by Peter Heath
“I see.” Adam stood still for a minute. Then he started toward the sullen-faced Indian.
“Death will come before I reveal anything,” Mr. Chatterji snarled. His eyes grew wider, and he trembled.
Then, strangely, his body relaxed. Adam’s hand had brushed his pallid forehead. Mr. Chatterji’s head slumped down until his chin was hanging on his chest, and his eyes slid shut. It wasn’t hypnotism, thought Jason. It was more like something or someone had entered his body to take control of it, to tell it things that it had no power to resist.
Now Mr. Chatterji sat up again. His eyes opened and he stared blankly ahead. Adam’s hand remained on his forehead.
“He is prepared for the questioning,” said Adam.
“You were given instructions to destroy me. Why?” said Jason.
Mr. Chatterji’s voice was hollow and far-away. “The Brotherhood does not question its commands. You are to be silenced. That is our task,” he said.
“What is the Brotherhood?”
“Only the Leader knows.”
“Where is the Leader?” asked Jason. Of course, the Indian was only a stooge, a hatchet man for an organization that called itself the Brotherhood.
“The Leader is everywhere. The Leader rewards and the Leader destroys,” the Indian chanted it like an often-sung hymn.
“How does the Leader reward you?”
“With pleasures undreamed of.”
“What else does he do?”
“The Leader heals the sick, repairs the wounded, comforts the dying.” The little Indian’s face lit up with the expectant look of a child about to be fed a lollipop.
“Does the Brotherhood know we are here?” Jason said, suspecting the answer before it came.
“The Brotherhood is watching you now,” was the reply.
“Then they know that you are my prisoner,” said Jason. “What will they do to you?”
“Death to all who reveal the secrets of the Leader,” the little man said in a sad voice.
Jason found himself feeling a little sorry for the Indian. If the strange organization calling itself the Brotherhood was really as omnipotent as it claimed, the little fellow’s life wasn’t worth an inflated Indian rupee. Then he remembered the howling mob that had tried to tear him to pieces. Whatever happens to Mr. Chatterji is well deserved, he thought.
“That’s all for now, Adam,” he told his friend.
Adam’s hand left the Indian’s forehead and, a few seconds later, Mr. Chatterji’s eyes blinked back into focus.
“I refuse to tell you anything, you heathen swine,” he hissed.
“Quite right,” said Jason. “Sorry we tried to make you.” Then, turning to Adam, he suggested that Mr. Chatterji be temporarily put away for safekeeping. A heavy piece of window sash served for binding and the musty smelling closet for a storage place. When the door was shut, Jason went to the old telephone and, after a few calculated smashes across its rusty face, got through to the switchboard.
“Get me the Oceanic Trading Company,” he said, reading the number off the piece of paper that Hamilton had scrawled on. “Mr. Joseph Blake,” it said. “Trade Representative for India.” The CIA could use a good idea man, thought Jason. By now everybody knows the import-export front as well as the face of a dollar bill.
Then the phone rang. Five and a half rings later, it was picked up and a pleasant male voice started to tell Jason that the Oceanic Trading Company was no longer in business, but any unpaid bills would be honored in due time.
“Look, Blake,” he said. “This is Jason Stair, the guy your—ah—company told you to be looking for. . . .”
There was silence. Then the voice changed into its real self: “Yes, I received my instructions, what can I do for you, Mr. Starr?”
“We could have a little chat. Supposing I come around to your office,” said Jason.
“About what, Mr. Starr?” The CIA man sounded suspicious. His orders were to keep out of Jason’s affairs, and he wanted to keep his nose clean with Washington.
“Ever hear of an organization that calls itself the Brotherhood?” asked Jason softly. He heard the sharp intake of Blake’s breath.
“I’ll expect you in half an hour.” The line went dead.
The streets were filled with jostling crowds carrying black umbrellas with bamboo handles, and everybody was trying to poke everybody’s eyes out with their steel-ribbed edges. Hawkers screamed their wares from under rain-soaked archways; plastic pens, dime-store spectacles, combs, perfumed hair oil, elixirs to restore your sex life, elixirs to keep off the howling tribe of homeless beggar children who circled around you like a ragged swarm of flies. It was the oldest con game in the world, and Jason plunged through it, going toward the docks and his rendezvous with Blake.
