by J. F. Penn
Morgan walked slowly around the statue, examining it for any other markings. The bronze fire surrounding the god shone in the sun and it seemed as if he could step down from his pedestal at any moment and pound the earth with his heels. She could almost hear the ringing of the hollow bronze and feel the shaking of the ground beneath. The demon under Shiva's feet had an expression of horror as he was crushed, but the god remained calm and expressionless as he renewed creation.
On the back side of the sculpture, behind Shiva's right knee, Morgan noticed scratches in the metal. They were unusual, as the rest of it was so perfectly polished. She bent closer.
"Look at this," she called to Jake. "It looks like a row of numbers, a code of some kind: 2717389178042068."
Amit came closer and as he bent to look at the code, his face paled.
"It can't be," he whispered. "It's just … It must be the artist's mark, some kind of number representing the workshop where it was made." He turned away and Morgan could see that he was shaking. The code was certainly more than an artist's mark. She took a picture with her smart phone and sent it off to Martin Klein back at ARKANE.
"Perhaps you could tell us about the men who donated the statue," Jake said. "We're particularly interested in Vishal Kapoor."
Amit turned, his face still pale from the discovery.
"There's something–"
A gunshot split the air, cutting off his words. A metallic ping echoed from the statue as a bullet hit the bronze.
"Down!" Jake shouted, pulling Amit to the ground.
Morgan crouched low and scooted around the statue away from the direction of the gunfire. They had come unarmed to the research facility, but now she regretted the assumption of a purely academic visit.
She poked her head out quickly and then pulled back as more shots peppered the statue.
"We have to get inside," she said. "They'll be on us soon enough. Before security can get here, at least."
Amit was shaking and his hands clutched at Jake as he whispered desperate prayers.
"The numbers," he said, his voice shaking. "It can't be …"
He stood suddenly and ran towards the main building, stumbling as he pushed himself up. Jake lunged at him, his fingers brushing Amit's coat, but he couldn't get a grasp.
A single shot rang out.
The young scientist fell to the ground, clutching his leg as blood spurted out on the pathway. He screamed in pain.
Alarm bells began to ring and security guards emerged from the building, but Morgan knew that they wouldn't find the shooter. Whoever it was would be long gone, their warning delivered.
As security swarmed towards them. Martin's comments about a leak at ARKANE troubled her. Was this a warning to stop them proceeding any further with the search? Was Marietti in danger?
Jake put his hands on his head and Morgan followed suit. No point in making a scene. They'd be out of here soon enough once Martin got on the case.
"Amit was about to tell us something about Vishal Kapoor," Jake said. "We need to know more about his business and how it relates to nuclear energy."
"And what the hell does that code mean?" Morgan replied. "Hopefully Martin will be able to get something from it so we know where to go next."
Two hours later, after being questioned and searched and ultimately having Martin plead their case remotely to have them set free, Jake and Morgan walked out of CERN and caught a taxi back to the airport. A text came in on Jake's phone and he held it up for Morgan to see.
"It's from Martin," he said. "The code on the statue contained the latitude and longitude references for the Taj Mahal. He's just sorting out flights for Agra."
"I haven't been there for a long time," Morgan whispered, her voice trailing off as she looked out the window at the mountains in the distance.
She closed her eyes for a minute with her head turned away so Jake wouldn't see her expression. She had been to the Taj Mahal on honeymoon with her husband Elian, only months before he had been killed fighting on the Golan Heights. They had both been in the Israeli Defense Force and knew the risks, but their time together had been so brief. Sometimes she could barely summon Elian's face to her mind, let alone recall the touch of his skin on hers.
But the Taj … Morgan sighed softly. She remembered the romance of gazing up at the perfect dome under the full moon as they sailed along the Yamuna River, and later, the opulent hotel in Agra where they had lain entwined for the night. I will love you forever, Elian had whispered, like Shah Jahan loved his queen. But that great love had ended in tragedy too, and like Shah Jahan, she was the one left behind.
"Martin's arranged a military transport," Jake said, tapping on his phone and interrupting her memories. "We should just be able to make it to the airport in time."
Morgan brushed the hint of tears from her cheek and turned back to Jake. He looked over and grinned, his excitement at the thrill of the chase clear in his expression. Morgan couldn't help but smile back because she knew exactly how he felt. Despite all she had lost, ARKANE gave her more than adventure. It gave her a purpose.
It suddenly struck Morgan that she could summon Jake's face in her sleep now. They had worked together on enough missions and been through so much danger, seen so many unexplainable things. Together, they had experienced far more than she and Elian had ever been through because they had never directly worked together. Her husband had been stationed at the military front while she had worked as a psychologist between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Now she spent intense periods with Jake on missions.
There was a spark between them and they both knew it. But the danger they both put themselves in meant the likelihood of loss if they took things any further. Morgan worried so much about her twin sister Faye and her niece Gemma, whom she had endangered at Pentecost. After Elian's death and her father's murder, Morgan didn't think she could handle such a personal loss again.
Of course, she could always give up being an ARKANE agent and return to the University of Oxford as an academic. Life would be simpler and safer, but it would also be black and white. With Jake and ARKANE, she lived in technicolor.
