The Goddess Legacy (7 page)

The gunman’s tone didn’t leave any room for argument, and Drake settled back into the seat as the SUV accelerated and shredded through another gate. The passenger-side mirror blew off from the impact and the cracked windshield frosted on the gunman’s side, but if the Frenchman cared about the damage, he gave no sign.

The gunman checked his phone map again and nodded. “We should be there in ten minutes. Fifteen on the outside,” he said.

“We’ll want another vehicle.”

“I’ll arrange it by morning.”

“Where are we going?” Allie asked.

“Somewhere nobody will think of looking for you in a million years.”

Spencer tried again. “Why are you helping us?”

The gunman laughed humorlessly. “Obviously, because I want something.”

“Money?”

It was the driver’s turn to chuckle. “I’ll take some if you’re offering.”

The gunman shook his head. “I’ll tell you soon enough.”

“What do you want?” Drake demanded.

The gunman twisted around in his seat and studied Drake for a long beat, and then turned back around.

“I asked you a question,” Drake said.

The gunman nodded. “I heard you. Now hear me. We’ll discuss it once we’re off the road. Until then, you’re to keep your mouth shut so you don’t distract us. That’s not an option, and if you don’t like it, you can try your luck out there,” he said, pointing at a slum to their left. “You’d last about ten minutes. They’d cut your throat for your shoes, much less any money you might have, and you’d be praying for the police to find you and drag you off to prison. Want to test my patience? Because I’m in a seriously bad mood, and I’m getting tired of being interrogated like a schoolboy while I save your sorry ass.”

Drake decided to err on the side of prudence and sat back. Allie squeezed his hand, which was slim comfort as they bounced along to an unknown destination in a country he’d already grown to hate in only a few short hours.

India-governed Jammu and Kashmir

Two men carried a stretcher down a trail toward a clearing near the ruins of an ancient stone structure, now little more than rubble. Three more toted torches, whose flames provided light in the darkness. Fog curled around them, lending them the appearances of spectral phantoms as they trudged down the path. All wore the traditional garb of mountain peasants: stained, ragged handmade robes and callused bare feet.

At the clearing, they approached a tall post at the center of a flat stone area, perhaps once a terrace or courtyard but now unrecognizable. The men were obviously nervous, glancing around furtively as they set the stretcher on the ground.

A rail-thin young man lay on the coarse canvas, clad only in an orange loincloth, his form so emaciated that his ribs jutted through his skin. He moaned and glanced at his bearers first in confusion and then in growing horror as he realized where he’d been taken. He’d never been to the cursed place, but the legends were of nightmare proportion, and evil seemed to emanate from the ruins like poison smoke.

“No…” he managed, his voice a croak. “Please. I beg you.”

The torch carriers looked away, and one of the two stretcher bearers grunted as he knelt beside him. “Your time is almost at hand. Be brave. It is an honor,” he said.

“It’s…a…a…gah,” he gasped, his energy spent.

“Your approval is not required.”

“Please. Water.”

The other stretcher bearer frowned. “Why waste it on the likes of him?”

The two men lifted the boy’s frail form and dragged him to the post, where they lashed his wrists behind him so the pole supported him in a standing position. Even in the dark they could make out the stained stone beneath it, the regular rains insufficient to rinse them completely clean. After studying their handiwork, one of the torchbearers walked to an old brass bell suspended from a nearby tree and rang it twice, and then tossed his torch onto a pile of branches and kindling ringed by stones. Orange tongues of flame licked from the fire pit as he raced to rejoin his companions, his expression frightened.

The bell’s last peal echoed through the area as the men rushed back up the path, and soon the faint glow of their torches had dimmed to nothing. The youth’s eyes drifted shut as silence reclaimed the clearing. His breathing was shallow, and his chin rested on his emaciated chest.

A sound from across the field jolted him back to full alertness, and his eyes popped open in terror. A procession of robed figures shambled toward him from out of the darkness. A monotone chant preceded them, one word, over and over, barely distinguishable, but to the youth as clear as the ringing of the bell. The name of the goddess of destruction, the deity that the approaching cult worshipped, the object of their devotion…and bloodlust.

