The Eye of Shiva (6 page)

Lamont changed the subject.
"Nick, how's it going between you and Selena? When's the wedding?"

"You're asking me? How would I know?"

"Oh, oh. Like that, is it?"

"I never know where I stand with her," Nick said. He told them about what had happened earlier at the jewelry store. "I wanted to surprise her. I thought she'd be pleased."

"You surprised her all right," Ronnie said. "You should've just bought the ring and given it to her without taking her into the store."

"What if she didn't like it?'

"What if she didn't? Then you could just go back to the store with her and have her pick a ring she liked."

"But that's why I went in there with her in the first place."

"You know what your problem is?" Lamont said.

Nick was beginning to get annoyed, thinking about what had happened with Selena.

"No, I don't know what my problem is. Why don't you enlighten me?"

"
The problem is you're thinking like a guy instead of like Selena. A guy says to himself, self, I think I'll go in this store with my honey and buy a nice diamond ring. It's a jewelry store, right? Got to be a lot of rings in there. Shouldn't take long."

"So? What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing, so far. Where it went wrong was when you picked the first one you saw and said, 'let's get that one.'"

"It was a nice ring."

"That's got nothing to do with it," Lamont said. "That's how a guy shops. We go to a store, we see something that works and we buy it. We don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. Women don't do it that way."

Ronnie was nodding his head
in agreement.

"What was I supposed to do?"

"You were supposed to let her look at rings until she decided she wanted to think about it some more."

"But what's there to think about?
" Nick asked. "There must've been a hundred rings in that damn store. Any one of them would of worked."

Lamont turned to Ronnie. "See what I mean?"

"Hopeless," Ronnie said. He turned to Nick. "That's not what Selena wants."

"You, too? Okay, Einstein, what does she want?"

"She wants it to be special when she chooses a ring." It was Lamont's turn to nod his head. Ronnie continued. "You made it seem like buying a pair of socks."

Nick looked at his two friends and their serious expressions.

"I think you're wrong. I'm picking up on second thoughts about getting married."

"Hers or yours?" Lamont said.

CHAPTER
9

Jagadev Muhkerjee walked the grounds perimeter of the Indian Embassy in Manila and looked
again at his watch. It was a very nice watch, with a little button he could push to light the dial. It was 3:30 in the morning, a half hour from the end of his shift and exactly 2 1/2 minutes since the last time he'd looked.

Jagadev was bored and tired. He wanted nothing more than a quiet smoke and hours of sleep on his bunk in the security barracks. The night sounds of Manila were muffled by the trees and landscaping that made Dasmarani Village seem more like a rural estate than an enclave of important government buildings. Only the glow in the night sky was there to remind him that he was in the heart of one of the great cities of the world.

Jagadev wasn't really a soldier, even though he wore a jaunty beret and uniform and carried an Indian made 5.56 mm INSAS rifle that put out six hundred rounds a minute. Security guards for India's embassies abroad were civilians. It was a job, like any other security job. In difficult areas like Jammu and Kashmir, security fell on the shoulders of specially trained commandos. But Manila wasn't Kashmir. The main requirements were that the applicant be an Indian citizen, have had the proper security or military training and be able to deal as required with the constant stream of people visiting the Embassy.

He looked again at his watch. Another minute had passed.
A three-quarter moon cast pale light on the tropical flowers and trees of the embassy grounds. A few stars glimmered in the night sky, flickering in the smoggy haze thrown off by the city.

There was a garden bench tucked away in the far corner of the grounds, under the trees.
Jagadev decided not to wait until he went off duty to grab a cigarette. The bench and the overhanging branches of the trees were a perfect spot to take a minute and handle the nicotine edge that kept him looking at his watch. No one would see him there and no one would know that he'd taken a short break from his perimeter duty. He reached the spot, stepped into the shadows and took a cigarette from the pack concealed under his shirt. He lit it and took a long, satisfying drag.

There was a faint sound behind him
. A gloved hand covered his mouth as he started to lift the cigarette to his lips and pulled his head backward. There was a terrible, hot pain across his throat. Blood fountained into the night, spraying over the bench where the ambassador liked to sit for his afternoon meditations. Jagadev's last thought was only a confused, unspoken question.

The man who had just slashed Jagadev's throat was dressed
all in black. He had been born in the slums of Mumbai, back when the city was still called Bangalore. His name was Ijay. His ski mask concealed the discoloration of large, dark spots on his face. The spots had earned him the nickname
Tendu'a
, after the silent and deadly leopard that was feared throughout India. The elite unit of black op commandos he led was known as the Leopards.

Ijay
had three kilos of Semtex high explosive in a backpack. He signaled the others. Four men in black with identical packs emerged from the shrubs and trees and fanned out at a run toward the back of the embassy. No one would miss the guard for several minutes. There was more than enough time to plant the charges and melt back into the trees before anyone saw them.

They
worked quickly, placing enough high explosive to take out most of the building. When the Semtex detonated, the wall and the back of the embassy would cease to exist. The ambassador's quarters were on the second floor in the back, directly over one of the charges. Only a miracle would save him.

As he worked,
Ijay thought about how all that Semtex was going to make one hell of an explosion. He wondered why an embassy of his own country had been chosen for the target, but it didn't matter. It wasn't his place to question orders. As long as he was creating chaos, Ijay was happy.

The others finished setting charges
. Ijay gave the signal to arm the detonators. In a movement they had practiced over and over, all five men knelt and triggered the timers at the same instant. All five rose as one and headed back for the cover of the trees. In seconds they were gone from sight.

