The Sacred Vault

by Andy McDermott

  Mac tossed the fallen weapon out of his reach, then waved to the occupants of the crippled Veyron. ‘Well, come on! We haven’t got all day!’

  20

  Kit lowered his cell phone, his normally sunny face somewhat clouded. ‘That . . . did not go well. But it could have been worse.’

  ‘What did your bosses say?’ Nina asked. ‘Are they going to arrest the Khoils? Or at least investigate them?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no. Not without more proof.’

  ‘But we’ve got proof,’ said Eddie, indicating the Talonor Codex. The golden book sat on a desk in Kit’s small but modern Delhi apartment, the Interpol officer having arranged a flight from Bangalore back to the capital on a government transport aircraft. ‘They had that thing in their bloody house. That’s got to be enough for Interpol to take action, surely?’

  ‘It’s your word against theirs. I know you recovered it from them, but that isn’t firm evidence. If Khoil had left a single fingerprint on it, that would be enough, but you said yourself that he never actually touched it. And,’ Kit sighed, ‘the Khoils have already been busy. They have lots of friends in high places - and they seem to have spoken to all of them in the last few hours. Politicians, lawyers, judges . . . We need absolutely irrefutable evidence before we can take any action.’

  ‘So there’s nothing they can be charged with?’ Nina said in disbelief. ‘What about the simple fact that I’m sitting right here in India? I was goddamn kidnapped!’

  ‘I looked into that. But unfortunately, the immigration agency has a record of you arriving - alone - at Bangalore airport three days ago.’

  ‘That’s impossible! They brought me straight to their own airfield.’

  ‘That’s not what the computer says, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And guess whose company wrote the software on that computer?’ said Eddie rhetorically.

  Mac made a grumbling sound. ‘It seems we have a stalemate. There’s not a great deal they can do to us without arousing suspicion against themselves, but we’ve got nothing on them either.’

  ‘I have one piece of good news, though,’ Kit told Eddie. ‘The Interpol red notice issued on you has been rescinded. I’ve told my superiors that the Talonor Codex has been recovered - and that you helped. I strongly implied the whole thing was some sort of sting operation. You’ll still have to be questioned back in New York, but for now you’re off the arrest list.’

  Eddie wasn’t especially overjoyed. ‘Fucking marvellous. We’ve got the Codex back, but it doesn’t matter, ’cause they’ve got what they needed from it.’ He tapped the plastic replica of the key beside the golden book. ‘They’ve probably made another copy already.’

  ‘I told you we should have deleted the pattern,’ Nina said.

  ‘So the Khoils will be able to find the Vault of Shiva?’ Kit asked.

  ‘Unless we find it first,’ said Nina.

  Eddie frowned. ‘Not much chance of that, is there? We don’t know where it is.’

  ‘Nor does Khoil. He had a translation of the Codex, and made some deductions from it, but hadn’t pinned down an actual location.’

  ‘What deductions?’ asked Mac.

  Nina thought back to Khoil’s boastful claims at the palace. ‘He said it was somewhere near Mount Kailash - Shiva’s home.’

  ‘The Sacred Mountain,’ said Kit, nodding. ‘The logical place.’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘No, unfortunately.’ He smiled. ‘My work doesn’t give me a lot of time for pilgrimages. Perhaps some day.’

  ‘Do you have an atlas?’

  Kit found a book and opened it to a map of the northern half of the Indian subcontinent, the contours of the Himalayas in greys and purples above the greens and browns of the rest of India. Tibetan China was above it at the top right of the page, Nepal sandwiched between the two much larger countries. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing at a spot above Nepal’s northwestern corner, near the disputed Indo-Chinese border. ‘These two lakes are Manasarovar and Raksas Tal - both holy places. Drinking the water of Manasarovar is meant to cleanse you of all your sins for a hundred lifetimes.’

  ‘Might be worth me having a swig,’ said Eddie.

  Mac cocked his head. ‘Just the one?’

  ‘Mount Kailash is north of them,’ Kit continued. ‘Lord Shiva supposedly meditates at the summit.’

  ‘Waiting to end the world, according to Khoil,’ said Nina.

  ‘And begin it again,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Maybe so, but for all its faults, I’d kinda like to keep the one we have now.’

