Kishan looked on in amazement.
“Careful,” Ravi warned. “There’s no more where that came from.”
“Here we go,” Laurent said.
“This is the day which the Lord hath made,” Ravi proclaimed.
“Very simple. There we go,” Laurent said.
“Rejoice and be glad in it,” Ravi called out.
“There. It is done,” Laurent said calmly.
Amazed at what he had seen, Kishan slumped to the floor behind the towers of boxes. The action dislodged his cell phone from the holster on his belt as his back slid against the wall behind him. By the time he caught sight of the phone falling to the ground, it was too late. He swept his hand to catch the phone, but he missed. The sound it made when it hit the floor was not loud by any means. But to Kishan, it might as well have been an atomic bomb.
They were on him in an instant.
CHAPTER 35
Mumbai, India
August 2014
There was only one thing Kishan was afraid of more than his father when he was angry, and it was heights. Which is why he was frantic when Ravi dragged him by the nape of his neck to the rooftop of Sehgal Labs. Granted, it was deserted and far from where other employees might eavesdrop. That would save him some embarrassment. But it was six stories up, and it was the dizziness as much as the anticipation of his father’s likely tirade that set his head spinning. Ravi had forgiven Kishan’s mistakes before, but he knew this time he was in deep trouble. But given what he had just witnessed in the warehouse below, his father had some explaining of his own to do as well.
Kishan had never seen his father so furious. The moment they exited the stairwell, Ravi shoved him from behind and knocked him to the sea of gravel on the roof that had been baking in the blistering afternoon sun. Kishan scrambled to his feet as quickly as he could, only to be knocked back down again with a powerful shove that sent him stumbling backward toward the edge of the roof.
“You’re insane, old man,” Kishan shouted. “Are you trying to push me off?”
“That’s exactly what I ought to do, you hoodlum,” Ravi shouted back. His face was contorted with rage, unlike anything Kishan had seen before. His father bent down, scooped up a handful of the hot stones, and flung them at his son as hard as he could. Most of them missed the mark, but several showered against Kishan’s bare legs, causing him to dance in pain.
“What did you want me to do?” Kishan cried as he tried to stand his ground and not back any closer to the roof’s edge. He felt faint from the emotions of the moment and the stifling heat, which had topped 112 degrees. “There’s been something wrong with you since you won that stupid prize,” he said. “It’s gone to your head.”
“Something wrong with me?” Ravi said. “Who’s the one unable to mind his own business? I begged you to stay out of the warehouse.”
“What did you expect? You’re hiding things and going plain mad, and you want me to look the other way?”
“There’s nothing mad about what you just saw down there,” Ravi said. “There’s a good reason for it, but you’re in no position to understand.”
“I’m not just talking about whatever you were doing with that woman downstairs,” Kishan said. “That’s just the latest. I’m talking about the lies.”
“I have never lied to you, Kishan. Never,” Ravi said as he stepped closer to him and rested his hand on his shoulder as if to invite some calm between them.
Kishan shrugged him off and stepped dangerously backward another couple of feet.
“Maybe not to me,” Kishan said. “I don’t know. But tell that to your friend, that Dr. Bondurant, and everybody else you’ve tricked with that ridiculous story about goat’s blood.”
Ravi angrily kicked a small pile of pebbles off the roof.
“Enough!” he shouted. “I won’t have a lazy orphan—one I took in, mind you—who doesn’t know what he’s talking about questioning my motives or the quality of my work.”
“Is that right?” Kishan shot back, hurt. “Changed your password lately? It doesn’t take a Nobel Prize to know goat’s blood from human blood. But what do I know? I’m just a lazy orphan.”
Kishan could see Ravi was in anguish over the insults they’d both regret.
“My beautiful son, listen to me. I love you,” Ravi said. “I always will. But there are reasons for these things you’ve seen that are beyond your ability to understand. You have to trust me that there is good behind all this. What I have learned in the quest for that prize will bring blessings upon all of the earth’s unfortunates.” Ravi tried again to rest his hand on his son’s shoulder, but Kishan rebuffed him once more. Kishan was hurt and angry and could feel tears beginning to well up in his eyes.