Prakash Khanna had watched the entire operation
from his hiding place in the shrubbery on the side of the grounds. He waited until the quiet of the early morning was shattered by the explosion. The back of the Indian Embassy rose toward the sky in a geyser of fire and stone. A billowing cloud of smoke and dust rolled out over the green lawn as bits and pieces of the building fell back to earth. The cloud thinned and Khanna saw that more than half of the embassy was gone. The remaining floors and rooms gaped at him like an open mouth with crooked teeth.

The ambassador never could have survived that,
Khanna thought. His lip curled in unconscious contempt. The man had been a pawn of the Americans, a weakling, just like the Prime Minister. Unwilling to do what needed to be done, to take the steps necessary to eliminate the Pakistani threat once and for all.

In the distance, Khanna heard the first siren.
Time to go
, he thought. He walked to where the crumpled body of the guard lay by the secluded bench. The stench of voided bowels filled the night. Khanna held his finger under his nose, reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of Pakistani cigarettes. He tossed the cigarettes into the bushes near the guard. He'd already filed false intelligence reports to New Delhi about a possible ISOK incident in Manila. Along with the Filipino report about ISOK's involvement with Abu Sayyaf, it should be enough to point the finger at them and at Pakistan.

Before the Partition of 1947
, Khanna's family had lived in Lahore, now part of Pakistan. The family had lost everything, choosing to leave rather than live under Muslim rule. His grandfather had died a bitter man. His father had taught him that Muslims were evil and Khanna had seen nothing to make him change his mind. Pakistan was the enemy, a thief that had stolen his ancestral home. If what had happened here tonight pushed India into striking a first blow, Khanna would be cheering every missile.

Fire
was climbing the broken wall on the side of the embassy. The sound of sirens was closer. Khanna lit a cigarette and walked away into the night.

CHAPTER
10

Selena finished her morning workout in the exercise room in her condo, went into the bedroom, dumped her sweats and headed for the shower. Usually the
workout and shower helped her relax, but it wasn't working today. She shut off the water, grabbed a thick, Turkish towel, and dried off. She rubbed steam off the bathroom mirror with the towel, stood before the mirror and gave herself a critical look.

Still pretty
good,
she thought, resting her hand on her hip and turning her head slightly. She touched the scar left by the bullet she'd taken in Mexico and felt a faint memory of pain. There were shadows under her eyes. Were those new lines at the corners? She leaned forward and stretched the skin a bit, trying to see. She hadn't slept well, not after leaving Nick standing in the jewelry store. She was still sorting out why she'd acted on impulse like that.

She'd been on edge that morning, annoyed with Nick and the way he
was taking her for granted. Assuming she'd just go along with what he wanted. But that wasn't it. It was deeper, some fundamental doubt the engagement was a good idea in the first place. In hindsight, if she tried to be objective, she could see Nick had meant well and was only trying to surprise her. Somehow her objectivity kept slipping away, lost in a mix of conflicting thoughts and emotions about the whole damned relationship.

Why was she thinking about getting married anyway? She was self-sufficient, ab
le to do whatever she wanted on her own. She had her own money. She didn't even need to work unless she wanted to. She could go anywhere she wanted, do almost anything she wanted to do. She could have her pick of intelligent, handsome and educated men from about any walk of life. So what was so damned attractive about a battered, stubborn man whose principal goal in life seemed to be jumping in where angels feared to tread and whose primary skill was shooting at people and blowing things up?

When Nick asked her to marry him, she'd barely hesitated. Maybe it was the context of a Caribbean night, the moonlight, the afterglow of sex, the w
arm strength she felt radiate from him as he stood next to her. Maybe it had been the knowledge that the next day meant one or both of them had a good chance of getting killed.

Or maybe you're just a closet romantic
, she thought.
Moonlight, flowers and guns.

She smiled to herself. Not too many people would put those three things together and think of romance. Nick would.
Things like that were why she loved him.

The thought rippled through her. It was true, she really did love him.
She wasn't sure that was enough of a reason to marry him. Too much had happened over the last few years.

She walked from the bathroom to the closet and picked out a bra and panties, then a pale lavender silk blouse that went well with her eyes. She added black slacks and low heeled, comfortable black shoes. She dressed, went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee and sat at the counter.

Love. Once before, she'd thought she was in love. His name was Ted. He was rich, educated, and sophisticated. They'd been on vacation in Greece, spending a week on Mykonos. He'd gotten drunk and they'd gone back to their room overlooking the harbor. An argument had started and he'd hit her, hard enough to send her staggering backward. She hadn't even thought about it. She'd decked him and kicked him where it hurt. It hadn't taken long to pack the few things she'd brought with her. She'd walked out and never looked back.

After that there'd never been anyone serious. Not until Nick.

Selena glanced at the clock on the counter. It was time to get going over to Virginia for the morning briefing. She and Nick could go out for coffee together afterward. They needed to talk.

CHAPTER 11

Elizabeth looked over her team and felt a vague sense of unease. Selena and Nick were sitting together but they might as well have been
in different rooms. Something was off between them.

Lamont looked
tired. His coffee colored skin was pale. The scar crossing his face seemed more vivid than usual. Elizabeth reminded herself to ask him if he was still taking meds. This wasn't a good time to have things getting in the way of the team's usual high level of performance. At least he was back in the mix. That counted for a lot.