Drake landed on his side with a pained grunt. Spencer leaned over him and offered his hand. “You hurt?”
Drake shook his head and probed his ribs. “Don’t think anything’s broken.”
Spencer pulled Drake to his feet and motioned to where a group of street urchins were watching them with curious stares. “Let’s go. We can lose them in the alleys.”
“Spencer…”
“Save it until we’re in the clear,” Spencer snapped, and then bolted across the road without waiting for a reply, dodging a retired school bus painted every color of the rainbow that was stuffed to capacity with passengers. Drake watched him fade into the shadows and blinked away sweat. What is going on? An hour ago he’d been ensconced in his first-class pod, pampered in climate-controlled comfort, and now he was running from the police, who were shooting at him?
Drake drove himself forward, ignoring the pain in his chest as he followed his friend. He managed to avoid an auto-rickshaw that appeared out of nowhere, its headlight extinguished or broken, and made it across the road to where Spencer had fled into a scattering of shanties. The jeers of children blended with sirens from the front of the hotel as the police mobilized, the shot fired signaling that there would be no holds barred in chasing them down.
Drake found Spencer by a run-down market. Its interior was illuminated by a single overhead bulb, and a score of faces stared out at them from inside: two muddy Caucasian males were an uncommon sight in the slum. Several tough-looking youths eyed them from a doorway across the narrow way, and Spencer motioned Drake nearer.
“We need to put some distance between us and the hotel. They’ll have a manhunt going soon enough,” Spencer said, never looking away from the thugs.
Their discussion was interrupted by the whoop of a siren from behind them, and Spencer pulled Drake down an alley that paralleled the road, electric wiring spanning overhead like black spaghetti. They hurried along, pushing past locals loitering on their rear stoops, all the while ignoring the occasional pull on their clothes from children pleading for handouts.
“Whose bright idea was it to come to New Delhi again?” Drake asked.
“Trust me, if I could turn back the clock…” Spencer went silent for a moment. “You got any money?”
“Some.”
“How much?”
“About four grand.”
“Cash?”
“I cleaned out my safe. Got a few credit cards, too.”
Spencer shook his head. “Too risky. They’ll figure out we’re together sooner or later.”
“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”
Another siren wailed from the far end of the alley, and Spencer’s tone hardened. He indicated another pathway between the buildings, too narrow for anything but pedestrian traffic. “Down this way. Hear the music?”
“No. My ears are still ringing from gunshots and sirens.”
Spencer took off at a fast trot and Drake struggled to keep up. He had no idea where all the people had come from, but when they turned into an intersecting tributary, he found himself in a swarm of locals all jostling to get to where he could now make out the dissonant strains of a melody. Spencer was taller than the majority of the throng, so Drake had no problem keeping him in sight. When they finally emerged onto a wider dirt street, Spencer waited for him to catch up before pressing on.
The aroma of exotic spices greeted them as they neared a junction, where tarps were strung in a procession along one of the roads. Thousands of people wandered along the open-air market, lighting provided by illegal taps of the streetlamps by entrepreneurial merchants selling every imaginable sort of merchandise.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Spencer grumbled, and shouldered through a group of women haggling with an elaborately bearded man demonstrating a battery-operated herb grinder, his turban bobbing as he enthusiastically assured them the device was foolproof and would last forever.
The howl of a motorcycle approached through the shoppers, and Spencer ducked into a stall selling bags and hats. He selected a black baseball cap and tossed a few notes at the merchant, who wordlessly pocketed it before returning to his newspaper. Spencer pulled on the cap and stepped out of the far side of the stall, and then led Drake further into the labyrinth of vendors. They passed a stall with car stereo speakers blaring what sounded like monkeys banging on pots, and Spencer angled his head toward Drake. “We should be able to lose them in this maze.”
“Why are the police after you, Spence?”
“It’s a long story.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“They were shooting at me, Spencer.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that. Look at the bright side — at least they missed.” He stopped and looked around. “We need to find somewhere to lie low. Someplace off the radar.” He began walking and Drake accompanied him. “You got your phone?” Spencer asked.
“No. It’s back in the room.”
“You can’t go back to the hotel.”
“Why not? I haven’t done anything.”
“I booked your reservation. They’ll be waiting for you to get to me.”
“But…”
“Just as well you left your phone there. They can track it.”
“Spencer, why would the police want to track my phone?”
Spencer grimaced. “To find me, of course.”
They emerged onto a boulevard teeming with vehicles, and Spencer waved down a green and yellow auto-rickshaw. After a halfhearted negotiation, he and Drake climbed into the back just as a drizzle began pelting the fiberglass enclosure. They sat in silence as the driver battled through the impossible traffic, the chaotic current of vehicles apparently random.
“Where are we going?” Drake ventured.
Spencer eyed the driver and lowered his voice. “More toward Old Delhi. It’s sketchier up there, but also less likely to be plugged in. Our odds of finding someplace discreet are way better.”
“So we’re going to an area that’s worse than what we just left?” Drake whispered, looking around at the squalid buildings and crumbling cinder-block dwellings.
“Oh, that was nothing.”
Drake sighed in exasperation. “You need to tell me what’s going on, Spencer.”
“I will,” Spencer promised, inclining his head at the driver with a raised eyebrow. “Later.”
Drake got the message: he was to stay quiet until Spencer felt it was safe to talk. The rickshaw continued on its stuttering way, and the men fell silent, the events of the last hour obviously weighing heavily on them as they motored through the New Delhi night.
Chapter 4
Rhythmic chanting rose from the sprawling complex of Swami Baba Raja’s Ashram of Eternal Bliss two kilometers outside of Bhiwani as the upturned faces of several thousand devotees in the main audience area serenaded the night. At one end of the rectangular space, a group of local celebrities waited expectantly as the swami’s acolytes wandered through the crowd, carrying incense burners, dressed in white robes to symbolize purity of mind and body achieved through spiritual cleansing and meditation.
Swami Baba Raja was a celebrity in his own right, whose followers from around the world were drawn to his simple message of humility, transcendence of self, and service to the unfortunate and needy. He counted among his devoted fans numerous musicians and actors, who in turn spread his philosophy abroad.
Baba Raja was one of India’s numerous holy men, believed to be the reincarnation of another divine figure from the past, one so close to the essence from which all matter springs that he could manifest priceless objects from thin air, was immortal, and could levitate. For decades he had prospered and his fame had grown until he was considered a national treasure, and he was regularly consulted by politicians as a guru whose wisdom surpassed that of any other living being. In the eyes of the faithful he was a god walking among them, incapable of error, and as unflappable as a Buddha, his countenance as perennially calm as the surface of a mountain lake at dawn.