He focused on the horizon of central Mumbai. He couldn’t look his father in the face. He had never felt both so close to and so far from his father. He wanted to believe him. He suddenly wanted not to know what he knew. He wanted it to be easy and to go back to the way things were. But of all the things he had seen or heard in the last few weeks, it was the photos he could not forget. The strange and horrid pictures of the poor children in his father’s secret closet had haunted him for days. He needed to know who they were.
“Why am I not on that wall?” Kishan asked as he wiped tears from his face and gathered the courage to look at Ravi again. “Why not me?”
“What do you mean, Kishan?”
“I want to know why I was saved, and not the others.” He leaned into his father like a child seeking a hug, and Ravi embraced him. They held each other for several seconds.
“The others?” Ravi asked.
“On the wall. The pictures on your wall. I go to bed at night and I see my face in every one of them.”
“What are you talking about, Kishan?”
“The room in your office,” he said with surprising calm. “Where you keep the pictures. The dead children. And that gun. I don’t know why—”
Ravi exploded away from their embrace and shoved Kishan backward once again, pushing him now perilously close to the edge of the roof. As Kishan stumbled and fell to his knees, he grabbed Ravi’s legs and drove forward. The edge of the roof was now just inches away.
Knocked flat on his back, Ravi started to wrestle with him but, disoriented, rolled with his son across the painful gravel even closer to the roof’s edge. Less than a foot from tragedy, they exchanged one exhausted, useless punch after another.
Soon Kishan knew his strength was spent. He covered his face with his hands and curled into a fetal position, just wanting the fight to end. His head hung slightly off the edge of the roof, facedown, and all he could see was the sickening sight of the parking lot that waited to greet him below.
“You idiot. I told you, didn’t I?” Ravi shouted between gasps. He threw another punch. “I told you to stay out of that room.”
Kishan continued to cover his face and lay motionless in fear.
“What are you planning to do now?” Kishan asked.
“What I am going to do, dawg,” Ravi said, nearly breathless, “is save the children. More children like you. Countless more like you. That is, if you will just mind your own business and let me.”
Kishan could tell Ravi too was exhausted, as his blows had no force when they struck.
“What I am going to do, dawg,” Ravi said wearily, “is fulfill the promise I made to my father. I want to try to help this miserable world through the birth of the Christ Child. That is all. I just mean to do good.”
Kishan heard his father sob with every useless punch. Finally, Ravi was completely exhausted. Kishan watched from the corner of his eye as Ravi relented and slowly crouched down next to him. He could feel his father gently run his fingers through his hair, as if to soothe him.
“Kishan, my son—”
But it was too late. Kishan knew he would never find another moment to free himself. He summoned all of his energy and bolted upright to distance himself from both his father’s touch and the roof’s ed
ge. He scrambled across the loose gravel as fast as he could toward the stairwell door only ten yards away. Mid-stride, he stopped only once to look behind him to catch a final glimpse of an empty man, the father he would never see again.
CHAPTER 36
India
August 2014
You know,” Bondurant said, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d think I was being played for a fool.”
“I think if you knew any better, you would duck your head. And very quickly!”
Bondurant spun around abruptly in the near darkness to see the oncoming tunnel and ducked his head in less than a second. The ceiling of the tunnel missed decapitating him by a few inches. Had his newfound companion been less familiar with the ninety-two tunnels passed through by the Mandovi Express train from Madgaon to Mumbai, Bondurant was sure to have met his demise many miles before. Many flights to Mumbai from the southern end of the country, including Bondurant’s, had been scrapped for “software performance” issues, as best he could tell. So Bondurant found himself headed by rail toward the massive city where it was possible that either Domenika or Sehgal, or both, could be found.