Cyber was on his way to the offices of the Bombay Times to search the newspaper’s morgue for any leads that might show past activities of the Brotherhood, and Mr. Chatterji was resting peacefully in his closet, gagged with a clean silk handkerchief.
It was dark and still raining by the time Jason found the old warehouse with the faded sign—OCEANIC, LTD.—over its paintless single door. The door was slightly ajar, so he didn’t bother to disturb the silence with a knock. He stepped inside and paused to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. He was standing in a large room filled with uneven stacks of cotton bales. A light burned dimly through a frosted glass door at the other end. The cotton smelled like it had been picked the year before Caesar was assassinated, and the rain drummed steadily on the tin roof. Jason started toward the door. An office, probably. Blake would be waiting for him.
Blake had grown tired of waiting. His head was on the old roll-top desk, and his sagging shoulders indicated a stupefying need for sleep. Blake had also forgotten to close up his filing cabinets, his safe and all the rest of the open cabinets and drawers in the room. The ripped-open manila folders stamped with big red letters that said TOP SECRET spilled out in all directions. Jason’s eyes took it all in in a split second. He crossed over to the desk.
Even if he hadn’t been dead, Blake wouldn’t have done much talking.
His tongue had been cut out. He had choked to death on his own blood.
Just as Jason decided he was going to get sick, he noticed the blood-smeared marks on the back of a bill of lading underneath Blake’s clenched right hand. His curiosity won the battle with his stomach, and he extracted the paper carefully.
It held the tongueless man’s last three words. Written in his own blood, it said: Krupt. ND. Kumindani. A dried red fingerprint ended the message.
It had been a fast job. But thorough. Jason found nothing of importance in the open files or the safe. Krupt? Krupt? . . . the K section contained nothing but a list of known killers wanted by the Indian Bureau of Investigation.
Then, hidden in Blake’s wallet in a false pocket they had apparently overlooked, he found Kumindani.
She was as beautiful in her way as Maria d’Allesandro Corday, the girl that Jason had left in Washington. She was wearing the ceremonial dress of an Indian classical dancer and her luminous dark eyes, her full-molded high breasts and her perfect legs said a lot for the Indians as a race. On the back of the picture she had written: For Joey and joy . . . Kumindani. Well, the joy part was over, thought Jason. He was halfway to the door before he remembered. The Brotherhood had murdered Blake after the telephone call. Meaning they knew he was here. Meaning he was due to be next on their agenda—even more so than before, probably. How? A bomb? Gas? Bullets? No. Another typically staged “accident.” He remembered the dried-out old cotton in the main warehouse. Probably burns like an old widow’s wig, he thought. They would be waiting now. He thought swiftly and his eyes searched the room quickly—wildly. Finally they found what they sought. Thank God the Indian power industry is so inefficient, he thought. A can of kerosene and a lantern were sitting in the corner next to the telephone.
Jason worked swiftly.
Using the CIA files, he built a paper snowball two
feet high. He tied it together with a ball of twine from the top of the desk. Then he soaked it down with kerosene. He poured on some more while he was dialing the number of the Bombay Times. Hoping that the message reached Cyber, he told the newspaper morgue attendant to have his friend meet him at the airport.
He poured the rest of the kerosene into his snowball while he called the police.
“I say, old boy,” he said to the duty sergeant. “Thought you ought to know—one hell of a blaze is raging down here at the Oceanic Trading Company . . . just doing my duty as a loyal ex-colonial official.”
He hung up with the rapid “What . . . what . . . what” of the duty sergeant still buzzing in his ear.
Now let’s see how my little assassins like their whiskers singed, he thought. Cutting an extra piece of twine, he carried his snowball to the door. While he tied down one end to the bomb and looped the other through his hand, he listened. Sooner or later someone has to cough, he thought.