Kali.

He offered a silent prayer and resolved to accept his fate without resistance. His strength had long since abandoned him; his body was nothing but a shell, powerless to fight an unstoppable force older than history. Nothing he said, no plea or offer, would halt the cult’s macabre ceremony, and he wouldn’t spend his last moments demeaning himself. He knew that he was wasting away from the illness that had claimed so many of his brethren – a byproduct of the work he’d been laboring at since a toddler – so at worst, these twisted animals would deprive him of the lingering moments of agony a death from that affliction would entail. In the end, perhaps they were doing him a favor, and he begged the universe to make his departure swift and painless.

The column stopped before him, and the leader looked him in the eyes, chilling his blood. The youth was looking into the face of hell – he knew then that the whispered rumors of timeless evil were no exaggeration. The man’s distorted grimace, the scars where his lips and tongue had been seared away with a glowing brand upon childhood initiation into the cult, the teeth honed to spikes – all were worse than the legends, as was the reek wafting from him as he leaned forward and hissed at the youth like a snake, unable to speak or form words, his dark goddess’s name a hoarse moan when mangled in atonal chant. His hair and beard were threaded with long strips of dry human skin, and a necklace of finger bones and desiccated ears hung low over the man’s bare chest smeared with ash and tattooed with forbidden occult talismans.

These were the infamous descendants of the Thuggee, the murderous cult that had preyed on India for centuries before supposedly being eradicated by the British, from which the English term thug had been derived. Most of the Thuggee had been opportunistic robbers, who would infiltrate caravans as innocent travelers, and once having earned their trust, would turn on them, strangling them and stealing their riches. But this sect was the worst of the worst, an extremist offshoot that had survived in the remotest reaches of the country, whose worship of the goddess of destruction was the stuff of whispered infamy and whose practices were abominations – cannibalism, human sacrifice, necrophilia…every imaginable desecration, including living in burial grounds and smearing themselves with excrement and the rotting flesh of the dead.

The death cult leader turned to his followers, who resumed their chant, an unholy keening from mutilated tongues. The tempo accelerated as the dark priest joined in, and when he spun back to the youth, he was clutching a wickedly curved blade with archaic symbols etched into the gleaming metal.

The youth’s determination to meet his end with dignity gave way to an agonized scream as the leader drove the blade into his abdomen and sliced upward, disemboweling him as another of the murderous clan slipped behind him. The sharp bite of wire burned like liquid fire against the youth’s throat, and then everything went mercifully black as it bit through his larynx and carotid artery, terminating the flow of oxygen to his brain.

The first part of the ceremony completed with the youth’s murder, the cult members lit torches and pounded drums in preparation for the next horrific phase – one that would extend long into the night, culminating in the youth’s remains roasted to ashes over the fire and his skeleton discarded in a massive pit with thousands of other unfortunates. Only then would the cult return to its caves along the rim of the boneyard, satiated until the next offering to the goddess of destruction, who required regular grisly tribute as her due.

New Delhi, India

Drake elbowed Spencer as the SUV rolled to a stop at the end of a dirt road. In front of them was a houseboat, one of a dozen moored to the riverbank, its hull swaying slightly to the tug of the river’s current. The Frenchman killed the engine and opened his door.

“This is it,” he said. “Everybody out.”

The gunman led them up a rickety gangplank to the houseboat entrance while the driver stood by the SUV and lit a cigarette, checking his watch after blowing a plume of gray at a sliver of moon. The warm air was redolent of decay; the river’s brown rush frothed with diluted toxicity from factories upstream.

The gunman swung open the front door and switched on the lights, and Drake entered behind him with Allie’s bag. She followed him in, trailed by Spencer, who looked worse for wear from having been assaulted by the hostel staff. The gunman turned on a wall air conditioner and then sat in an easy chair facing a moldy couch, an expectant expression in place. Spencer sat on a barstool by the kitchen, and Drake and Allie took the couch, facing their host, who sat forward with his fingers steepled.

“All right. You have questions,” he said. “Might as well get them out of the way.”

Spencer cleared his throat. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Casey Reynolds. I’m American.”

