Sagramanda

by Alan Dean Foster

  Somehow, he knew that trying to use them to appeal to this person would carry less weight with the tall, stolid-faced killer than a dead leaf falling from a tree.

  Gun held in one level, perfectly steady hand, the other extended outward, palm up, Chal approached the wide-eyed Karlovy. “In addition to this gentleman, I am required to return with the two items you presently hold in your right hand. Please pass them over to me while you are still capable of doing so. I assure you I have no compunction about picking them up off the ground, should they happen to drop along with you.”

  Swallowing, Taneer took a step forward despite a terrified Depahli's best efforts to hold him back. He held out the security case. “Take this. I'll open it for you. There's a lot of money inside. Millions more than you're being paid to do this, I'm sure.” He raised his voice slightly. “Go on—take it!”

  Barely glancing in the scientist's direction, Chal's gaze briefly flicked over the case. Its presence and contents were confirmation that the esteemed Mushtaq's sources had once again come through.

  “You want to know the difference between an employee and a whore? An employee has one kind of reputation, a whore another. I value my reputation, Mr. Buthlahee. Besides, even if I were to take you up on your offer, others of my chosen profession would then be hired to look for me in turn. Not to mention that I would have to kill you—all of you—simply to buy a little time.” He smiled pleasantly. “For a man of logic and reason, I don't think you've thought through your offer very thoroughly.”

  Taneer's lips tightened. “If they get me back, the company will forcibly extract the information they want from me. Then they may kill me anyway, or they may not.”

  The tracker pursed his lips slightly. “Not my concern.”

  Sanjay could not keep from blurting, “You will excuse me, please, but I must ask: what happens to the money?”

  Smile widening, Chal studied the shopkeeper and whispered something under his breath. It might have been “peasant,” or it might have been something even less flattering. Sanjay could not tell, nor did he really care.

  “I suppose this gentleman”—and he indicated Karlovy—“will return it to his superiors. He'd better, or they're liable to hire someone like me to find him.” Shifting his attention from Taneer and Sanjay, he inquired curiously of the frightened businessman, “I don't imagine they're going to be very pleased when you have to report the details of your failure here.”

  To his credit and despite his evident fear, Karlovy did not cower beneath the tracker's stare. “I shall plead extenuating circumstances.”

  To everyone's surprise, but not relief, Schneemann laughed. “I've been around long enough to hear myself described a great many ways, in a great many languages, but as ‘extenuating circumstances'? That is a first.” An auditory vapor, the laugh went away, fleeing into the night. Chal gestured anew with his upturned palm. “The items, please. Before I lose my sense of humor.”

  Keshu wanted to shake the spinner, to threaten it. He was going to have to make a decision, and soon, very soon, without the right kind of information he needed to make it.

  “Chief Inspector, what's going on out there?” With a nod, Johar gestured in front of them, toward the trees that blocked contact and a proper view of what was transpiring deeper in the forest.

  “I don't know.” Keshu squinted at his readout. “None of them seem to be moving. Since they're not likely to be spending all this time in prayerful communion, I expect they must be talking to one another.” As he had been doing all night, he kept switching rapidly back and forth between the overhead drone's infrared and magnified-starlight views. One was little more instructive than the other. “Without audio or daylight vision, I can't tell what's going on. Are they arguing? Are they old friends meeting up for a night's illegal campout?”

  Johar looked over at his superior. There was sympathy in his voice. “We're going to have to do something soon, Chief Inspector.” He indicated his own readout. “It looks like the suspect is on the move again.”

  Keshu's attention shot back to his own spinner. Damn! The foreign woman was showing signs of moving, all right—away from the others. Pick her up, or let it go. It was the same thorny choice he had been faced with all night.

  He was tired. It wasn't fair. All the careful trailing and observation, the expensive surveillance, the number of personnel on site and holding as backup; everything added up to a considerable expenditure of time and money. If he called it off, he'd be asked in no uncertain terms to explain the decision. If he gave the order to pick up the woman Chalmette, he might have no case—and no chance to prosecute again in the future.