Jake leaned over and showed her some pictures of the Taj on his phone. "It's amazing," he said. "I've always wanted to visit. Do you think one of the pieces could be there?"
"It's possible," Morgan said. "But the Taj attracts millions of visitors every year, and from what I remember, it's not full of obvious places to hide a piece of a statue."
"We'll work it out when we get there," Jake said. "Remember Santiago de Compostela in Spain? We didn't have a clue where the stone was hidden, and yet, we still found it, despite it being hidden for so long."
"You had way too much fun that day," Morgan said with a laugh, as she remembered Jake swinging on the chasuble rope, high up in the nave.
He took her hand in his and squeezed, his dark eyes suddenly serious. "We're a good team, Morgan. I'm glad we're doing this together."
Chapter 10
Asha walked into the penthouse office without knocking and breezed past the secretary with a cool glance that stopped the woman in her tracks. Mahesh had begun to use the main office before their father had died but now he had truly made it his own. He looked up as she came in and Asha noticed the dark shadows under his eyes.
"What is it?" he said, his voice tired.
"I hear you're heading to Chittagong," Asha replied.
Mahesh stood and ran his hands through his thick black hair. "Yes, I need to build better relationships with the heads of each industry sector." He looked at his watch. "I'm heading to the airport in an hour."
"I want to come," Asha said. "I've never seen the ship-breaking yards before."
Mahesh looked surprised. "I thought you'd focus on the lab and tech side of things now. I can handle manufacturing and mining. Let's face it, the ship-breaking yard is no place for a woman."
Asha bristled at his words, a retort on the tip of her tongue. But she held it in. She walked to the desk. Mahesh was using their fat
her's fountain pen, a Visconti inlaid with walnut wood. She leaned forward and picked it up, taking the cap off to admire the silver nib.
"He used this for all his legal documents," she said. "His private journals too."
"It's too big for your hand," Mahesh replied, plucking it from her fingers.
She let him take it, forcing herself to relax. She needed to keep him onside for just a little longer.
"We can't split everything between us," Asha said in a softer tone, her voice placating. "Father would have wanted us both to understand all aspects of the business. If you let me come to Chittagong, I'll escort you round the labs when we get back. I have some projects that will fascinate you." She paused for effect and then dropped her head, letting a glimmer of a tear glisten at the corner of her eye. "I miss him."
Mahesh rounded the desk and pulled her close, stroking her long hair. "I miss him too, Ash." He kissed the top of her head. "Let's not fight. I need your support as we go through this transitional period." Asha leaned against her brother and wrapped her arms around him in return. For a moment, she felt her father's warmth in his embrace. Then Mahesh stepped back. "Actually, I could use your help. The Board want me to look into a number of discrepancies. Father's illness put them off but now they want answers."
A chill ran through Asha at his words. The labs, the clinic, the Aghori, the hunt for the pieces of the statue, the Kali temple. All were secret, but there would be a money trail.
"What kind of things are they looking into?" she asked, her eyes wide with innocence.
"The details are all in that report." Mahesh pointed at a thick folder on the desk. "I'm going to skim it on the plane."
Asha's eyes darted to the report. She had to know what was in it. She still needed more time to get the rest of the statue and she could not be found out now.
Mahesh looked at his watch. "If you're coming, I'll meet you on the helipad in ten minutes and we'll head to the airport."
An hour later, they boarded the Kapoor private jet and were soon flying northeast towards Chittagong in Bangladesh, on the Bay of Bengal. It was a six-hour flight across the widest part of India, but at least they traveled in comfort. The stewardess brought refreshments over as Mahesh opened his briefcase and pulled out the Board report.
"How about I skim it and give you the highlights?" Asha said.
Mahesh smiled. "I'm glad to have you here, sis." He handed her the Board report. "Just make sure I can answer all their difficult questions."
They both settled into their respective work as the plane flew east. The hum of the engines soothed Asha as she concentrated on the dense text. Much of it was focused on the main business sectors but as she skimmed through, she found questions raised about funds diverted to her own projects.
Asha visualized the Board, those self-righteous, pompous men who gorged themselves on the profits of others, who had grown fat from the industry of the Kapoors and who now questioned how the company was run. But they had forgotten what lay beneath it all. They had forgotten the man who had scraped and worked his fingers to bloody stumps for his first few dollars. Vishal hadn't been afraid to get his hands dirty in order to build a future for his family, and Asha had every intention of making sure the company continued in that vein.
She worked through the report and by the time the plane descended, she had distilled it into a few pages of summary for Mahesh to read as well as recommended actions for the more innocuous projects. That should keep their attention elsewhere for a little while, Asha thought as she packed up the files and buckled up.
They soon landed in Chittagong, a natural harbor and major coastal seaport city that had seen the Portuguese trade here in the seventeenth century, later the Mughal Empire and then the British East India Company. It had become part of East Pakistan in 1947 after Partition of India, and the city had been the site of Bangladesh's Declaration of Independence in 1971.