  ‘Exactly what did Khoil tell you about this plan of his?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Not enough,’ she sighed. ‘Although I think he may have given away more than he intended when he was showing off how he’s rigged the Qexia search engine. He used India and Pakistan as an example of two countries that would only need the right spark to go to war - maybe that’s already part of what the Khoils are planning.’

  Mac nodded. ‘Both countries have nuclear weapons. If they started throwing them about, things would escalate beyond just the two of them very quickly.’

  ‘But what would the Khoils gain from that?’ asked Kit.

  ‘Global collapse,’ said Nina. ‘Pramesh wants to force the world into the next stage of the cycle of existence - end the Kali Yuga, and start a new Satya Yuga. A new golden age,’ she added for the benefit of the two puzzled British men.

  ‘That’s rather arrogant of him,’ said Kit thoughtfully. ‘The Kali Yuga is supposed to last over four hundred thousand years, and Shiva is the one who will end it. Not a man.’

  She smiled darkly. ‘Arrogance is about his only personality trait, unless you count nerdiness. But he said he has to have the Vedas from the Vault of Shiva for his plan to work. Without Shiva’s teachings to inspire them, people will just stay in the gutter.’

  ‘So what if he doesn’t get these Vedas?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘I don’t know. If he believes in them that much, maybe he won’t carry out his plan at all.’

  ‘Well, then. We get them before he does. Problem solved!’

  ‘Easier said than done. We don’t know where the Vault is.’ Nina looked at the map more closely, brow furrowing as she trawled through her memory of everything she had learned from the Talonor Codex. Some clue was tantalisingly close to revealing itself, but without access to the translation she couldn’t pin it down. ‘And . . . I’m not entirely sure that the Khoils do, either. Something isn’t right. Do you remember what I was telling you about Talonor - when you realised that what he was writing was a tactical report?’

  ‘Some of it. What about it?’

  She tapped a finger on the map. ‘Something about Talonor’s journey. He visited a temple where he met the Hindu priests - who showed him the key to the Vault of Shiva.’ She lifted the replica, tilting it so light picked out the reliefs of Shiva and the five goddesses. ‘He said the Vault was one day away from the temple. Or rather, one day to get there, and one hour to get back.’

  ‘How’s that possible?’ Mac wondered.

  ‘Khoil thought they might have come back by river,’ said Nina. The Himalayas were riddled with blue lines running down from glaciers, so that didn’t narrow the possibilities. ‘But Talonor said he went away from the river to reach the temple. And then . . .’ She snapped her fingers. ‘From there, he carried on northeast until he discovered the Golden Peak.’

  ‘The Golden Peak?’ asked Kit.

  ‘The site of an Atlantean settlement.’

  He was surprised. ‘There was an Atlantean settlement in Tibet? I’ve never heard that.’

  Nina realised she’d made a gaffe. ‘Oh . . . yeah. It’s something we kept out of the public record for security reasons, because it contained the . . .’ She tailed off and glared at her husband, who was making a show of holding his head in his hands. ‘Knock it off, Eddie. Uh, things I can’t tell you about. Sorry.’ She gave Kit an apologetic shrug.

  ‘I understand,’ h
e said. ‘Every organisation has its secrets - I should know!’

  ‘How does that help us, then?’ Eddie asked. He indicated an area above and to the left of Mount Kailash. ‘This is where the Golden Peak is, more or less.’

  ‘To the northwest of the sacred mountain,’ Nina pointed out. ‘Talonor said he continued northeast.’

  ‘There couldn’t have been a translation error?’ suggested Mac.

  ‘No, not for something that basic. That means the Vault of Shiva can’t be at Mount Kailash.’ She checked the map’s scale. ‘The Golden Peak is almost a hundred miles northwest of there. Talonor was the greatest explorer of his time - he couldn’t possibly have made such a huge navigational error. But Khoil doesn’t know that. He’s working from all the information Qexia has trawled from the internet - but nothing about the Golden Peak has ever been publicly released.’ A triumphant smile. ‘Guess computers can’t do all the work for you after all.’

  ‘So if it’s not there, where is it?’ Eddie moved his finger diagonally over the map. ‘If he went northeast to reach the Golden Peak, the Vault’s got to be somewhere southwest of it.’

