The Lost Prophecies (45 page)

‘Amazing sight, isn’t it?’ Dr Allen whispered beside him. ‘Makes me want to cry when I think what we’ve lost. Better hurry up,’ he continued gruffly. ‘Don’t want to catch a chill.’

The concrete building where they waited was another relic, faded pictures of drowned Chinese landscapes lining the walls. They sat on wooden benches, and a group of guards distributed rugs and bowls of soup.

‘I didn’t know it could be so cold anywhere,’ Shiva remarked.

‘We’re very high. Over three and a half thousand metres. Makes some people ill. I don’t envy the guards. A ghost city and no one else within two thousand miles.’

‘No.’

‘And we fly south over India next. The great jungles, all the new plants.’ Enthusiasm entered Dr Allen’s voice. ‘Tree ferns two hundred feet high, huge sprouting flowers we don’t even know the names of. The plants have adapted to the heat faster than anyone could have guessed. Pity it’s too hot down there to do any proper scientific surveys.’

‘What about animals?’

Dr Allen shrugged. ‘People say there are big creatures down there. They see the trees move from the air. God knows what they are. Some people say there are even people on the Himalayan slopes.’

‘Survivors?’ Shiva asked eagerly. ‘From India?’

The scientist looked embarrassed, no doubt making the connection to Shiva’s ancestry. ‘It’s just that some pilots flying over thought they saw smoke rising from the jungle, like campfires. On the upper slopes it’s not too hot for people to live. But condensation often rises from forests when they warm up in the mornings. It could be people, though, it could be. One day when things are more settled we’ll go down there and find out.’ He smiled uneasily. ‘We’re lucky in a way: we have a whole new world to explore.’

‘Yes.’ Shiva thought of people who looked like him, perhaps living a Stone Age life down there, cut off. If the Black Book was right, before the year’s end God would kill the lot of them.

‘What are the Tasman Islands like?’ Shiva asked.

Dr Allen laughed. ‘Prosperous. Busy. Old-fashioned. Very like the old world in a lot of ways. Dunedin’s pretty, nice view out across the bay.’

‘I hear they’ve got a big fundamentalist movement,’ Shiva said neutrally. ‘Gets a lot of votes in the elections.’

‘Less than they did, thank goodness. Maniacs.’

They talked a little about the scientist’s work, then he went to sleep again in his chair. Shiva looked out at the huge old palace, grey in the moonlight, high jagged mountains rising behind. He thought of the most recent message he had received from Parvati Karam: ‘Look forward to meeting you on Thursday. Mackenzie’s Café, George Street, Dunedin. 2.30.’

He thought of Alice, who had given him the radiation ring. It was two years since they had parted. She had loved him but he hadn’t loved her back, or not enough. He often disappeared for weeks at a time because of his work, but she was always waiting for him on his return. There was something smothering in her devotion and in the old-fashioned way in which she wanted him, as the man, to decide and initiate things, even their lovemaking. Shiva hadn’t wanted that sort of power himself. Strange, though, that it was always leaders – people who wanted or wielded power – to whom he had been drawn since school, mixed in somehow with a desire to bring them down, show their feet were made of clay. Like Marwood. He saw the fraudster’s face again, heard him cry out that he was innocent. The case had affected him more than any other. There had been something in the way the man actually believed his own lies that had made Shiva ashamed to deceive him. Marwood had been generous, had desired affection. Yet that did not make him any less wicked than any of the fraudsters he had brought to justice over the last ten years. Marwood had deceived farmers who were trying to scratch a living from thin mountain soils, surviving on the edge.

He felt a similar unease about Parvati Karam, about using their own shared heritage to deceive her. He shook his head. These qualms didn’t make sense in moral terms. He was just tired. Tired to the bone, he realized. He had spent sixteen years in the police, twelve in the fraud department. It was time to leave, he thought; he needed to change his life. But where would he go? An inspector he knew had retired early and gone to work in the refugee camps; a number of people did. But he didn’t want to do that. He wasn’t built for it, apart from anything else. He looked at his hands, thin and bony. His parents had called them Brahmin’s hands, though they weren’t Brahmins. A boy at school had once called them girl’s hands. He could kill a man with them if he had to; he had been trained to do so long ago. That ability, though, was about knowledge of anatomy and lines of force, not strength. He leaned back in his chair and slept, a deep and dreamless sleep until a guard shook him awake. The guard was tall and stocky, with high cheekbones and slanting Asiatic eyes. ‘Time to get back on board, sir.’

