“The Amar Mahal haveli on.”
“I am familiar with its location. She is?”
“Ajmer Rao. We have her card details. Morva is on the paper trail. One strange thing, we aren’t the first system to have accessed this shot tonight.”
“Explain.”
“Someone else has been into the security camera net and had a look at this; at seven-oh-five PM to be precise.”
“Anything on the Gyana Chakshu log?”
“No. It wasn’t our system and I can’t get a lock on what it was. I think it might be a portable; if so, it’s a lot more powerful than our ’ware.”
“Who would have access to equipment like that?” Mr. Nandha muses. “Americans?”
“Could be.” Madhvi Prasad draws a circle in the air and pulls up a zoom on the aging surfer at the desk.
“Professor Thomas Lull,” says Mr. Nandha. “You know him?”
“How short your memories are these days. He was the major theorist and philosopher in the A-life Artificial Intelligence field in the Twenties and Thirties. His works were set texts at Cambridge but I read him privately. I could not say for pleasure, more for the discipline of understanding my enemy. He is a brilliantly clever and convincing evangelist. He has been listed as missing for the past four years and now here he is in Varanasi with this female.”
“He’s not the only American at that hotel,” Madhvi Prasad says. She pulls up an image of a tall, big-boned Western woman in a clingy top and a blue sarong. “This woman checked in seven twenty-five PM Her name is Lisa Durnau.”
“I do not doubt they are deeply involved in the Kalki affair,” says Mr. Nandha.
As the elevator climbs through the rain Mr. Nandha surveys his city. The lightning has moved west, fading flickers light up the towers and projects, the fat white parklands and freeways of Ranapur, the huddle of old Kashi turned in on itself and the scimitar-curve of the river cutting through it all. Mr. Nandha thinks: We are all patterns of light, harmonics of music, frozen energy gathered out of the ur-licht into time, for a time, then released. And then behind the fierce joy of that understanding comes a dreadful sickness in his stomach. Mr. Nandha lurches against the glass walls of the elevator A keen, sharp, thin dread drives irrefusably into his heart. He has no name for it, he has never experienced sensation like this before but he knows what it is. Something terrible has happened. The most terrible thing he can imagine, and beyond. It is not a premonition. This is an echo of a happening event. The worst thing in the world has just gone down.
He almost calls home. His hand shapes the ’hoek mudra, then the universe resumes its normal perspectives, time restarts, and it was only a feeling, only a failing of body and will.
This case demands the greatest determination and dedication. He must be firm, correct, inspiring. Mr. Nandha straightens his cuffs, combs down his hair.
Morva: Fiscal. “The hotel is booked through a Bank of Bharat, Varanasi account,” Morva says. Mr. Nandha approves that Morva wears a suit to work, more so that he has a spare, in case. “I’ll need bank authorisation to get the complete details but this card has been on its travels.” He hands Mr. Nandha a list of transactions. Varanasi. Mumbai railway station. A hotel in a place called Thekkady in Kerala. Bangalore airport. Patna airport.
“Nothing before two months?”
“Not on this card.”
“Can you find out the card limit?”
Morva taps the botom line. Mt. Nandha reads it twice. He blinks once.
“How old is she?”
“Eighteen.”
“How quickly can you get me into that account?”
“I doubt it’ll be anything before business hours.”
“Try,” says Mr. Nandha, giving his coinvestigator a pat on the back as he leaves. Mukul Dev: Investigations.
“Look at this!” Mukul is five months out of postgrad and still wide-eyed at the cool of it all. Hey, girls, I’m a Krishna Cop. “Our girl’s a media babe!” The video sequence is raw, chaotically shot, worse lit. Moving bodies, most in combats. Fire gleaming off curved metal surfaces.
“This is the attack on the train,” Mr. Nandha says. It is already as ancient and irrelevant as the Raj.
“Yes, sir; it’s army helmet cam footage. This is the sequence.”
It is hard to make out any detail in the chaos of fire and flight but he sees Thomas Lull in his ludicrous garb run towards the camera and out of shot while Bharati soldiers take firing positions. He makes out a line of movement against the longer, darker line of the burning train. Mr. Nandha shudders. He knows the scuttling scurrying of antipersonnel robots from his wars with Dataraja Anreddy. Then he sees a figure in grey go down before the charging line and raise a hand. The robots cease. Mukul waves a stop sign and the picture freezes.
“This was not in the news reports.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Good work,” Mr. Nandha says standing up. He signs an open-channel mudra. “Everyone to the conference room in thirty minutes.” Acceptance chimes go off inside his skull as he leaves Mukul’s office.
Oh-three-thirty, Mr. Nandha reads from the timer patch in the corner of his vision as his investigation unit enter the conference room and takes seats around the oval table. Mr. Nandha can smell the exhaustion in the overlit room. He looks for a receptacle for his Ayurvedic tea bag, tuts in disappointment to find there is none.
“Mr. Morva, any progress?”
“One of my aeais threw up an unusual purchase; custom-grown protein chips from AFG at Bangalore; what is unusual is the shipping docket; that unlicensed surgery in the Patna FTZ.”
In his peripheral vision Mr. Nandha notices Sampath Dasgupta, a junior constable, start at something on his palmer screen and show it to Shanti Nene his neighbour.
Madhvi Prasad: “More on her identity too. Ajmer Rao is the adoptive daughter of Sukrit and Devi Paramchans, also from Bangalore. Here’s the odd bit, they show up in all the civic registers and revenue databases and public records but if you go to the Karnataka Central DNA database, there’s nothing there. They would have been registered at birth. I’m trying to locate her natural parents; this is guesswork, but I don’t think she’s come here for no reason.”
Mr. Nandha: “She could be trying to contact them. We could preempt that by searching her hotel for a DNA sample and making that contact ourselves. Good.” The ripple of disturbance is spreading along the right side of the table. “Is this something I should be aware of?”
Sampath Dasgupta: “Mr. Nandha, the Prime Minister has been assassinated. Sajida Rana is dead.”
Shock rolls around the table. Hands reach for palmers, gesture up newschannels on ’hoeks. Murmurs rise to a loud chatter to a blare of voices. Mr. Nandha waits until he hears the seeds of abatement. He raps the table loudly with his tea glass.
“Your attention please.” He has to ask for it twice before the room is quiet again. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, now if we could resume our meeting?”
Sampath Dasgupta erupts.
“Mr. Nandha, this is our Prime Minister.”
“I am aware of that, Mr. Dasgupta.”
“Our Prime Minister has been assassinated by a mob of karsevaks.”
“And we will continue to do our job, Mr. Dasgupta, as we are tasked by our government, to keep this country safe from the menace of unlicensed aeais.”