The Breath of God

by Jeffrey Small

  “The Persian architect who designed the Taj was named Ustad Isa, spelled with one s.”

  “You’re amazing!” He leaned over and wrapped his arms around her in an embrace that almost knocked the computer from her lap. The couple beside them glanced over again. He didn’t care that he was making a scene. For the first time since they’d left Bhutan, they were a step closer to reaching the texts. He noticed Kristin was beaming at him. “So we meet Kinley and Jigme at the Taj Mahal, but when? I assume the last phrase about the full moon has something to do with meeting them at night?”

  Kristin traced her finger along the final phrase: reflected in a pond by the light of the full moon. “That makes perfect sense,” she said.

  “It does?”

  “In front of the monument are two long reflecting pools where you can see the image of the Taj. When Kinley and I were chatting in the courtyard before we went up to the library, he asked me about my travels through India. One of the highlights for me was seeing the Taj at night under the full moon. You see, the Indian government strictly regulates access to its World Heritage monuments, but on one night per month, during the full moon, they open the grounds of the Taj for a few hours to tourists.”

  “So all we have to do is to find the next full moon,” Grant said.

  Kristin typed “lunar phase” into the browser’s search field. Seconds later they had their answer. They had to hurry. The next full moon was in four nights, and it would take two days to get there. Fortunately, he thought, their visas were still good.

  Then the thought of the hearing at Emory that would determine his academic fate in two weeks flashed through his head. He would forward Jigme’s email to Billingsly, but he doubted Dean Flannigan would grant him a reprieve. Could they travel to Agra and meet Kinley at the Taj and then return to Atlanta with proof of the texts in time?

  CHAPTER 26

  AGRA, INDIA

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES behind schedule. Did anything in this filthy country run on time? Tim shifted uncomfortably on the train’s hard plastic seat. At least he’d paid the extra rupees for the first-class car on the Shatabdi Express from New Delhi to Agra. His stomach had turned two hours earlier when he saw the coach cars pull past him on the New Delhi station platform: humans packed like livestock, standing in the stench of their unwashed countrymen. At least his first-class car had working AC, and no one had tried to bring chickens or goats into his compartment.

  After flights from Birmingham to DC and DC to London, Tim had finally arrived in New Delhi yesterday, exhausted but exhilarated. He had waited his life for an opportunity like this. What he’d been searching for in the Army—belonging to the team protecting his country—had driven him until that was taken away. Now he understood that he’d suffered then for a reason: to gain the skills and the fortitude to face the opportunity before him. He was now part of something bigger than his country—he was an agent in God’s plans.

  After he’d arrived in New Delhi, he picked up several emails on his phone. The first was a copy of a coded message from the monk Kinley to Grant Matthews, and the second was a translation of the code that gave him a new destination: the Taj Mahal. Tim congratulated himself on his foresight to travel halfway around the world to wait in India for his Bhutanese visa. They were now coming to him. Tim stopped at Bhutan’s consulate in New Delhi to apply for his visa—one could never overprepare—and then he left for Agra, the city made famous by one of the world’s most recognizable monuments.

  Glancing at his fellow passengers, Tim noticed how dark-skinned they were, not quite black, but not far from it either. The men looked halfway respectable, dressed in business suits, but the saris the women wore looked like silk curtains wrapped around their bodies. Colorful, but as ridiculous-looking as the odd nasal piercings and red smudges on their foreheads. During the time he’d spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, he’d never become accustomed to the primitive habits of Third World people. Indians, Afghanis, Iraqis: they were all the same to Tim. As Reverend Brady had emphasized many times, these people, the non-Christians, would all end up in hell.

  He checked his watch again. He was anxious to arrive in Agra before Grant Matthews and Kristin Misaki. He’d been closely following their every move for days now. The software he’d installed on Matthews’s computer worked perfectly. A copy of every email Grant sent or received was covertly forwarded to an anonymous account Tim had set up. He’d taken an additional precaution by activating the E911 microchip in Grant’s phone. This chip transformed the phone into a GPS receiver, and once activated, the cell phone’s location could be pinpointed to within a few yards with a web browser. Based on the emails he’d intercepted from their online bookings, he knew that Grant Matthews and Kristin Misaki would arrive in Agra late the following day, giving him little time to scout the city and plan his operation.