It was still dark when they flew over India, so Shiva saw nothing. There was turbulence that the pilot said was tropical storms below. He slept again and awoke, eyes sore, to find they had crossed the Indian Ocean and were above a red desert stretching endlessly to the horizon. Australia, once partly inhabited but now the hottest desert in the world. A few hours now and they would be there.

In his mind he reviewed his correspondence with Parvati. He had started with a tentative e-mail saying he had found they were distantly related. Her reply, his first words from her, had been equally tentative, but he fostered the correspondence, feeding her information about his family, a mixture of truth and invention. When he had said he was coming to work in Dunedin, where she lived, she had said that was a coincidence. Shiva had wondered whether there might be any underlying suspicion there but decided it was imagination. He sensed an underlying keenness to meet him. When he gave her the date of his flight, her next reply had been enthusiastic, asking about his life in England. She said her own was dull: ‘I work long hours, boring computer stuff for the government, but I have a nice house overlooking Victoria Bay and the islands. Work for my church takes up my leisure time.’ She suggested they meet in a café near the EU embassy once Shiva had settled in.

His first meeting with Alice had been in a café, set up through a dating site. He recalled sitting in the little café, batting off mosquitoes, sweating because it was just before the monsoon, annoyed that the pretty white girl opposite him looked quite cool. He wondered where she was now.

The engine note changed, the front of the plane tipping slightly forward. Dr Allen leaned across Shiva to look out of the window. ‘That’s Dunedin,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Nearly there.’

Below, Shiva saw a coastline. The plane circled lower, and for the first time since passing over Germany he saw a green, cultivated landscape, little fields marching up hillsides, mountains in the distance. Then, once more, houses again, perched above a bay with islands beyond. Humanity, clinging determinedly to its last fragments of the earth.

The old city of Dunedin lay beneath the waves, and a new town had been built on the hills behind. Most of New Zealand’s mountainous South Island had survived, though the Canterbury Plains were gone. As the bus from the airport drove into town, Shiva saw rows of colourful earthhouses with elaborately carved wooden frontages. It was the gardens that amazed him, full of roses and flame trees and carefully cultivated palms. In Europe there were few gardens, only endless vegetable plots. But the Tasman Islands were the richest nation in the world, with plentiful hydroelectric power, large areas of mountain land that was potentially fertile but had never been cultivated, and a homogeneous, highly educated population. As he watched the healthy-looking people, many wearing shirts rather than kaftans, their long hair often braided into elaborate designs, Shiva wondered how such a people could have turned to an organization like the Shining Light Movement in substantial numbers.

The bus dropped him in the town centre, near the embassy. Dunedin was built around a large eight-sided roundabout called the Octagon, a reconstruction of the one that had existed in the old city, and Shiva took a road named George Street. The new town had re-created the design of the old, just as the original Scottish colonists three centuries before had named the streets after those of Edinburgh. It was midday, but the heat was bearable. A cool breeze wafted up from the sea, whipping up dust. In England at this time of day, people would be hot and sticky, searching out vestiges of shade, but here they walked about in the sun, relaxed-looking. Shiva carried his luggage to the embassy, which stood in a street of four-storey wooden official buildings, rising high above the one- and two-storey earthhouses in the surrounding streets. The doorpost was elaborately carved with what Shiva guessed were Maori carvings, intricate designs surrounding grimacing faces.

He was taken to a room on the third floor, a large room with a wall of windows overlooking a sea dotted with little islands. The embassy intelligence officer was a dapper man in his forties, immaculately dressed in a dark suit and high-collared white shirt. He wore black-leather shoes, polished so they shone. Shiva knew his name was Rodriguez. He rose from behind a large desk, where papers stood in neat piles, and shook Shiva’s hand, his grip dry and strong. On the wall behind him was a map of the Tasman Islands; Tasmania and the South Island of New Zealand relatively little changed from their old coastline except that the North Island was now split into two. Above Tasmania, a corner of Australia showed at the edge of the map, the endless desert coloured orange in contrast to the green shading of the Tasman Islands.

