I remembered him wading immaculately from the depths of that muddy pond. The seed pod I’d tossed from the roof—that’s what he’d been up to.
“Why destroy it?” I asked.
“We won’t be needing the backup,” he said, untying the top of the sack. Inside it looked like a thousand eyes staring out of the dark—hundreds of lotus seed pods, each sprouting multiple seeds. “We harvested these three days ago, before we destroyed our plants.”
“Where did you hide them?” I asked.
“There,” he said.
I turned to see the bamboo ladder poking up from the pit. “Down there?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t Vanitar find it?”
“Vanitar didn’t look deep enough.”
WE HAD NOT TRAVELED more than half a mile from the stupa, retracing our tracks in the sand, when the two of us caught sight of a glaring star on the horizon. Distracted momentarily from my “suffering” on that camel, I felt like a Wise Man on the journey to Bethlehem. But then the star grew brighter and a sound reached our ears—the unmistakable whir of a helicopter.
Scanning the sands with a spotlight, the chopper appeared to be tracking the route we had taken north from the well. Had the Iranians conspired with the Chinese? I wondered. Had they spotted Jamyang and Anand? The large aircraft looked like a troop transporter, painted in sand-colored camouflage. The beam of its light soon locked on us. We squinted up blindly from our saddles, uncertain whether to wave in welcome or flee off into the dark.
As the great bird descended, a fierce squall of blowing sand threw itself against us. I covered my face with an elbow. Amazingly, the camels resolutely held their ground, treating the brutal onslaught like a sandstorm. I squinted into the nettling wind and saw a man emerge, bending to avoid the scything blades. An upheld arm covered his face until he stood below me. Then Harry Grant busted into a smile.
“You’re invincible!” he shouted.
I grinned and showed my bandaged ankle. “Not quite,” I said, then nodded toward the chopper. “How did you manage—?”
“Beijing doesn’t want their internal troubles attracting America’s attention. They’re anxious to fly us the heck out of here.”
“Have you seen Dan?”
“He’s going to be all right,” he said. “No damage to the spine. Govindi’s okay, too. I saw them with Dr. Tzu at the hospital.”
“Thank God,” I said. “My friend Anand is up ahead. I had to leave—”
“They’re on the chopper!” Harry cried. “We picked them up on the way—”
“He’s alive?!”
“The guy’s a former Gurkha, Jack—old soldiers never die!”
Dr. Fiore was trying to coax his stubborn camel to the ground. Staggering out of the cyclone, clutching his robes in the wind, Jamyang spotted the lama and gleefully raced across to help him.
“Jack?!”
The voice sent a thrill through me. I peered into the storm. “Phoebe?!”
Holding down a headscarf, she emerged from the swirl of sand and started rushing toward me, shouting out my name again, almost in a scream.
That naked cry of jubilation pierced right through my heart. It answered the only question I had, maybe the only question that really matters about love. The only question that matters about anything.
Is it true?
In my rush to dismount, I tumbled into the sand.
Phoebe fell beside me. “Are you hurt?” she asked.
“Yes!” I said happily. “It’s excruciating!”
She looked at me as if she feared the fall had cracked my head.
“It means I’m not dreaming!”
She grinned. “You sure?”
I stared into her baby blues. “I’m absolutely certain.”
“So am I,” she said. She lowered her mouth toward mine. “You fell off your horse, cowboy.”
“Call me Easy, Slim.”
We kissed. The two of us. Merging into One.
AFTERWORD
While The Assassin Lotus takes its starting point from the world’s oldest religious text still in use today, the ancient Rig Veda of Hinduism, its true inspiration was the later and more widely known Sanskrit classic, the Bhagavad Gita. Composed in India between the fifth and second century BCE, the Gita tells the story of the warrior prince Arjuna, who pauses at the brink of a terrible battle to consult with his charioteer and guru, Lord Krishna. The divine Krishna urges Arjuna to overcome his doubts and to fulfill his earthly duty as a warrior to kill. According to Swami Vivekananda and, more recently, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the essence of the book is succinctly expressed in Krishna’s initial exhortation to Arjuna (verse 2.3): “Do not yield to unmanliness, O son of Prithâ. It does not become you. Shake off this base faint-heartedness and arise, O scorcher of enemies!” What seems a simple call to courage is actually a summoning of Arjuna’s deeper Self, a concept that requires another 699 verses to fully explore its logic and meaning. For what is courage, exactly? And how do we summon it within ourselves?
Montaigne said that courage was “the strangest, most generous, and proudest of all the virtues.” The ancients saw it as the essential trait, without which all other virtues were impossible. In fact, as C. S. Lewis put it, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” For this reason courage—or the lack of it—lies at the heart of every story ever told. From Homer to Hemingway to Harry Potter, it is bravery makes the hero. But the Gita was the first story to examine where that bravery comes from and to try to understand just what it is.