Asha knew that her father had an emotional attachment to the ship-breaking yards here. He had been a fixer for various archaeological digs and that had led to him solving problems in many different industries, making relationships across huge cultural and logistical divides. He had become involved in the shipping industry and soon saw an opening for the thorny problem of disposal. Most commercial ships had a lifespan of twenty-five to thirty years, and then became uneconomical due to wear and tear.
Vishal always reused everything, finding ways to recycle even the smallest leftovers. She remembered how he had tinkered with their bikes in the early days of the business, soldering on extra parts he'd sourced from local scrapyards. She could only imagine her father's excitement when faced with a huge ship to break down.
Asha had only seen pictures of the huge rusting hulks in the shallow waters of the coast before. This was the first time she would see them with her own eyes. Could there be another piece of the statue here?
"I know Father would want us to keep the yards running," Mahesh said, as they both stared out the window of the car that drove them north out of the city to the coast. He reached for Asha's hand. "But there have to be changes now he's gone. You understand that, don't you?"
Asha heard the implication in his voice.
"Of course," she said. "Did you have anything specific in mind?"
"Your … guru." Mahesh spat the word. "If you want to be more involved in the running of the company, you have to get rid of him. We can't be associated with such extremism."
Asha pulled her hand from Mahesh's grasp. Her brother couldn't understand what the Aghori meant to her. She could still feel the touch of his bloody fingers on her skin. She could still hear his sacred words. Mahesh didn't know what they planned, so she just had to play for more time.
"As you wish." Mahesh looked over at her demure words and frowned a little. She looked back with wide eyes. "It's all about what's most important for the company now, I understand that."
Mahesh nodded and was silent for a moment.
"Nalika is pregnant," he said finally. "I meant to tell you, but it's not even three months yet, so we're keeping it quiet."
A dark stone settled in Asha's stomach. A baby would be seen as a success for Mahesh. He would be a responsible family man, a worthy successor to her father. The Board would sideline her. She couldn't let that happen.
She leaned in to give him a hug. "Congratulations," she said, beaming. "I'm so pleased. Did Father know?"
Mahesh shook his head. "I whispered it to him at the end but he didn't respond."
"He would have been pleased," Asha said. "Delighted."
She stared out the window again, focusing on the gulf to the west as they sped north on N1. Another child to add to a nation of over a billion people. What impact could that have on a global scale? None whatsoever. She would prove who was the more powerful sibling.
But time was ticking away.
They finally reached the ship-breaking yards, passed the armed guards and stepped out of the car into the heat of the late afternoon. The tang of burned metal and rust hung in the salty air with a greasy edge of oil that seemed to coat the back of Asha's throat. The dirty beach stretched into the distance with the hulks of old ships in the shallow waters, looming above the sand. Some were fully intact, ready to be picked over, others were just shells, stripped of every useful part. The names of the ships faded in the sun, the paint peeling away as they were returned to the elements.
Thousands of men worked here. They crawled through the beached container ships and oil tankers every day, breaking down everything to its component parts, ants under the gigantic propellers and barnacle-encrusted hulls. It was like the Towers of Silence in a way, Asha thought. That which has been created must be destroyed. Everything was reused here, in the same way that bodies were devoured by the raptor birds in the Parsi towers. She could see why her father had loved it here. It appealed on a visceral scale, an impressive testament to man's power over machine.
The foreman approached, taking his hard hat off as he greeted them. He shook Mahesh's h
and and gave Asha a respectful nod.
"I'm so sorry about your father," he said. "He came for an inspection only last year."
"We're here to make sure that everything continues smoothly," Mahesh said.
Asha put her hand on the foreman's arm.
"I want to see what my father did when he was here." Her lips trembled slightly. "I want to trace his footsteps through the yard."
A look of surprise crossed Mahesh's face at her emotional words but he remained silent.
"I'm sorry madam, but that's impossible," the foreman said, trepidation on his face. "Everything changes here by the day, as you can see. The ships come in periodically and every day those that are here disappear little by little. You cannot see what your father saw because it's all gone."
Asha looked out over the vista of metallic grey and noted the pools of rust and oil that slicked about the hulls of the ships. Where could her father have hidden the sculpture piece in these ever-shifting sands?
She nodded. "Of course, I understand, but please show me what you can. I want to see through his eyes."
"This way," the foreman said. "We can stay on the boardwalk and keep you out of the mud."
They followed him to the shoreline and onto the rough planks laid down at the edge of the sand.
Men traipsed back and forth through the black mud in bare feet or simple flip-flops. A group of them walked past with a heavy cable over their shoulders as they dragged it towards a newly arrived ship.
"They'll use that to winch pieces of the ship ashore," the foreman said. "We reuse a lot of the materials and chemicals and we find other special items, too. Your father liked to see those. He had his own special place to do it. Come, I'll show you."
A shrill cry suddenly rang out from one of the ships, taken up by the workers around it. The men shouted as they ran from the shoreline, arms waving in warning. A wrenching squeal of metal tore the air. One side of a nearby ship broke apart and a giant hunk of metal crashed to the sand. The noise was like a muffled explosion and the shock rippled under their feet.