoon. At the far end of a skybridge I came to a door that wouldn’t open. I wrestled with it for a while, which drew me to the attention of a security officer, who politely but firmly steered me back the way I had come, saying I didn’t have the appropriate clearance to go any further. I would have got snitty with him if he had been a twat about it, but the guy was niceness itself, which kind of spiked my guns. I enquired who
did
have clearance, and he told me it was above his pay grade to know the answer to that and above mine to ask.

Naturally, knowing there were parts of the island where certain members of personnel weren’t entitled to go fuelled my paranoia. The obvious, reasonable explanation was that the Trinity had cards they wanted to play very close to their chests. They couldn’t have everyone on the premises knowing everything they were up to. It wasn’t sound business sense. All corporations compartmentalised, especially those with crucial proprietary interests they wanted to protect. Coca-Cola and their ingredient “Merchandise 7X,” for example, or the Chartreuse monks and their recipe of herbs and flowers, or Disney and Uncle Walt’s cryogenically frozen head. The Avatars and theogenesis were the Trinity’s. I could see why they’d prefer not to have random bods like me tramping through the hush-hush corners of their empire, intruding where we didn’t belong, potentially stumbling on trade secrets we could sell to their rivals.

But I didn’t like being excluded, and I really didn’t like the feeling that the Trinity were pursuing some sort of hidden agenda, especially if it was one that might lead them to copy Ozymandias’s method of tying up loose ends. Ignorance, in this instance, was
not
bliss.

I began identifying people who might work in Meru’s inner recesses. Some of the computer techies, for instance, I was sure spent their daylight hours in the third ring. They were secretive about what they did, and had a slightly superior air. But then so did a lot of programmers.

One of them turned out to be a comics reader and a fan of my work, so I sounded him out, quizzing him casually about what he did. He wouldn’t be drawn. He just kept shrugging and saying it was a job, nothing more. I even drew him a sketch of She-Hulk in a lingerie-clad lesbian clinch with Storm out of the X-Men, since he confessed that this had been one of his masturbation fantasies as a teenager.
²
He was delighted with the gift, but it didn’t get me any further. The ingrate.

Another guy, some sort of nurse or medical orderly, was similarly tight-lipped. I cornered him in one of the bars and bought him a drink, but every time I steered the subject round towards his role at Mount Meru he just brushed it aside. “I’m just here in case anyone gets hurt,” was all he would offer. “Avatars, humans, whoever. They get broken, I help fix them.” He then asked me if I was single, and I went into a tailspin of embarrassment. Talk about misinterpreted signals.

It was frustrating. Everyone was being so damn discreet. No one was letting slip even the smallest clue. These people knew more than I did, but they weren’t sharing. Probably they were getting paid big bucks not to, or else they’d signed confidentiality agreements with penalties even more swingeing than the one I’d signed.

So I did something I am still not proud of.

I nicked Aanandi’s swipe card.

I didn’t plan to. I am not that much of a schemer. I certainly never went to her room with the express intention of purloining the swipe card. Until I spotted it on the floor I wasn’t even aware that she had one, although why shouldn’t she? Let’s just call it a crime of opportunity.

I knocked on her door, toting a six-pack of Tiger from the canteen. My aim was nothing more than to have a drink and a chat with her. Maybe I could get her to open up a bit more about the Trinity and their overarching goal. Maybe I was hoping to get her squiffy, lower her defences, then put the Zak Bramwell moves on her. I wouldn’t be sorry if either approach got a result. I swear, though, that I had nothing devious or treacherous in mind.

No answer to my knock, so I tried the door handle. Perhaps she was in the en suite bathroom having a shower. “Coming in!” I announced. “Only me!” The door wasn’t locked, you see. So, arguably, my stealing the swipe card was all her fault. If only she’d been a little more security conscious.

Her room was empty. It smelled of fragrance and the overall spring-freshness that women’s rooms tend to have. It was tidy, too: the bed made, the clothes put away, not a chair or trinket out of place. A far cry from the malodorous, unruly pit I’d allowed my own room to become.

There were framed photos on the vanity unit, one of a bushily bearded Indian man with kindly, soulful eyes, another of the same man next to a graceful woman in a sari and headscarf with a bright red bindi on her forehead, he kissing her cheek, she hugging him. Aanandi’s father and mother, had to be. They looked a sweet couple, very much in love, very much unlike my own argumentative parents whose marriage had ended when I was eleven in a divorce so acrimonious that neither of them even spoke to the other for the next five years. I envied her them.

There were no sounds from the bathroom. I was conscious of being where I shouldn’t be, trespassing. I knew I should get out of there in case the rightful resident turned up and caught me.

But I couldn’t go just yet. I stayed, looking round at Aanandi’s things in a creepy, slightly stalkerish manner. I studied the books on her shelf, mostly textbooks on Hinduism, including two she had authored herself,
The Field Of Truth: A New Perspective On The Bhagavad Gita
and the catchily titled
Brahma’s Lotus: Eastern Tradition Through Western Eyes
. I lingered beside her laptop, then accidentally-on-purpose hit a key so that her desktop popped up onscreen, although there was nothing of note there, just the usual icons. I even, God help me, checked in a couple of drawers in the hope of snatching a glimpse of underwear.

I realise this makes me seem like a pervert, but I’m not – I was simply doing what any red-blooded heterosexual male might have in those circumstances. I justified it to myself by telling myself that I was getting to know her better, covertly gleaning extra info about her which I could use to my advantage later.
³

Then my gaze happened upon the swipe card, which Aanandi had left under the desk chair.

Did I say “left”? Clearly she had dropped it by accident. Most likely it had slipped out of her pocket the last time she’d sat down to work at her laptop, and she didn’t even know she hadn’t got it on her right now.

I reckon that was what prompted me to pick it up and shove it into my own pocket: the conviction that Aanandi had already in a sense lost the swipe card and so would not be suspicious if she returned to her room and couldn’t find it. Had it been sitting somewhere obvious, somewhere it was meant to be – on the bedside table, say – then I wouldn’t have touched it. She would notice, would realise someone had snaffled it. As things were, I stood a decent chance of getting away with the theft.

No, not theft, I insisted to myself. I was merely taking temporary custody of the swipe card. I would put it back when I was done with it.

I crept out of the room and tiptoed down the corridor, super-furtive, like a spy. No one saw me.

The swipe card had Aanandi’s photo on it.

It stated that she was Clearance Level Beta.

It was mine.

¹
See, kids? Comics
are
bad for you.