Shadow Tyrants

SIXTEEN

Fifty miles southeast of Mumbai on a thousand acres of heavily forested private property sat one of the few surviving remnants of Ashoka’s Mauryan Empire. A magnificent five-story stone fortress had been constructed around a central dome called a stupa, a temple that contained Buddhist relics. To the Nine Unknown, who had conducted their regular meetings at this location for more than two thousand years, it was simply called the Library.

The grounds were patrolled by elite guards paid equally by each of the Nine so that none of them would be beholden to any single member. Intruders were summarily executed, their bodies disposed of so that they were never seen again.

Unlike most forts, the Library had no visible gates. The outer wall, laid out in a perfect square, was one smooth surface for its entire perimeter. The fortress was surrounded by a vast moat that extended into an array of canals leading into the forest.

There were nine carefully hidden entrances, each of which was known only to the guards and one of the Nine Unknown. That way all of them could enter from a different direction without being seen by the others, and no one would see them arriving together.

Romir Mallik’s entrance was a quarter mile south of the fortress. He walked on a narrow dirt path toward the Library with Asad Torkan, who was intently peering at the fort as he tried to figure out how they were going to get in. It was his first time to a meeting of the Nine, and Mallik had withheld the secret of the entrance.

“You won’t even give me a hint?” Torkan asked. He seemed interested in the riddle about how to get in, but he was actually distracting himself about the potential fate of his twin.

Mallik admired Torkan’s effort to remain optimistic ever since they’d lost contact with his brother. But when the yacht reached the coordinates of the Triton Star, they found a U.S. destroyer in the vicinity and abandoned the rescue mission. Mallik assumed Rasul had been either captured or killed. His operation, however, had obviously been a success. The Americans were now fully invested in finding out who was responsible for the attack, exactly as Mallik had hoped they would be.

He smiled at his brother-in-law’s frustration about the entrance to the Library. “You’ll find out where it is soon enough.”

Torkan shook his head and kept looking.

A minute later the path descended to a canal and disappeared into the water. The path rose again on the other side. The width was too far to jump and no bridge spanned the canal. A square stone pillar four feet in height stood next to the path. It was capped with four lion heads, each facing out in a different direction. The only marking was a circle with nine spokes and a swastika in the center, the symbol of the Nine Unknown.

Torkan frowned and pointed to the symbol. “Did the Nazis build this?”

“The swastika is an ancient Buddhist emblem that Hitler corrupted for his own use. Notice that it’s a mirror image of the Nazi version. Its original meaning connotes good luck and harmony.”

“Does it also mean ‘swim’? Because it looks like that’s the only way we’re getting across.”

Mallik shook his head. “We are at the entrance.”

Torkan looked around in confusion, then at the distant fortress. “Here? I thought the entrance was some kind of secret door in the fortress wall that we’d take a boat to. We’re not even close to the wall yet.”

“It wouldn’t be well hidden if was easy to find.”

Torkan again looked at the pillar. “Then that has to be the door knocker.”

“In a way. Press the swastika. You’ll need to push hard.”

Torkan shoved his fist against the symbol. It sank into the pillar, and the four lion heads rose six inches from the top.

Torkan turned to Mallik with a puzzled expression when nothing happened. “Now what?”

“Turn the lion heads a quarter turn clockwise.”

Torkan did as instructed. When they reached a quarter rotation, there was an audible click, and they sank back into the pillar.

At the same time, the water in front of the path began to recede. In a few seconds, waterfalls were cascading over the top of two parallel stone walls that rose from the bottom, four feet apart on either side of the path. An unseen hole was draining the trench between the temporary dams. It looked as if the Red Sea were parting.

Soon it was clear that the path didn’t continue to the opposite bank. Instead, it led down to stairs that disappeared into a tunnel.

“Come on,” Mallik said as he stepped onto the wet stairway. “We’ll only have a minute when the water is completely drained. A float causes the outlet to be plugged again, and the water flowing over the dams will refill the opening quickly.”

He continued down the steps, followed by Torkan, until he reached the bottom level twenty feet below. They walked through a small foyer and then back up a few stairs to a corridor where a stone barrier was rising at the same rate as the water was filling the foyer. Soon the barrier would dovetail into a groove in the ceiling and seal off the corridor. A pillar identical to the one outside stood next to the moving wall.

“Is this how all the entrances work?” Torkan asked as the light from the exterior began to dim.

“I don’t know,” Mallik replied, activating the light on his cell phone to use as a flashlight. “In all my years as a member of the Nine, I’ve never been through another entrance.”

Torkan lit up his own phone, illuminating thousands of years of torch smoke caked on the ceiling, and they walked down the silent tunnel that seemed to stretch into infinity.