Rodriguez poured Shiva a glass of fruit juice and invited him to sit down. ‘You look tired,’ he said in a strong Spanish accent. His own eyes looked deceptively sleepy.

‘Yes, sir. My body thinks it’s the middle of the night.’

‘Flying is not a natural way to travel. Once was enough for me.’ He smiled, showing white teeth. ‘We have a small house for you a few streets away. You can get some rest soon.’

Shiva noticed that though Rodriguez’ tones were formal, he did not use the clipped speech of the official classes at home. Was that only an English affectation? He had never been abroad, so he didn’t know.

Rodriguez smiled at him. ‘Well, what is your first impression of Dunedin?’

‘It seems prosperous, everyone looks well fed. They have space for gardens.’

He nodded. ‘Compared with most places last century they were very lucky. By the time the great inundations came, most Australians had abandoned the continent; it hadn’t rained there in thirty years. Those left went down to Tasmania, or came here. There were the usual refugee camps and starvation and disease. But the population’s up to eight million now – impressive when you think there are fewer than thirty million in Europe.’

‘It is.’

‘They’ve planted everywhere except the high peaks and the western fjords. They’ve been very successful. Of course, it helped that the islands were so isolated. And they had a navy. They blew refugee boats coming down from Indonesia out of the water.’ A trace of bitterness entered Rodriguez’ voice. Perhaps he was recalling when Spain turned to desert, the migrant wars in the Pyrenees.

‘It’s surprisingly cool,’ Shiva observed.

‘The water around the islands is cold. Ten years ago there were still icebergs drifting up here from Antarctica. In time, it’ll get hotter.’ He leaned forward and smiled, his eyes not sleepy any more. ‘Have you made an appointment to see that woman?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Good. Get some sleep before then. And watch your step. The Shining Light are tricky people. They show three faces. On the one hand the church services and the evangelization drives, on the other the politics, the pressure for religious laws. But the third face is the hidden one. They are very good at infiltrating key points in state and private institutions with people, hiding their allegiances. The civil service is full of them.’

‘I understand they’re not as powerful as they were. Politically.’

‘No. There was a movement here a few years ago to privatize some of the public services, like the railways and the water supply. People looking to make easy money out of facilities it took the government fifty years to re-create. The Shining Light people jumped on the bandwagon; their programme of going back to biblical morals hadn’t done very well, but taking the lead in the privatization campaign brought them votes. For a while.’

‘Only for a while?’

‘Yes. They privatized the railways and it was a disaster. No coordination, fares through the roof. The Shining Light people got blamed.’ He paused. ‘Companies they run still own several railway lines, though. Make a tidy profit. There are lines pushing everywhere into the hills as people settle them.’

‘I was told their leader is reclusive.’

‘Ah, yes. Dr Brandon Smith.’ Rodriguez shook his head. ‘They have a hideaway somewhere in the mountains in the south-west. They bought a lot of land there, and no outsiders are allowed there. Smith disappears for months, then appears at the climax of some evangelization campaign. Seems to show himself less and less these days, but still turns up now and again standing on a box in a town centre somewhere. Promises everyone salvation if they join the Church, everlasting fire if they don’t.’

‘Have you ever seen him?’

‘Once, here in Dunedin. He’s very dirty and ragged, looks like an Old Testament prophet. But he runs everything from behind the scenes. He used to be a schoolteacher until God told him he was destined to be a great prophet.’

‘Why have they had so much success here? There are a few of them in the north, but they’re a joke, a little sect.’

Rodriguez shrugged. ‘Perhaps people here feel guilty about the degree of success and prosperity they’ve regained, feel it can’t or shouldn’t last.’ He leaned forward. ‘Whatever the reason, the Shining Light people feel they are special, chosen ones. That always makes people dangerous. And we’ve seen from the theft of the book how ruthless they can be. And this Parvati Karam—’ Rodriguez grimaced ‘—the Shining Light think women should be subordinate, stay in the home. To rise to a position where she was trusted with a task like stealing that book, Parvati Karam would have to be very good.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Be careful, Inspector Moorthy.’