THE STERADIAN TRAIL: BOOK #0 OF THE INFINITY CYCLE (16 page)

34

T
hey sat for a while in stunned silence, punctuated by the squeaking of the fan and the odd screeching of monkeys on the trees outside. Two people had died after attending his conference and Lakshman was in as much of a daze as Joshua.

It was Joshua who spoke first.

‘This cop Carla’s been holding back on me,’ he said.

‘Since when did you start expecting cops to tell you everything they know? From each according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s need,’ Lakshman said. ‘Do you think Jeffrey knew about his death?’

‘Most likely. Especially if he was involved in it.’

‘You mean Jeffrey could have been behind Simon’s death?’ Lakshman asked.

‘I can’t rule out anything at this stage,’ Joshua said. ‘It could’ve been Jeffrey, it could’ve been somebody else. We really can’t be sure unless we know how much Simon knew about Jeffrey or to what extent Jeffrey had involved him.’

‘If it were somebody else, then Jeffrey might have suspected he was in danger too.’

‘That’s possible. But it’s equally possible that he thought it was an accident. That’s what it looks like on the face of it. The report clearly indicates a high alcohol level in the blood.’

‘Yeah,’ Lakshman said. ‘Is that common? People going for a swim after a drink and drowning?’

‘It’s not unheard of. Perhaps not as much as drunk-driving but it happens more frequently than you would expect: Grad student going partying with friends at night, then going for a swim, and the next thing, is found dead in the pool next morning. It’s an all too familiar story,’ Joshua said.

‘But how was he killed without any traces or marks left on his body? I’m sure the cops there would have done a thorough investigation before ruling out foul play.’

Joshua shrugged. ‘If he was drunk, he might not have been able to fight back too much when he was held under water.’

Pause.

‘So what do we do now?’ Lakshman asked.

‘Connect to my mail server and check my email like I was planning to originally,’ Joshua said.

‘Right. Forgot about that,’ said Lakshman. ‘Why don’t we go to the lab? I’ll set you up with someone who can help you hook up to your server.’

Lakshman led Joshua into the lab with some hesitation. The smell wasn’t as noxious as it had been the previous day, but it still lingered. The floor could easily do with another lick of Dettol water. Making a mental note to ask Mahendran to get the cleaners, he looked around for a trusty hand from his team. The first person his eyes rested on was Biju John. The poor fellow had been waiting for an audience with him since morning. Lakshman had finished reading his thesis and summoned him to his office to give feedback. But between chasing Pomonia’s hat size and clues for Joshua, he hadn’t found the time to see Biju. He’d asked him to wait in the lab and promised to fetch him as soon as he was free.

Biju stood up expectantly when he saw Lakshman entering the lab. Lakshman was about to draft him for Joshua’s business but changed his mind when Divya stumbled into his roving gaze.

The girl was working at her favourite terminal by the far end windows, oblivious to his arrival. She had played hooky at home once again and come down to the department, much to Meenakshi’s consternation. She had gone to bed last night thinking that the write-up for Joshua was more or less done and she would stay home today and help her mother in the kitchen and also chip in a few hundred
Sri Ramajayam
s. But she woke up in the morning with a new flash of inspiration which promised to greatly embellish her proof of the algorithm and improve the exposition of the paper. She was so excited she didn’t even stop to browse the newspaper for weekend movie releases as she had been planning to do. She stuffed two puffy idlis into her mouth and zipped away on her Scooty before Meenakshi got the chance to kick off her harangue.

Lakshman walked up to Divya and asked her to help Joshua link up to his server. He asked Biju to vacate his terminal for Joshua and meet him in his office to discuss his thesis. Biju gladly obliged and followed Lakshman back to his office sporting a big smile on his face which would get wiped away the very moment he saw his thesis looking like a victim of some gruesome accident, each page bloodied with comments and corrections in red ink.

Divya took down the details of the server from Joshua and began typing. After a few false starts she asked Joshua to key in his password. Seconds later, he found himself staring at his mailbox.

He thanked her and let her return to her post near the windows and began plodding through the mailbox, burning in anticipation.

Pampered over the years on the PC, Joshua had difficulty navigating his mailbox in UNIX. But he got the hang of it gradually. His inbox was inundated with thousands of emails that had accumulated over the course of the last six weeks, not counting all the junk swept away into a separate folder. There was no easy way for him to filter out emails that contained words like Jeff, Jeffrey or Williams and he began scanning through them one by one, starting with the latest. But he lost patience after a while and decided to try a different tack, sorting the mails by the sender and running through them, leapfrogging from sender to sender . . .

But there was no mail from Jeffrey to be found.

On a hunch he tried searching for Edwin Miller and Simon Thathachari next . . .