A list of American descendants of this genre would have to include Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, or more recently, the works of Steven Pressfield. All address the conundrum of courage directly. Stephen Crane saw his Civil War novel as a “psychological portrayal of fear.” With a remarkable turn of phrase, he describes the sudden surge of valor in battle as “a temporary and sublime absence of selfishness.” The adjective sublime is key: it suggests a kind of transcendence, an inspirational grandeur and awe. At the same time courage contains a dark, manic quality, what Crane calls “the delirium that encounters despair and death, and is heedless and blind to the odds.” The blindness is in truth a kind of single-minded vision. In Harper Lee’s novel, the attorney Atticus Finch explains that true courage is “when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” T. S. Eliot expressed a similar sentiment: “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” The ultimate result lies beyond our control, and in the end it almost doesn’t matter. What matters is to act. That’s a principle that in the past has been proudly embraced by Americans. In the heart of the heartland, the Nebraska Cornhuskers play football in a stadium engraved with words might have come from the lips of Lord Krishna: “Not the victory but the action; not the goal but the game; in the deed the glory.”
This notion of acting without expectation—a central theme in the Bhagavad Gita—is the core of Eastern philosophy and the very definition of self-sacrifice. “Be free from vain hopes and selfish thoughts, and with inner peace fight thou thy fight” (verse 3.30). Finding the source of that inner peace is a spiritual quest that charts its course through all the major religions, and achieves its highest expression in our greatest works of art. Think of Michelangelo’s David. Single-minded calm in the face of impossible odds. The beauty of the sculpture resides in the way it so perfectly captures that sublime quality of selflessness that Stephen Crane wrote about, a sublimity that hints at an answer to the question, “How could a mere boy do this?”
It is our deepest mystery, one that must be plumbed again in every generation. Juan Mascaró, in the introduction to his translation of the Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics, 1962), writes that “Sanskrit literature is, on the whole, a romantic literature interwoven with idealism and practical wisdom, and with passionate longing for spiritual vision.” The A
ssassin Lotus is a 21st-Century American writer’s attempt to carry on that noble tradition, a challenge I often found outstretched my meager talents, yet one that I felt I could not give up on, if only to avoid feeling cowardly. As no less a hero than Amelia Earhart wrote, “Courage is the price life exacts for granting peace.”
Heartfelt thanks to my dear friend, author/publisher/producer Ken Atchity, for bucking up my courage and for keeping me on track. And of course for reminding me: “In the writing the glory.”
A huge thank you to my good pals Debrah Neal and Roy Freirich, brilliant story analysts and two of the very finest writers I know. Your notes and generous support have been invaluable.
Special thanks to photographer/videographer Larry Scher, my very first buddy in the business in LA. I truly appreciate all the help you’ve given me over these many years.
“Jai Guru Dev” to my lifelong friend, electrical engineer-cum yoga-radio guru, Dan Waterloo, who has aided me enormously in all things technological.
And lastly, a merging-into-one kiss to my beautiful wife, Joanna. It was you who made it possible to “see it through no matter what.” Your love is the root of my courage, always.
D.A.
Los Angeles ~ Memorial Day, 2014
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID ANGSTEN is the author of two previous novels, Dark Gold and Night of the Furies, published by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. In his former life he traveled the world as a video and film director, and for years wrote riveting screenplays that, after cheerfully star-trekking through the galaxy of Hollywood, forever disappeared into the black hole at its heart. He believes two things have saved him: forty-plus years of meditation practice, and marriage to a clinical psychologist. David now resides with his wife in West Hollywood, where he presumes to be an authority on the art of self-deception, lives in constant fear of re-inflaming his tennis elbow, and seems to take a perverse pleasure in describing himself in third person.
Tat tvam asi—him be me.
FINAL NOTE
TO THE READER
An adventure thriller about Eastern mysticism runs the risk of alienating its two most obvious audiences. Thriller readers may have little interest in religious or spiritual matters, while students of Eastern religion and philosophy will likely be put off by violence and killing. But hopefully readers who have made it this far have seen that this mixing of the sacred and profane is partly the point of the story, and that the act that makes a hero can be a link between the two. If you’ve found it a tale worth telling, I hope you’ll take a moment to share your thoughts with other readers on Amazon.com. A review there—however brief—would be extremely helpful, and much appreciated by yours truly. I also invite you to follow me on Twitter @DavidAngsten, friend me on Facebook, and email me at [email protected] (please note: no “id”). My author website is www.davidangsten.com, and my blog “Be Here Now” is at davidangsten.blogspot.com.
As a writer, I’m useless without readers. It would mean a lot to me to hear from you.
—D.A.
The Assassin Lotus Page 40