“Why are you helping us?” Allie asked.

“That’s complicated.”

“Try us,” Drake said.

“I’m with the DOD, the Department of Defense. With its military intelligence agency, more precisely – the DIA. You landed on my radar when your friend Carson was killed.” He paused. “I was assigned, among other things, to keep an eye on him.”

“Why?” Spencer asked.

“He’d downloaded a lot of imagery on an area of the country that’s of strategic interest to us. His inquiries tripped some alarms. I’m not sure exactly why, but we were chartered with finding out everything we could about what he’d discovered.”

“And?”

“He was killed before we learned a whole lot.”

Spencer’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not the whole story, is it? Doesn’t explain why you’d risk breaking me out of the hotel and being snagged by the cops.”

Reynolds sighed. “Two days ago, my agent went missing in the area Carson was researching. He’d gone there to nose around, see what he could learn on the ground after we picked up some suspicious chatter. He dropped off the game board and hasn’t been heard from since. His disappearance has to be connected with Carson – hours after my man went dark, Carson shows up on a slab in the Subzi Mandi morgue. That’s no coincidence.” He looked hard at Spencer. “You had a two-hour dinner meeting with him after you flew to India. Which makes you the last person to have seen him alive. I’m guessing you didn’t get on a plane to broaden your cultural horizons, am I right?”

Spencer didn’t say anything.

“Look,” Reynolds continued. “We know he was after some kind of treasure. That’s not a secret.”

“How do you know that?” Drake asked.

“The NSA. We have everything he downloaded.”

“Why is the DOD interested in lost treasure?” Spencer snapped.

“The truth is I’m not completely sure why we were ordered to put Carson under surveillance. We work on a need-to-know basis, and apparently I don’t need to know that. Only to watch him and report back to my superiors.”

“Back to why you helped us escape…” began Allie.

“I’m stationed in New Delhi. A desk officer, if you like. So I can’t go investigate what happened to my agent or follow up on what Carson was looking for in person.” Reynolds paused. “But you can.”

“Wait. The DOD can’t investigate the loss of one of its own men? That doesn’t make any sense,” Drake said.

“I already ran it up the flagpole and was ordered to stand down and let my superiors handle it. But I don’t have confidence it’s a priority or that they can do much. So I need some unofficial help from someone deniable.”

“You want us to see if we can find your man?”

Reynolds nodded. “More that I want you to finish the job Carson started. Whatever he was onto, it was worth killing him to keep quiet. I’m afraid that’s also what happened to my agent. If I’m right, that changes everything. People don’t murder for nothing.”

Drake shook his head. “You want us to put ourselves in danger? For what? Why would we continue working on something that people are being killed over? Carson was decapitated. What’s the most appealing part about that?”

“Do you know much about how Indian law works?” Reynolds asked quietly.

Drake started to splutter a denial, and Spencer cut in. “What’s your point?”

“Here’s the deal,” Reynolds said, turning to Spencer. “Your friend aided a homicide suspect to evade the police. That’s a felony. And you, Spencer, are wanted for Carson’s murder, and from what I hear, the cops are anxious to put you away. They have your papers, so you can’t escape. The short version is you’re both screwed.”

“We’ll get attorneys to fight it,” Drake countered.

Reynolds smiled sadly at him. “This isn’t the U.S. Here, they stick you in a mudhole that makes a Russian gulag seem like Club Med, while you fight the system. I’m talking something that makes a Turkish prison look like a five-star luxury cruise. And Mr. Ramsey, there’s no question that you aided and abetted Spencer, so you’re also provably guilty. In other words, doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it, they have you dead to rights, so you’ll be spending years in hell before you’re even sentenced. They take it personally when foreigners come here to help murderers escape justice – and I get the feeling they’ll want to make an example of you to show how honest the system is: that even a rich, privileged white man can’t weasel out of a felony in India.”

“But he didn’t kill Carson!” Drake said.

“You know that, and I know that, but they believe Spencer did it – or rather, they believe they have enough to pursue the case, which for our purposes is the same thing.” Reynolds eyed Spencer. “You’re not in Kansas anymore. If the locals want to put you away, they’ll find a way to do it.”