But there was no trace of them either.

Unsure what to do, he sorted the mails by the date and began skimming through them, this time starting with the oldest.

He spotted an email from Nancy with the innocuous title ‘library request’ in the subject bar. She had explicitly tagged the mail as low priority and Joshua’s first instinct was to skip it and move on, but something made him open it. A word in the main text hit him in the eye and sent an eerie tingle down his spine: TDU.

35

Dear Josh,

As you are aware, a copy of the English transcript of your old interview with Mrs Ammal has been kept in the Wiener library along with the original audio-tape. The old tape in the library has been damaged and the Wiener folks have been trying to reach you to make a new copy to fulfil an inter-library loan request from TDU. Since it’s going to be a while before you return from India, they asked me if I could make them a copy from your records. I didn’t see any harm in doing it as you have already placed everything in the public domain. So I just went ahead and fulfilled their request without waiting for your return. I hope you are okay with this. I just wanted to let you know in any case.

Thanks,

Regards

Nancy

‘Oh my God!’ Joshua gasped. Something Durai had said suddenly started making sense to him. Jeffrey had not come down south as a rubbernecking backpacker. Lakshman was totally wrong about that. And so was Carla, about 70209. ‘Oh my God!’

All heads turned in Joshua’s direction, Divya’s included: What was wrong with him?

Once Joshua managed to calm down, he called Divya to his terminal and asked her to print out a copy of the email for him. He snatched the printout before it was even fully out of the printer and dashed out of the lab.

Without even bothering to knock first, he opened Lakshman’s office door and shoved the printout in his friend’s face. ‘Take a look at this!’

Lakshman was in the middle of a discussion with Biju John, the latter’s thesis spread open on the desk. He put on his reading glasses and started reading as a bewildered Biju looked on.

Lakshman was gasping for breath within seconds. ‘Oh my God! . . . I don’t believe it!’

‘Remember everything Durai said?’ Joshua asked.

‘Very much,’ Lakshman said. ‘Everything makes sense now. I thought it was
we
who were going after him, but it was
he
who has somehow been after us all this time.’

‘So are you going to pack a toothbrush and go fishing in the waters of the Cauvery with me or –’

‘Or? Of course I’m going with you,’ Lakshman cut him short.

He quickly sent Biju away with his bloodied thesis and asked Joshua to sit down.

‘When do we leave?’ Lakshman asked.

‘You tell me,’ said Joshua. ‘Is tonight a good time? How long does it take to get there?’

‘Yes, tonight will be good time to start. We’ll get there in the morning.’

‘This guy Durai says he knows the routes inside out. He even offered to take me on a tour. Should we take him or call someone else?’

‘I’d rather not trust these hotel drivers with night-time driving on the highway. Or any driver for that matter. We’ll have no idea what they do once we doze off in the seat. By the time we wake up we may have arrived in heaven already.’

‘Then how do we travel? I’m sure there’s no airport nearby.’

Lakshman nodded. ‘Train would be best, but it’s too late to make a reservation for tonight. All things considered, bus is the best option we’ve got. They may not be as great as your Greyhound, but if we get an AC coach it shouldn’t be too bad. If you’re okay with that, I can call my travel agent and book the tickets.’

‘Sounds good. Go ahead, book the tickets,’ Joshua said. ‘I’ll tell Becky and work on other things.’

‘Okay then.’

‘Speaking of other things,’ Joshua said. ‘Do you have a copy of the book? I think it might be useful.’

‘No, I don’t have it. Haven’t read it at all, to tell you the truth; I’ve only heard of it.’

‘I think we should try to get our hands on a copy.’

‘The library may have a copy here, but it should be available in the bookshops – Higginbotham’s or Landmark on Mount Road.’

‘Okay, I’ll go check them out in the afternoon. If I don’t find it, maybe you could check with the library here. I’ll call you.’

‘Okay.’

‘Another thing,’ said Joshua. ‘Do you have a copy of the transcript?’

‘Yes. I should have both the transcript and the tape and all the notes I made at the time.’

‘Great! I thought I was the packrat here. You aren’t so bad yourself.’

Lakshman rose from his chair and made for a shelf lined with box files and folders. He panned through the racks, browsing the spine labels and homed in on a file whose sticker read ‘R Old’.

‘I keep all the stuff in this,’ he said and pulled the box out. It slid off the rack with surprising ease. Flinching a little, Lakshman took a peek inside.

He was right.

He twisted around and placed it on the table for Joshua to
see . . .

‘Oh my God!’ Joshua gasped.

36

T
he box was empty.

His heart thumping faster, Lakshman scoured through other files with an ‘R’ label and then all other labels. But what he was looking for was nowhere to be found in his office.