He was right. It was actually a nervous throat being cleared somewhere in the darkness of the big outer loft. The Brotherhood was waiting.
Jason’s cigarette lighter did nicely.
The snowball turned itself into a bomb of pure fire in five seconds. Jason waited until he could feel his fingertips starting to burn. Then his foot lashed out, shattering the glass door into a million fragments. He whirled his missile once around his head and let it fly.
It arched high, trailing fire like a comet, and then down, to explode in a shower of flaming debris on the wood floor. It scattered itself all over the high-stacked, tinder-dry bales of cotton, turning them into walls of flame. The quickness with which it all happened surprised even Jason. The stuff was going up as if it was impregnated with oil.
He dove through the small window at the back of the office head-first. It was the first time he was glad of the rain and the mud. He hit shoulder-first and rolled with the shock. By the time he had wiped off his eyes he was up and the .38 in his hand.
It was another alley, dark and empty—this was a dockside area—and he crossed over and took up a station behind a pile of broken masonry. The warehouse was uncannily silent. Some of them must be making it out through the front door, thought Jason. But not very many. Then he saw the head and shoulders appear in the window from which he had recently ejected himself. The silhouette of a man framed in fire. It started to climb out. Then Jason squeezed the trigger and it stopped. It fell back inside and disappeared.
There were two more. Jason was merciful. He hit them before they wasted any energy climbing out. The last one screamed before his arms slid out of sight. It was silent for a moment. Then the whole world exploded. Jason had a flash view of the top of the warehouse rising into the night sky on a pillar of fire, and the shock wave drove his face back into the mud.
He let it stay there for a while. In fact, he was most grateful to it. While secondary explosions rocked him back and forth, and wreckage pelted across the top of the pile of broken masonry, he hugged the ooze, thinking. Rotten old cotton bales, full of high explosives—the CIA warehouse, all right, and also the CIA’s depot for demolition materials. I guess some explanations will be in order if and when I have a chance to make them, he thought. A last minor explosion rocked the building.
The wail of sirens interrupted his reveries. It was the police and the fire department. Time for Jason to disappear—unless he wanted to do his explaining from an Indian jail cell. As he trotted away through the darkness, he heard the distant popgun sounds of small-arms fire. Apparently the police were cleaning up the surviving members of the Brotherhood’s strong-arm squad. He slowed to a walk, and while he made his way through the oldest slum in ancient Bombay, his mind started to glue the bits and pieces of new information together.
Strangely enough they stuck: Mr. Chatterji, the so-called Brotherhood, Kumindani . . . Krupt . . . and ND. New Delhi, of course! The site of the symposium of brain researchers and cybernetic specialists . . . the arrows all pointed in that direction. And tomorrow was the day the conference began. Satisfied with his decision, Jason stopped thinking and trotted toward the lights of the main thoroughfare that lay a block ahead. The rain was slackening off and a shaft of cold moonlight found its way through the clouds long enough to illuminate his strong, high-cheek-boned face. It was the face of a man who was learning the laws of the jungle and the art of survival.
* * *
Chapter †
ELEVEN
THE INDIAN PEOPLE are said to be the world’s largest and most disorderly welcoming committee. This fact and this fact alone was responsible for saving Jason’s rumpled tropical suit from the effects of the five well-positioned and accurately aimed high-velocity hunting rifles aimed at his chest by five well-hidden men.
The crowd, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands, had been waiting under the hot Punjab sun for more than three hours. They had been waiting for the leading Chinese delegate to the Asian symposium on Human Development—Doctor Hsin Lau, a man of peace and a man of hope. Science knows no political boundaries, and the current border crisis with China had not prevented the Indian Congress Party from turning its members out en masse to welcome the good doctor and the other delegates. It was good official policy and great fun.
As the Air India DC-3 with Jason and Adam aboard cut its engines and creaked to a stop in front of the New Delhi Air Terminal, a tiny speck appeared in the blue sky. By the time the door of the thirty-year-old aircraft had been flung open, the speck had grown into an Illyushin jetliner with two large red stars painted across its fuselage. It was the Chinese delegation, and the crowd knew it.