  As the train pulled into the Agra Cantonment station, Tim hoisted the straps of his olive green backpack onto his shoulders and pushed past the other passengers. He stepped onto the concrete platform with its open-air corrugated metal roof. The stench of urine immediately assaulted his nostrils. At least the fall weather was sunny and warm, not like the scorching summers he’d spent in the Middle East. Swatting at the flies swarming his face, he shoved past a thin man wearing torn navy pants and a soiled polyester shirt.

  The man, who carried a blackened rag and a can of shoe polish, followed beside Tim, tugging his arm and repeating, “Shoeshine, mister?”

  Tim’s hand instinctively went to his hip, but the reassuring bulge of his Glock was missing, packed into his backpack. Before leaving the States, he had carefully disassembled it, concealing parts in a fake alarm clock and a converted shaving cream can. Many parts of the gun were made from a composite plastic, which made his job all the easier. Tim had checked his only bag, knowing how lax airport security actually was in light of all their self-congratulatory efforts post-9/11.

  Undaunted, the man pleaded, “Twenty rupees. Good shine.”

  Tim briefly considered punching the scrawny man in the face, but then he pictured the man’s blood and saliva on his hands and thought better of it. Who knew what kinds of diseases these people had? Instead he glared at the shoeshine man, who, Tim realized, was not even wearing shoes himself.

  “They’re hiking boots, you fucking moron,” Tim spat out. Although the barefoot man may not have understood the exact words Tim used, he got the message and moved to the next travelers departing the train.

  As he continued along the platform, the smell of deep-fried food awakened Tim’s stomach with a growl. He passed a vendor selling a breaded ball of something cooked in a murky vat of oil from a metal cart. As hungry as Tim was, he imagined the gut-wrenching diarrhea this food would probably give him. He would wait until he arrived at his hotel to find something safer to eat. He remembered that he had a handful of protein bars in his backpack too.

  Reaching the end of the platform, Tim climbed a metal staircase leading to a catwalk that crossed over the train tracks to the street exit. From the group of taxi and rickshaw drivers haggling for his business, he picked the least offensive, an elderly man dressed in a frayed white shirt, who at least wore a tie. Tim tried to touch as little as possible while sitting in the interior of the dented white van. He caressed his forearms as he gazed out the window.

  During his brief layover in Delhi, he’d noticed that the Indian government had made an attempt to cover up some of the squalor with wide tree-lined avenues and modern-looking office buildings in the newer parts of the capital city. After just a few minutes in the taxi, he could see that Agra was a different story. Decrepit wood and stone structures stood next to concrete buildings that had not seen a coat of paint in decades. Every few blocks, he passed communities of tent cites that had sprung up outside the walls around the buildings. Entire families lived under lean-tos made of rusted tin. Mud covered the ground and the people. The squalor here dwarfed anything he’d encountered before.

  How do they steal our fucking jobs? he
wondered, shaking his head. These people had no respect for themselves or their city.

  Garbage littered the sides of the street, in places three feet deep. The aroma of this teeming city was a far cry from the clean pine scent of his home. As the van rounded a bend, he spotted two young children, standing in a heap of garbage by the side of the road. The older child, a girl of seven or eight, was dressed in a tattered dress that hung loosely off her shoulders. Tim watched her search through the trash, perhaps for something to eat. The younger child, a boy about four with greasy black hair and no shirt, probably her brother, squatted on his heels while lifting his hand to his mouth.

  Tim swallowed back the acid taste of bile when he realized the boy was scooping brackish water from a stagnant puddle to drink. No sign of parents anywhere: they were like stray dogs on the street. As the car passed within a few feet of the children, the girl lifted her head and made direct eye contact with Tim. Behind the unwashed bangs that fell in front of the young girl’s face, Tim saw only a vacant look in her eyes.