And then it hit him: something that happened during the conference.

Lakshman was on his way to a plenary one morning and had come rushing to his office to pick up his visiting cards when the door lock opened without so much as a click, before he even fully twisted the key in. Suspecting something amiss he ran his eyes around. His desk and the shelves looked a little messy, but then they were always like that, especially these days when the conference preparations were driving him crazy. As he was in a bit of a hurry then he went in for a quick litmus test, checking the most valuable possessions in the room: his laptop, desktop and the petty cash he had stowed in the drawer. All three were intact and so he had presumed that in all the hustle and bustle about the conference he had not locked the door properly the previous day and left it at that.

When Lakshman mentioned this incident to Joshua, he said, ‘Looks like our friend’s paid a little visit to your office as well.’

‘He must have, to take exactly what was needed,’ Lakshman said. ‘Should not have been too difficult. Come around dinnertime, bring along someone to pick the lock and watch the door while you go in and do what you want.’

‘Do you have any other copies?’ Joshua asked.

‘No, I kept whatever I had in this,’ Lakshman pointed at the empty box file.

‘Never mind, I’ll ask Nancy to email us the transcript. I have several copies sitting around. I’ll have her cc you as well, just in case.’

‘Why don’t you also ask her to send us the tape if possible?’

‘You really mean that?’ Joshua said. ‘Seems like overkill to me.’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Lakshman. A monkey screeched outside and Lakshman picked up on that. ‘See, even the monkey agrees with me. Think about it, why did he take the trouble of asking for the Tamil tape when the English translation of the whole thing was readily available on paper?’

‘My point exactly,’ Joshua said. ‘He couldn’t have made head or tail of it.’

‘
He
couldn’t have. But remember who he had with him,’ Lakshman said. ‘Simon Thathachari. Narasimhan Simon Thathachari.’

‘Jeez!’ Joshua said. ‘Okay, I’ll ask her to Fedex us the tape as well.’

‘Maybe she could convert it into an audio-file and upload it to your homepage or something. We can download and play it here. It’ll be faster than Fedex.’

‘Good idea,’ Joshua said. ‘Converting the tape to MP3 may take her time but it’ll still be faster than Fedex. By the time we’re back we should at least have the transcript waiting for us on email. That’ll be something to go on. Let me call her right away.’

One glance at his dual-dial Rolex and Joshua dropped the idea. ‘It’s middle of the night in Boston now. I’ll just drop her an email.’

Joshua returned to the lab, dashed off an email to Nancy and went in search of the bookshops on Mount Road, promptly trailed by the men on the motorbike. He was already well out of the campus when he realized that in all the chaos he had forgotten the second item on his original agenda: searching for the Sulba Sutra paper in his mailbox. But it was too late to turn back now.

37

M
uch of Joshua’s evening was taken up by the next round of police inquiry into the disappearance of his laptop. Joyshankar Banerjee lined up the hotel staff in batches and asked Joshua if he suspected any of them. Nobody was spared. Cleaners, concierges, guards, desk workers and drivers – Durai Raj included – were paraded past Joshua. The cleaner whisked away yesterday had been released and was on leave to rest and recuperate.

The investigation wasn’t going anywhere and Joshua could see that. He was upset about the laptop but felt bad for the hotel staff. He knew almost all of them were innocent. There could be a black sheep or two but there was no way he could figure who it was. He just shook his head and let them all go.

With Joshua’s permission, Banerjee had his men turn the suite inside out for any clues they might have missed earlier. When it seemed to go nowhere, he began probing Joshua about his laptop, asking him about its contents. What kind of data was stored in it? What kind of documents? Anything particularly important? Who might be interested in them? . . . The questions made Joshua squirm; it was not for nothing that he had taken the precaution of partitioning the laptop’s
hard disk to create a strong room for sensitive files including the Sulba Sutra paper, encrypting and firewalling it with three layers of passwords. He answered Banerjee’s questions as generically and vaguely as he could, but he couldn’t dodge a seasoned cop for long. When Banerjee started to probe deeper, he had no choice but to bluntly refuse to get more specific. It was close to dinnertime when Joshua finally managed to get Banerjee and his men off his back.

He returned to the suite after dinner and updated Becky on the latest developments, telling her about his travel plans and asking her not to worry if she couldn’t reach him in the hotel for a day. Lakshman was going to pick him up on the way to the bus terminus and he got busy packing his travel kit. He was more or less done stuffing his duffel bag and packing his camera on top when the phone rang.

Thinking it was Lakshman reminding him to wait in front of the hotel, he picked up the phone and said hello.

‘Hello, Doc,’ said a familiar female voice at the other end. ‘How come you’re back so early in your room?’