  ‘Yeah . . . but the Codex specifically said that he met the priests at a temple on a holy mountain. Kit, are there any other—’

  ‘Kedarnath,’ Kit cut in, his expression suggesting he was chastising himself for not having thought of it earlier. ‘Kedarnath, of course! Here.’ He indicated a particular peak on the Indian side of the disputed border. ‘Lord Shiva lived on Mount Kailash, yes - but he had a second home on Mount Kedarnath.’

  ‘So he had a holiday cottage?’ said Eddie. ‘I’d pick somewhere a bit nearer the sea myself. But then, I’m not a god.’

  Nina grinned. ‘You just think you are. So what’s the story of Kedarnath?’

  ‘There are three, actually,’ said Kit. ‘The great Hindu texts have many different ways of telling the same stories. One of them is that two of Shiva’s followers, Nar and Narayan, performed great penance before a lingam of Shiva - a symbol of the god,’ he clarified for Eddie and Mac. ‘Shiva was pleased and granted them a boon - a wish. They asked if he could make a home closer to his followers than Mount Kailash, and he agreed. In another, five brothers followed Shiva there to beg forgiveness for having killed their cousins in a war. He gave it, and told them he would live there to watch over them.’

  ‘And the third version?’

  ‘Shiva’s wife, Parvati, thought Mount Kailash was too far from India - she wanted to be nearer the people she loved. So she asked Shiva for another home that was closer to them.’

  Eddie laughed. ‘That sounds familiar. The bloke has to move house because his wife wants to be somewhere she thinks is nicer.’

  ‘Are you telling me you liked living in Blissville?’ said Nina, of their move out of Queens back into her native Manhattan five months earlier.

  ‘It was a lot cheaper, I’ll give it that.’

  She huffed, then turned back to Kit. ‘What else can you tell me about Kedarnath?’

  ‘Not much. I’ve never been there. But there is a temple there - one of the oldest and holiest in India. It’s dedicated to Shiva.’

  ‘How old?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but very.’

  ‘Old enough to have been there when Talonor visited,’ Nina said thoughtfully. ‘Everything fits: Talonor thinking that Shiva, with his trident, was the same god as Poseidon; the temple being southwest of the Golden Peak; the entire site being considered a sacred mountain, the home of a god.’ Her expression brightened. ‘And Khoil’s looking in the wrong place. He’s started from a false premise - that the sacred mountain mentioned in the Codex is Mount Kailash. And since he doesn’t know about the Golden Peak, he’s got no way of realising that!’

  ‘So the Vault is somewhere on Mount Kedarnath?’ Kit asked.

  ‘Seems like it.’

  ‘Then I can’t see how it hasn’t been found already. Kedarnath is not like Mount Kailash - lots of people have climbed it. And the temple is a major tourist attraction, as well as a site of pilgrimage.’

  ‘It could be hidden. In a cave, through a crevice - however many tourists have been there, I doubt they’ve crawled over every square inch of the entire peak.’

  ‘It doesn’t help us find it either, though,’ Eddie said.

  ‘I know. If I had the translation . . . wait a minute. I’m a dumbass.’ She looked at Kit’s laptop. ‘I can get the translation. Can I use your phone?’

  One call to Lola in New York later, and - after telling the relieved PA that she and Eddie were okay - the IHA’s translation of the Talonor Codex sat in Kit’s inbox.

  ‘So computers do have their uses, then?’ joked Eddie.

  ‘For some things, yeah,’ Nina admitted as she scrolled through the text. ‘I don’t know why I’ve suddenly gotten this reputation as a Luddite, though. I’ve used computers to help me my entire career. It’s when you rely on them to think for you that you have a problem - as Khoil hopefully won’t find out until it’s way, way too late.’ She remembered something and gave her husband a scathing look. ‘Speaking of problems . . . we need to have a little discussion about your internet surfing habits.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Khoil knows what you’ve been looking at. Everything. Qexia has a record. He showed me.’

  ‘Oh, that. Yeah, he mentioned it. And next time I see him, I’m going to kick his arse so hard that he’ll shit out of his mouth.’