As Jason ducked through the door into the sweltering mid-morning heat followed by Cyber, a great roar went up from thousands of Hindus.
What happened next saved Jason’s life.
With one accord, the people surged forward. The steel retaining fences toppled. The line of policemen was swept aside, and the howling mob surged onto the field.
An instant later Jason felt rather than heard the sighing swish of a high-powered bullet going past his head. A hole appeared in the aluminum over the door. Then another. Then the man ahead of Jason, a minor Indian bureaucrat with whom he had exchanged a few words on the flight, jerked spasmodically and pitched forward down the ramp.
“The crowd! Quickly!” Jason’s words were swallowed up in the general pandemonium. With Adam right behind him, he hurdled the body of the Indian and they were swept into the center of the welcoming mob.
Women screamed. Children tried to escape and were caught in a forest of grown-up legs. Everywhere, policemen swung their bamboo lathis, smashing them down on heads that paid no heed. Somewhere a pipe-band was playing what once might have been the Indian national anthem. But still the human tidal wave pressed forward. Its goal was the awning-covered platform which was to be used to receive the dignitaries.
The mob overran it just as the big jet rolled to a stop, and the startled Chinese pilot cut his engines hurriedly for fear of sucking a few score heads into them. The line of top-hatted officials was swallowed up in a flash. Chairs, tables, microphones were overturned and trampled to kindling. The awning sagged badly and then slid off its supports, covering the rest of the scene like a modest veil. Underneath it the game went on until, one by one, shirtless, hatless and shoeless government officials emerged. The police rushed forward and the battle continued.
Somehow Jason and Cyber had managed to hang back during the melee. Now they found themselves on the edge of the vast crowd centered around the parked jetliner. As the ramp dropped and the first Chinese emerged, Jason saw the way out of their desperate situation.
It was an old Packard limousine, parked in a line of newer cars with flags attached to the fenders . . . part of the motorcade into town. The autos stood deserted, and Jason beckoned his friend forward. The Chinese were emerging now, and the crowd roared its approval. Since the reviewing stand lay in wreckage, the visiting dignitaries were surrounded by a cordon of police and led swiftly to
the cars which would deliver them to Government Palace and a garden party.
The ten-mile drive into New Delhi was a continuation of the Indian madness for good will. Flags had been planted, flower covered archways erected, and the motorcade roared past a colorful cheering rose-pelting throng. Jason was in ninth place. He drove with one hand and brushed the flower petals out of his eyes with the other. Beside him Cyber turned his head left and right. He seemed interested in the spectacle.
“Smile, Adam,” said Jason. “Wave your arm . . . it’s part of being in a parade.” It’s also part of giving the Brotherhood the slip, at least for the time being, he thought.
Sitting up to their waists in crushed flowers, they drove past saluting sentries and parked in the Palace courtyard. They got out and followed the crowd streaming through a stone gateway and up a staircase leading to the gardens of Kashtrapati Bhavan.
What looked like three thousand people eddied and swirled along the paths between the flowerbeds and fountains. Above Jason, the old viceroy’s palace looked down. A magnificently uniformed band played military airs, and turban-clad sikhs hovered behind long tables waiting to serve tea. Jason could have eaten a sacred cow at that point, but tea it was, and tea he would drink.
The Chinese had disappeared inside the Palace and now, with a fanfare of trumpets and the first bar of the national anthem, they reappeared, coming down one of the pathways toward Jason. He recognized Dr. Lau immediately. Tall for a Chinese, with a full head of graying hair. The eyes were practically lidless, and cold. Very cold. Walking beside him was a Westerner, a huge man with a coarse, piglike face and a close-cropped bristle of rust-red hair. Ignoring the happy greetings that peppered them from all directions, the two men moved stolidly through the greeters, engaged in conversation. Jason saw the redhead nod rapidly as if he had agreed to something and then turn away from the doctor to disappear into the crowd. Then the party passed on and Jason’s eyes fell on the tea tables. There were cakes and cookies, too.