‘Do they pay you to keep tabs on me from there?’ Joshua said. ‘Even if they did, how do you do it?’

‘I try to reach you around this time every day, but you’re never in, so I end up waking you in middle of the night,’ Carla said. ‘I got lucky today.’

‘You really did,’ Joshua said. ‘A couple more minutes and I wouldn’t have been here to take your call. What’s up? I’m sure you’re calling me for a reason.’

‘I managed to call all your students downtown,’ Carla said. ‘That is not to say all of them were willing to talk to me. Four of them did without any reservation as soon as I mentioned your name.’

‘What did they say?’

‘That their fraud numbers haven’t gone way out of whack recently or in the last couple of years. Their pain in the neck apparently is the internet. Online fraud’s been going up and up, but it’s just the nature of the business and nothing unexpected.’

‘What about the three other guys? Who are they and what did or didn’t they say?’

‘Maggie Tang, Peter Ashdown and Ron Edgerton, they refused to get into any discussion with me. Even mentioning your name didn’t work.’

‘No wonder they work in Risk Management,’ said Joshua. ‘Don’t trust anybody.’

‘They said if you wanted to pick their brain, you’d call yourself,’ Carla said.

Joshua couldn’t help laughing a little.

‘So do you mind?’ Carla said.

‘Me?’ said Joshua. ‘Just because I’m in India right now doesn’t mean you can outsource all your grunt work to me.’

‘I’d appreciate it if you could. It’s not just Mr Williams, it’s two dead people we’re dealing with: Mr Williams and his grad student Simon. Simon was found in a pool. Dead.’

Joshua was hardly shocked or surprised. ‘So you’re finally opening your cards to me now?’

‘You know about Simon?’ Carla asked, surprised.

‘The news is all over the TDU website.’

‘Any chance you knew Simon?’ Carla asked sharply.

‘No, never heard of him,’ Joshua said.

‘So do you mind?’ Carla asked, her tone quickly moving down the register.

‘I don’t have a problem talking to my students, but I’m not sure if it’s going to help,’ Joshua said. ‘I suspect there’s something else going on.’

‘You mean to say there’s no salami slicing and stuff going on? It’s all baloney?’

‘I’m not saying anything, steak or salami or baloney. I really can’t tell anything right now. It could be something very different. It may not have much to do with money.’

‘Come on,’ Carla said. ‘What else can drive people to kill if not money?’

‘Revenge, for one. Fame, for another.’

‘Are you holding something back from me? You sound so sure.’

‘Let me just say for now that I’m going down a different road here.
I’ll let you know if I stumble onto anything.’

‘Come on, Doc, don’t hold back on me. Give me some clue.’

‘If you insist,’ Joshua said. ‘Say a little-known patent clerk in Switzerland shows a crook E equals mc
2
and how, what would the crook do?’

Carla paused. ‘You’re talking in riddles, Doc. Could you be a bit more specific? Give me a little more?’

‘Seven o’ two o’ nine,’ Joshua said. ‘It’s not really seventy and twenty and nine.’

‘What do you mean?’ Carla said. ‘I listened to the recording myself. He seemed to be mentioning three numbers, seventy . . . twenty . . . nine. That’s what popped up in the voice recognition software as well.’

‘It’s seven-
teen
not seventy and twenty-nine, not twenty and nine. You may not have heard it right because he was out of his breath. It’s not three separate numbers, it’s two at best, but in reality it’s just one.’

Carla paused again to process that. ‘Even so, what does it mean?’ she said. ‘Is that a password or combination or what?’

‘It’s not a password or combination, it’s a code,’ Joshua said and explained it.

‘Jeez, Doc. Looks like we have to open up another front in India,’ Carla said.

I’m in the middle of a theatre here, and here you are, thinking about opening a front only now,
thought Joshua.
‘Well, I’m already on it,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘Yup. But I don’t have anything right now. Give me a couple of days and I’ll call you back with something.’

‘I’ll be waiting, Doc,’ Carla said. ‘You should let me in on everything then.’

‘You bet,’ Joshua said. ‘But on one condition,’ he added, quick on the footwork.

‘You mean you want to remain anonymous and all that?’

‘That goes without saying. It’s not even a condition, it’s an assumption,’ said Joshua. ‘I’m talking about something else.’

‘I don’t think I follow, Doc.’

‘That’s precisely what I’m talking about,’ Joshua said. ‘You should stop calling me Doc.’

‘I’ll try to, Doc,’ Carla said, stifling a chuckle. ‘Can I call you Prof instead?’

‘No!’ Joshua bellowed. ‘J-O-S-H Josh. Just call me Josh.’