  Why had all these other people decided to pick the same night and place to convene for their mysterious little gathering? Why couldn't they have done so a kilometer farther north, or south, or at a sensorium tea shop somewhere in the middle of the city, or at a damn meet-and-greet center at one of the city's five main airports? Why in Gurja's name did they have to end up doing this now, on his watch, here, tonight? Had he not been devout in his work, his home life, his prayers? What had he done to deserve this?”

  “Chief Inspector?” In the darkness alongside him, Johar was staring a little harder than usual at the glowing screen of his spinner.

  “What now, Lieutenant?” Somehow, Keshu managed to substitute resignation for exhaustion in his voice.

  “It looks like we have another new heat signature, sir.”

  Oh great. Wonderful wondrous, an exasperated Keshu thought. Who could it be now? A wandering politician in search of nocturnal votes? Teenage forestry scouts desperate to earn commendations? Was there perhaps a small convention scheduled for this region he had not been informed about? He directed his attention to the far right-hand portion of his readout as the unseen distant drone slightly adjusted its position and magnification to accommodate the new arrival.

  Recognition shot through him as if he had received a full jolt from one of his department's own advanced mob control stunners.

  The telltale heat signature of the new arrival was far too big, and moving much too fast.

  Five people stood around the artificial water hole. A sixth had begun to retreat slowly through the dense undergrowth that concealed her. Given so many choices, all equally oblivious to its presence, the tiger logically settled on the one that had its back facing the jungle.

  To his credit, Chal sensed the big cat's approach and whirled with almost superhuman speed. Expecting to find a human bearing down on him, he was sufficiently taken aback, for just an instant, to hold off pulling the trigger of his small but exceedingly deadly weapon. When instinct and reflex finally managed to overcome shock, it was too late.

  Depahli screamed. Everyone screamed. In the darkness and shadows of the night, the tracker's blood spurted like black milk as the huge cat brought its jaws together across the man's neck. Paws big enough to completely cover a car hubcap slammed into the tracker; one digging deeply in his right shoulder, the other shredding his face like an angry child toying with a piece of burnt toast. Muscle was pulled away from bone, bone splintered. The tracker went down with the cat on top of him.

  It was Sanjay who had enough surviving presence of mind to grab hold of his employer and his employer's girlfriend and pull them in the opposite direction.

  “Run, Mr. Taneer, sir! And you too, lady! Run this way now, please, back to the fence! We need to get through the fence!”

  “Y-yes.” Stumbling backward in the clutch of the shopkeeper's determined fingers, a shocked Taneer had to rip his gaze away from the nightmarish scene in front of him. Once, the tiger looked up, glaring green eyes meeting his own. He had seen tigers before; in zoological parks, from elephant back in Bandhavgarh. But not like this. It stunned him, threatened to root him to the spot as effectively as an infinitesimal dose of the deadly fluid contained in the tracker's syringets. Only when the big cat looked down to check on its unmoving prey did the scientist find his feet again. It helped that Depahli, too, was now tuggi
ng at him.

  Together the three of them turned and sprinted, stumbled, staggered back the way they had come. Only Sanjay dared to occasionally check back over his shoulder to see if the cat was in the mood to take multiple prey tonight. Mercifully, the jungle trail behind him remained empty in the pale starlight.

  What was it with him and cats, anyway?

  They were halfway back to the fence line before Taneer realized he was still clutching the security case tightly to his chest.

  Mr. Vaclav, alias Karlovy Milesclova, was used to dealing with the dangers of large, civilized cities. He knew how to negotiate with muggers, with prostitutes plying their trade on public streets, with beggars and the desperately drug-addicted. He knew how to find his way rapidly and efficiently through airports and other congested public transportation termini. He understood traffic flow and corporate intrigue and social backbiting.