His acquaintance of several hours, Samar Chandrasekar, had chosen to ride on the roof of the northbound express for the same reasons as Bondurant and dozens of others on their way to Mumbai. There were no empty seats onboard below, and not a square inch was left to stand in the passageways of the entire train. That, and the slight breeze outside on the roof of the train, made the fifteen-hour ride a tolerable 10 degrees cooler than the 100 degrees that threatened to bake the train’s passengers inside. Within the steamy cars, a crush of humanity, along with an assortment of colorful belongings from a baby lamb to crates of watermelons on ice, simply tried to survive through the heat of the early evening.
“Thank you, Samar,” Bondurant said.
“You are most welcome. The next tunnel is several minutes from here.”
Samar Chandrasekar, a stranger to Bondurant, seemed to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every tunnel and obstacle on the long, twelve-mile-per-hour run from Madgaon to Mumbai. He also spoke excellent English and, as far as Bondurant could tell, had a sympathetic ear. Beyond these useful attributes, Bondurant could tell Samar was just plain good company on what he hoped was not a wild-goose chase launched by the flight itinerary they’d found in Domenika’s apartment in Rome two days before.
While finding Domenika was Bondurant’s goal, he’d also determined that he was in a race against time to find Sehgal as well. It was time to secure the full truth, and perhaps rescue his own reputation. To be sure, Bondurant’s report—though leaked as opposed to officially released—had debunked the myth of the Shroud. Bondurant’s reputation as one of the most daring and successful forensic anthropologists in the world was more than intact. Professionally, while the Catholic Church was in an uproar, he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Yet something very fundamental about Sehgal’s findings concerning the famous Shroud study didn’t sit right with Bondurant. And the feeling would not only not leave him alone—it had in fact grown stronger the more time passed.
His doubts had begun on the early June morning several months before when he’d had to play referee between Sehgal and O’Neil about splitting the samples from the Shroud. Bondurant knew Sehgal had been less than honest about why he needed all the blood they’d collected during the study. His fears that something was amiss grew fast after the findings were leaked. Some of Domenika’s last words to him in her fit of rage were about the “solid evidence” she had that Sehgal was wrong. If Sehgal had evidence contrary to what he’d reported to the rest of the team, something that would fundamentally alter important results, then it was critical to make that information public immediately. No scientist of any merit would knowingly allow false information on controversial research to stand, and it was Bondurant’s obligation to ensure that his report was beyond reproach.
As to Sehgal’s whereabouts in Mumbai, Bondurant had the address: Sehgal Labs, 22484 Lady Jamshetjee Road, Mumbai. He’d been there once before, when he’d traveled to India to press Sehgal to join his team. This time he had no invitation from Sehgal to visit, nor did he feel that he needed one. Sehgal, like Domenika, had been radio silent since the Shroud report had first leaked. He was nowhere to be found. Bondurant had tried to reach him by phone, e-mail, and text to help manage the fallout from the report, but he’d had no luck.
“Duck again, good doctor,” Chandrasekar said as the next tunnel approached.
Bondurant ducked his head quickly and held it there until they were through the short tunnel and the night sky became visible again. Stars had begun to emerge on the dark-blue horizon ahead of them. Bondurant looked around at the darkness that had befallen them. His eyelids were heavy. He yearned for the comfort of sleep. But he knew the journey forward would require real vigilance. He rested his head atop his suitcase and reflected on what he saw in the vague outline of a wooden bridge they had started to cross. From where Bondurant sat, the rickety bridge looked to be just part of a long and treacherous journey that might involve many steep and dangerous ravines ahead.
• • •
When Bondurant awoke atop the Mandovi Express, his companion was gone. So too were the many others who had made their way off the top of the train. He’d been left with a gift from the friendly stranger, a small bag of fruit at his side. The brightest light on the concrete platform that seemed to stretch for an eternity announced clearly where he was: “Mumbai Central,” it read.