  “Not even human,” he muttered.

  As if to confirm his thoughts, the slow movement of a hulking shape twenty meters down the road from the children caught his attention. As the car drew closer, Tim recognized the shape to be two large pigs rooting through the same continuous line of garbage that the children had been digging through down the road. Both were heavier than the boar he was used to hunting in the Alabama woods, and their wiry gray coats were covered in the same mud covering the people who lived along the road.

  This place turned his stomach. He felt himself losing focus on the task ahead, so he closed his eyes and went through his mental checklist. Once he unpacked, he would reassemble the Glock. Then he would need to find some ammunition. Despite his feelings that most baggage screeners were complete morons, he wasn’t confident he could adequately conceal the chemical trace of gunpowder or the unmistakable shape of a bullet. But he knew that anything could be bought in a place like this, for the right price. Forty-caliber bullets would be a cinch.

  In addition to the gun, Tim’s pack contained one of his most creative ideas. Just thinking of his cleverness made him grin. Inside a nylon case were six EpiPens, plastic shots of self-injectable doses of epinephrine delivered via a concealed spring-activated needle. Tim had easily obtained them from a drugstore with a forged prescription he’d photoshopped. Many people carried these singleuse shots in case of emergency allergic reactions to bee stings or food items.

  But Tim didn’t have any allergies. Allergies were for sickly people. Instead, Tim had modified the EpiPens, none of which contained epinephrine any longer. Three now contained Versed, a benzodiazepine drug doctors often injected into patients immediately before surgery to induce a twilight state of consciousness. He recalled his own experience with Versed in his twenties when his wisdom teeth were removed. He’d pocketed the vials the day he was excused from his hospital job. You never know when certain drugs might come in handy, he’d thought, and Tim was nothing if not patient. So many of the things he’d done over the years, not knowing for what outcome, were starting to fall into place, further convincing him that God had held this plan for him for many years, perhaps his whole life.

  Tim smiled when he thought about the effects of jabbing someone with one of his modified EpiPens: the person would be rendered helpless within seconds. Barely conscious, his victim would follow his instructions clumsily and, owing to the drug’s amnesiac effect, remember nothing once the drug wore off.

  The other three EpiPens were marked with a red line. He’d used a Sharpie so he wouldn’t mistake them for the Versed-filled ones. The red-lined shots would act as quickly as the other three, but with far more dramatic results. These were filled with hydrocyanic acid, a chemical related to cyanide but with an even higher toxicity. The victim stabbed with one of these would go into immediate cardiac arrest. This chemical had been even easier to obtain than the Versed; he’d ordered it from an online chemical supply company.

  Within a day’s time, he anticipated testing both types.

  CHAPTER 27

  UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA

  GRANT GAZED OUT the car’s window at the flat, arid land whose sandy soil was tinted with red. He wondered whether Issa had crossed this land on his way to the Himalayas. The car jolted as it hit a pothole. Calling the road to Agra a “highway” was someone’s wishful thinking. Its lanes needed a complete repaving, instead of haphazard patch jobs. The bumpy ride might have bothered him were his attention not drawn to the inevitable head-on collisions their driver miraculously avoided every few minutes when he swerved into incoming traffic to pass a slow-moving tractor or an even slower-moving camel-pulled cart.

  They’d spent no time at all in New Delhi, where they’d arrived yesterday after eighteen hours of flying, including a layover in Paris. The road conditions combined with their jet lag made the four-hour drive between cities seem even longer than it was. Grant marveled at the large diversity of travelers on the streets of the towns they’d passed through—cars whose drivers seemed oblivious to the rules of the road, buses with as many passengers riding on the roof as inside the vehicle, three-wheeled rickshaws whose drivers peddled furiously in the heavy traffic, camels pulling carts loaded with construction materials, and swarms of motorbikes darting in, out, and around like hornets circling their nest. Neither traffic signals nor the concept of right of way existed here, yet in the chaos, these travelers somehow managed to dance around each other as if they were performing an elaborate ballet to the sounds of the ever-present symphony of car horns.