  He had not wanted to be here, in Sagramanda, doing this thing. But the consortium's overboard had voted, and he had been designated. Or lost out, depending on one's perspective. More than willing to forgo the promised bonus, he had done his tactful best to beg off. His polite pleading had been turned down.

  Now he found himself running for his life. Not from some addled street person with a knife, not from some bomb-throwing antiglobalization terrorist, not from some irate religious fanatic whose personal precepts the consortium he worked for had inadvertently offended, but from a tiger. A tiger, of all things! In this day and age! It was absurd, outrageous, unbelievable. That he, Vaclav Milesclova, executive vice president of an international family of companies whose name was known throughout the world, should be frantically huffing and puffing his way through the jungles of the subcontinent without a chauffeured Mercrysler or Rollsbach in sight, was too much to countenance.

  Wild of eye, flushed of face, his heart pounding like a runaway bass drum despite all the hours he had spent on his office treadmill and electronic toner, he looked back. Nothing stirred in the dark behind him except the fronds of the plants he had brushed up against. The starlit path was devoid of devils and empty of pursuit. Though he knew nothing of the habits of wild creatures, it seemed to him quite possible that the beast might well be preoccupied with its fresh…meal. Shuddering, he turned to run on.

  He tripped over an unkind tree root, and fell.

  His face smacked into the dirt. Raising his head almost immediately, he wiped grit from his flesh and looked apprehensively back over his shoulder. Was that movement, there in the night? Or only wind stirring the trees? Hastily, he scrabbled to his knees and began searching the area where he had fallen. On contact with the ground, he'd dropped both of the prized packages. He found the one containing the molly almost immediately. Like most modern forms of portable information storage, it was well made and had survived the fall with no visible damage. The second envelope…

  The second precious, irreplaceable envelope had ripped on impact. While a small portion of its contents lay scattered nearby, the bulk had thankfully remained inside the transparent glassine container. Rising to a kneeling position, he started to pick up what had fallen out, when he heard what was a loud cough somewhere behind him.

  Utterly consumed with sheer terror, he struggled the rest of the way to his feet and ran on, heading for the pickup point located just inside the preserve's fence line. He would have used the communicator zippered into his inside shirt pocket to request an immediate pickup instead of the one already scheduled, but he did not want to spare either the time or the wind to make the call.

  If the general outline of the massive heat signature that had appeared so suddenly and unexpectedly on his spinner had not been enough to identify its source, the reverberant snarl that traveled through brush and across trees to the place where Keshu had set up his temporary command post was confirmation enough.

  “Vishnu!” Johar muttered as he stared at his own readout. He looked over at the chief inspector. “Seems to me I remember seeing something on the news about a rogue cat taking people in this part of the preserve.”

  “I knew we'd have to coordinate this operation with Transport, but not with Wildlife and Game.” Keshu's words came sharp and fast. His difficult decision had been made for him. By an animal. “Tell the two flying squads to head this way. Instruct everyone on the ground to move in.” He took a deep breath. “Pick up the Frenchwoman.”

  Johar eyed his superior uncertainly. “But Chief Inspector, you've been saying all along that without unassailable proof, a court case can't be—”

  Keshu cut him off. “It doesn't matter now, Lieutenant. We've done as much as we could, and it's all flown to pieces. I won't risk letting this woman slip away and hide.”

  “What about the others—these other people?”

  Keshu adjusted his turban as he regarded the officer. “One crisis at a time, please, Lieutenant Johar. First the Frenchwoman. Then we'll see if we have a need, or responsibility, to deal with these others.” Motioning for the officer to follow, he started forward along a predetermined route that led through the jungle. “Inform everyone as to what is happening out there and instruct them to be extra alert, though all the noise and activity should be enough to frighten off—”

  Johar reached out and gestured with his spinner. “Chief Inspector—look.”

  Frowning, Keshu rechecked his own instrument's readout. Somewhere overhead, above the ground and below the clouds, the drone was still doing its job. Only now the images it was transmitting made no sense: no sense at all.