It was nine o’clock in the evening, too late to try to locate Sehgal at his offices, which Bondurant figured were long closed for the day. He grabbed a cab and asked that it take him to a decent hotel as near as possible to the Special Economic Zone, where he knew Sehgal’s headquarters were located. Twenty minutes later, as his cab rolled down Sant Savtamali Road toward a Holiday Inn three miles farther down the road, Bondurant spied a modern, six-story building across the highway ahead, still fully lit under the night sky. It looked familiar. It wasn’t until they had pulled parallel to the building that Bondurant could clearly make out the electronic sign that adorned the building’s top floor—“Sehgal Labs.”
“Working this late?” Bondurant asked.
“Pardon me?” the cabbie said.
“Oh, nothing. Just an observation,” Bondurant said. “I’ll tell you what. How about if we make a U-turn and head toward the parking lot of that building on our right,” he said.
“Most gladly, sir,” the cabbie said. “Dr. Sehgal, a name to be praised. He is our hero here. A thousand blessings on his name.”
“Yes, yes,” Bondurant said. “You mean for the honor of the Nobel Prize, I’m sure.”
“Of course, yes,” the cabbie said as he strained somewhat with his steering wheel to execute a full U-turn. His cab sputtered back into gear and pulled forward as soon as they were on a straight line again. “He has brought great honor to India. Great honor to Mumbai. Great honor to our people.”
“He certainly has,” Bondurant replied. “Now if my friend would just simply answer his phone or reply with a text, he’d be my hero too.”
“You know this man, Dr. Ravi Sehgal?” the cabbie asked as he coaxed his cab into the lab’s parking lot and brought it to a stop. “Praise to your name too, sir.”
Bondurant leaned out of his window and surveyed all the floors. While nearly every light in the building was on, illuminating every room, it was the sixth floor where he could see there was clear activity. Given that the windows were masked by lightly shaded screens, it was difficult to count the number of people in the conference room, much less make out the identity of each person Bondurant watched from down below. But there was no doubt in Bondurant’s mind he had unexpectedly stumbled across an important late-night meeting that might prove helpful in his quest to track down Sehgal. However, he was going to need his cabbie’s help.
“How would you like to make an additional thousand rupees tonight?” Bondura
nt asked of him.
“I would like that very much.”
“Okay, then. I need you to be my observer,” Bondurant said. “I am going to push the call button here at the front door. I can’t see our friends on the top floor of this building, but you can from over there. I need you to call out to me what’s happening as I talk to my friends inside. Can you do that?”
“With a thousand rupees in hand, I would be delighted to do this,” the cabbie said.
Bondurant paid the fee.
“Now remember, I need you shouting out exactly what you see for me. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly.” The cabbie stood less than two feet from Bondurant at the moment but shouted out at the top of his lungs: “THERE ARE SIX, NO, SEVEN PEOPLE IN A CONFERENCE ROOM ON THE SIXTH FLOOR.”
Bondurant stood, shocked for a moment as to how many decibels his partner could reach.
“I think that will do it,” Bondurant said, his ear aching slightly. He jogged the twenty feet or so to the call button at the front entrance to the lab.
“Okay,” Bondurant said. “I’m pressing the call button. What do you see?”
“I SEE TWO, MAYBE THREE PEOPLE REACHING FOR THE PHONE ON THE CONFERENCE ROOM TABLE!”
“Thank you,” Bondurant said. He could hear a phone ringing several times. Then someone answered the phone.
“Good evening, Sehgal Labs. I presume you’re calling from downstairs. We are closed for the evening. How can I help you?”
“ONE OF THEM, THE FAT LITTLE ONE, HAS ANSWERED THE PHONE!”
“Thank you,” Bondurant said. “I realize you’re closed. But I am trying to reach someone, and it’s very important.”
“Yes, and who would that be?” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“Dr. Ravi Sehgal,” Bondurant said.
“And may I ask who’s here for Dr. Sehgal?”
The Shroud Conspiracy Page 25