It took ten minutes before they saw a faint light that intensified until they reached a well-lit metal gate. A guard carrying an assault rifle was standing on the other side. No ID was requested. The guard recognized Mallik immediately and ordered the gate raised.

Mallik knew every inch of the fort’s interior and led Torkan through a confusing series of corridors until they arrived at an archway decorated with another swastika. Two armed guards stood outside at attention.

Mallik and Torkan entered the center chamber of the fort directly under the domed stupa. A circular mahogany table sat in the middle. All but one of the nine seats were already occupied, and Mallik took the empty one. A single person stood behind every one of the Nine, since each could bring a lone companion into the Library with them.

Jason Wakefield was seated on one side of Mallik, and Lionel Gupta on the other. Wakefield, who seemed fully recovered from the fake kidnapping attempt that Mallik had set up, shook his hand, then nodded at Torkan. Gupta, on the other hand, didn’t even turn to greet him.

Xavier Carlton, who was sitting on the other side of the table with his assistant, Natalie Taylor, behind him, said, “Romir, good to see you.”

Mallik looked around the room, surprised to see that he was the last to arrive. He patted his pocket to reconfirm that the glass vial was still there. “Am I late?”

“Not at all. We just sat down. I was just introducing our newest member to the rest of the Nine.”

Carlton nodded at Pedro Neves, a Brazilian whose father had passed away six months ago. His family had been gifted with the scroll on diseases and now owned one of the biggest biotech companies in the world.

“Pedro, this is Romir Mallik,” Carlton said. “Bestowed with the cosmogony scroll and now heavily involved in the space industry. And you already know Gupta and Wakefield, who received the alchemy and communication scrolls, respectively.”

Carlton continued with the introductions. Boris Volanski was a Russian who’d inherited the physiology scroll, which had been the basis for the development of martial arts. Volanski now headed a military contracting firm in Moscow.

The last three of the Nine were Daniel Saidon, a Malaysian whose family had built Saidon Heavy Industries, based on the gravity scroll, and owned the Moretti Navi shipyard, where the Colossus ships were built; Melissa Valentine, an American who was the only woman in the Nine and CEO of an internet search firm developed after her ancestors had been given the scroll on the mysteries of light; and Hans Schultz, a banker from Switzerland, who held the scroll on sociology.

“Now that the pleasantries are concluded,” Carlton said, “I have a distinctly unpleasant matter to bring up.”

Mallik’s hand went to the vial again. Something was definitely wrong here. He could sense Torkan tensing behind him.

“As you all know, except perhaps Pedro, our colleague Boris Volanski is quite involved in the Russian arms and mercenary business and provides all of the security for the Colossus Project. In speaking with him earlier today, he gave me some disturbing information. Boris?”

Volanski, a dark-haired man in his sixties, leaned forward. “Through my sources, I found out that a stolen nerve agent shipment was used in the attack on the island of Diego Garcia. I don’t know who is responsible, but I believe they planted evidence to make it look as if the Nine were responsible.”

That set off murmurs around the table. Mallik joined in so that he wouldn’t draw attention to himself.

“How can you be sure?” Melissa Valentine asked.

“Because the chemical weapon used in the failed strike was one I had smuggled out of Russia. It’s a nerve agent called Novichok. I originally thought it went to the bottom of the sea in a shipwreck, but now I know that it was actually stolen from me.”

Mallik’s stomach went cold, but he gave the appearance of being as appalled as everyone else in the room.

“How could the evidence lead back to the Nine?” he asked.

“Not to the Nine Unknown, specifically,” Carlton said. “To Jhootha Island. The ship used to mount the attack was the Triton Star.”

Everyone exchanged worried glances. They all knew the Triton Star was the ship regularly used to supply the island.

“If the Americans were to invade the island and catch us by surprise,” Carlton continued, “they would have everything they need to learn about the Colossus initiative. Then all our work for a new dawn of humanity would be for nothing.”

“This is outrageous,” Daniel Saidon said. “First, the attack on the Colossus 5, then the attempted kidnapping of one of our own, and now this?” More angry grumbling around the table.

Carlton put up his hands to calm everyone. “It’s being taken care of. I’ve ordered the entire island to be erased per our emergency protocol. Even though it continues to contribute to the project, the island has largely served its purpose. By the end of the day, there will be nothing left.”

“Put together, all these incidents are disturbing,” Jason Wakefield said. “I believe that means there’s a traitor in our midst. What are we going to do about it?”

Instead of murmurs, now the table was deadly silent.

Carlton peered intently at Wakefield and said, “In all our two thousand years of history, we’ve never been required to eliminate one of our own. But now it looks like we will have to.”

Carlton turned his head toward Mallik, who froze. But Carlton kept turning until he focused on Lionel Gupta.

“What do you have to say for yourself, traitor?”