  When the new arrival had shot the big man and then confronted the others by the water hole, a puzzled Jena had decided that events had become too complicated. Her redemptions were models of simplicity and purity. Not knowing how to proceed under such increasingly baffling circumstances, she had decided to give up on her evening's original intent and had begun to withdraw.

  And then the tiger had appeared, striking out of nowhere, slicing through the night like the incarnation of a god. The assassin had found himself slain. It had been a paralytic moment, one of those instants of unforeseen stupefaction capable of numbing even those who thought themselves permanently inured to all manner and kind of violence.

  Unlike those clustered by the water hole, Jena hadn't screamed. She had just stared, hardly breathing, looking on as the tiger proceeded to first slay efficiently and then begin to dine on its prey. She crouched in awe, looking on in admiration. She was not frightened.

  She was envious.

  Never before had she been witness to such studied ferocity. Was the tiger nothing more than a big cat? Or was it truly, as the sacred scriptures declared, the mount of the goddess Durga herself? Jena's mind was awhirl, overwhelmed with the rigors of the long night's stalking, the warm enveloping smells of the jungle, the heat, and now this unexpected miraculous presentation right before her very eyes of death by tiger. From where she knelt she could smell the blood. It was something they shared. Deep, deep within herself, she knew she was more closely akin in spirit and desire to the tiger than she could ever be to its victim.

  Was not the great goddess Durga, more properly known as Mahadevi, shown riding upon a tiger? Thus mounted, had not she defeated the demonic Mahisha against whose powers the combined might of all the other gods had shown themselves to be useless? And afterward, was not Durga acclaimed by all and anointed the leader of the gods in all matters of battle?

  Why should she not be the same? Would not Mother Kali look with approval on her servant who, taking such initiative, would thereby render herself even more capable of serving? With her daily dose of drugs coursing through her system, dizzy with delusions of divine approval, she rose slowly from her place of concealment and began walking—not away from the scene of primeval carnage, but toward it.

  Mesmerized, a flabbergasted Keshu and Johar stared at their readouts. It was the lieutenant who broke the temporary trance.

  “Lord Krishna,” he muttered, “she's not running away: she's heading right for it.”

  Holstering
his spinner, Keshu broke into a run. “Tell everyone to hurry.” He pulled his sidearm. “We have to get close enough so we can fire and scare it off, but I don't want to hit her!” He broke into the brush. Johar was right behind his superior, barking frantically into his spinner.

  As she emerged into the small clearing by the water hole, Jena was chanting a favorite mantra to herself. Full of allusions to innocence lost, Mother Kali, India, loves gone astray, and murders committed, it would have provided ample fodder for even the least-demanding clinical psychologist.

  It was doubtful that it had much of an impact on her present audience.

  Instantly alert, able to see infinitely better at night than any human, the tiger looked up from its meal, raising its bloodied snout from the hollow it had chewed out of the center of the dead tracker's midsection. It stayed like that, staring unblinkingly at the creature that had interrupted its feeding, slowly and unconcernedly licking the blood from its exquisite muzzle.

  Removing her clothes, singing softly to herself, Jena reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out the sword. The same sword that had, in the name of Mother Kali, sped so many on their journey away from this sordid, unhappy world. Jena had no necklace of skulls to dangle from her neck, no belt of dead men's hands to encircle her waist, but she had studied with the dedication of a true acolyte. She knew the reputed moves as well as any disciple.

  Holding the sword tightly in one hand, regretting she had no head of a demon to display in the other, completely naked to the Sundarbans night, she began to dance.

  Her movements were as graceful as those of the ballerina she had once thought, long, long ago, to become. As gracile and fluid as those of a sambar deer, as polished and controlled as those of a mass murderer. Twirling the razor-sharp weapon over her head and breathtakingly close to her sides, eyes half shut as if in a delirium of pleasure, she spun and twirled to the corrupt, unhealthy, soul-crippling music only she could hear. She alone, and Mother Kali, who was forever her lord and savior from the complete and utter insanity that years ago had threatened to overwhelm her completely.