  Mac tried to hide a smile. ‘Something you want to share, Eddie?’ He put his hands on Nina’s shoulders and grinned. ‘Only with my wife.’

  ‘I don’t want to share . . . that,’ Nina protested.

  ‘I bet you’d like it once you tried it.’

  ‘I don’t want to try it! We shouldn’t need . . .’ she blushed, ‘props.’

  He kissed the top of her head. ‘Such a prude.’

  ‘Shut up. Oh, here it is.’ She highlighted part of the text.

  ‘Talonor describes the part of the mountain where the priests said the Vault of Shiva is hidden. “A ridge, higher above us, many stadia distant across hard but passable terrain. It was marked by a notch like that in the edge of a damaged blade.” Everything in military terms again,’ she remarked to Eddie.

  ‘Can we use that to work out the Vault’s location?’ Kit asked.

  ‘We should be able to, since we know where the temple is. Do you have Google Earth or something on your laptop?’

  He did; a few minutes later, the screen showed a virtual view of Kedarnath mountain from the village of the same name. Off to the northeast, there was indeed a ridge with what could be described as a notch cut into it, though the relatively low resolution meant it could just as easily be a glitch of the rendering system.

  ‘The ridge is, let’s see . . . about three and a half miles from the village,’ said Nina. ‘The Vault’s supposedly somewhere up there.’

  Eddie brought the camera higher, pulling back for an aerial view. ‘It says the village is at about three and a half thousand metres, but the ridge is . . .’ He moved the cursor across the screen. ‘Christ, it’s almost six kilometres up in places.’

  ‘Steep climb,’ noted Mac. ‘You’d have to take it slowly, or risk getting altitude sickness.’

  ‘That’d explain why the priests needed a full day to get to the Vault, I guess,’ said Nina. ‘But they wouldn’t have had anything close to modern mountaineering gear, so there must be a way that’s passable by foot. Could they have gone through the notch?’

  ‘Depends how big it is.’ Eddie indicated the angular graphic on the screen. ‘That doesn’t tell us anything. Could be fifty metres deep, or five hundred. We’d need to see it for real.’

  ‘What are the chances of that?’ Nina asked Kit. ‘You said that Eddie’s no longer Public Enemy Number One - are we free to travel?’

  ‘You really want to go to Kedarnath?’ he asked. ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘Whatever the Khoils are planning, it seemed to be on a de
adline, otherwise they wouldn’t have been in such a desperate rush to get hold of the Codex. And they both seem pretty smart - they might not be archaeologists, but they’ll figure out that Mount Kailash isn’t the right place sooner rather than later. And when they do, they’ll start looking for other possibilities. Since they’re both devout followers of Shiva, I’d guess they know about Mount Kedarnath and his pied-à-terre.’

  ‘You want to go climbing the Himalayas?’ Eddie asked. ‘In December? It’ll be a bit bloody nippy.’

  ‘Pramesh seemed completely sincere about needing these ancient texts, the Shiva-Vedas. If we can find the Vault of Shiva and get the Vedas first, that’ll be a big spanner in his works - not to mention an archaeological find to match anything we’ve seen so far.’

  Mac tapped his foot on the floor, the prosthetic leg making a dull creak of metal and plastic. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to count me out, then. Much as I love freezing my arse off on mountainsides, I’m not really up to the task any more. I have a slight deficiency in the limb department.’

  Nina smiled at him. ‘Mac, you’ve already done way more than I can ever thank you for.’

  ‘I might still be able to do something useful, though. Peter Alderley is coming to India as part of the British delegation for the G20 summit. The Khoils might be pulling every string they can in the Indian government, but I highly doubt they’ll have any influence at MI6. I’ll talk to him and see if he can find out anything.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ Eddie groaned. ‘My favourite person.’

  ‘We should meet him,’ Nina said, teasing. ‘You can apologise in person for dropping his invitation down a drain.’

  ‘Tchah!’

  Mac smiled. ‘I’m sure Peter will enjoy that. But whatever Eddie may think of him, he takes his work very seriously - and threats to global security are very much part of MI6’s remit. Especially with twenty world leaders in the same place at the same time.’

  ‘Do you think that’s their plan?’ said Nina. ‘Attack the G20? Then manipulate the media to place the blame on different countries?’