  “What’re you thinking about?” Kristin asked through a yawn.

  “You’re awake. Oh, nothing. Just the symphony.”

  Kristin gave him a confused look as she stretched her arms over her head. As if on cue, their driver blared his horn and swerved around an emaciated spotted cow standing in the middle of a busy village intersection, one of many their driver had blazed through in the last three hours. The cow seemed stoned, perhaps from breathing in too many exhaust fumes, and it didn’t bother to look up at the SUV as it passed within inches of its hindquarters. The aggressive maneuver pressed Kristin into Grant’s side.

  Before righting herself, she whispered into his ear, “There’s a saying in this country that drivers only need three things: horns, brakes, and good luck.”

  “Fortunately, we’ve had an abundance of all three,” Grant replied. He leaned forward and asked their driver, “Hey, what’s the deal with all the cows in the road?” On his previous trips to India, he’d been quite amused by the cattle who roamed freely in the middle of the road and slept on the medians.

  Their driver, whose collarless white shirt contrasted with his dark complexion and jet black hair, explained in accented English, “People keep cows for milk. Use dung for cooking fuel. But the cow is sacred animal to Hindus. We do not butcher them for meat. When the animals are too old to make milk, the owners let them go into the streets.”

  “Instead of stray dogs, you have stray cows?” Grant smiled.

  “Oh yes. Many stray dogs here too.” The driver chuckled.

  Although Grant had witnessed in India the most abject poverty he’d ever seen, he also marveled at the energy of the people and the richness of the culture. The people they’d encountered so far had been extremely friendly and helpful.

  Kristin checked Grant’s watch. “We should be in Agra soon.”

  “Well, tonight’s the night.” He rubbed his palms on his khakis. They had replied to Jigme that they’d be there at eight PM under the full moon—the one night a month the Taj Mahal was open—but Jigme hadn’t responded. Now Grant hoped for the best. He couldn’t help but wonder whether the cloakand-dagger charade was really necessary. The frenzy of publicity surrounding the initial publication of the Issa translation had died and been replaced by headlines highlighting Grant’s humiliation. But then he thought about Kinley and all the trouble he must have gone through to make a reunion possible.

  “You think
they’ll be there?” Kristin asked.

  “Let’s hope so.” Grant felt confident about their interpretation of Jigme’s email. But what if we’re wrong? They didn’t have much time, and they would deplete Kristin’s travel money within a week.

  CHAPTER 28

  AGRA, INDIA

  THE SHADOWS OF DUSK concealed the small skiff motoring east down the Yamuna River. Tim’s fingers tingled from the vibration of the throttle on the fifteen-horsepower outboard attached to the stern of the flat-bottomed boat. Finding a boat for hire had not been a problem: finding one with a motor instead of an old man with a pole had taken some effort, and four thousand rupees—just under a hundred dollars. Fortunately, Tim had been given a generous cash allowance for this mission. He was thankful again for his foresight and well-planned operation. Had he not left early for India, he never would have had time to prepare after he’d intercepted the coded email and its translation. One of the key lessons from his military training had been the importance of preparation and planning.

  With the skiff humming across the placid water, Tim removed his phone from the backpack by his feet. The one redeeming aspect of this filthy country, he thought, was its kick-ass digital cell service. In under thirty seconds, he connected to the Internet through the phone’s browser and had access to a color map of the city of Agra. Tim tapped the screen, zooming in until he saw the flashing red dot. Matthews’s cell phone. He marveled at how easy it was to follow someone’s every move. The government claimed the mandated E911 chips were for public safety: a panicked motorist calling 911 after an accident could be instantly located. The cell phone companies also pitched the technology as an additional benefit to those who enjoyed using GPS, and they even sold a service to parents to make their kids safer. For a small monthly fee, parents could log on to a website at any time and pull up a city map showing their children’s exact location. But Tim knew what the technology was really for—just another way for the government to control its citizens. And tonight he would use it to his advantage.