Shadow Tyrants

EPILOGUE

Juan clasped his hands behind his back as he kicked his flippers to propel himself down the underwater passage. His headlamp picked up the bloated face of another dead body, the fourth he and Max had passed since venturing into the passageway to what Lionel Gupta had called the Library.

The ancient fortress on a sprawling estate turned out to be one of the only properties in India to be held in private hands continuously since the time of Ashoka. Although Gupta hadn’t kept the location of the Library in his files, Murph and Eric were able to hack into the phone records of both Carlton and Mallik. The last time their phones were in the same location was when they visited this location south of Mumbai.

It took a day of probing for Juan and Max to find a way in, but they had loads of time on their hands. Although the repair team finally got the main engines on the Oregon working again after the fight with the rogue frigates, the revolutionary drive mechanism had been severely damaged. It took three days for the ship to limp into the Port of Kochi, a trip that normally would have taken her four hours at top speed. Thanks to an ethically flexible shipyard owner who didn’t see the need to report the ship’s presence to the authorities, Juan arranged for her to go through a full refit in a massive covered drydock adjacent to the facility where India’s newest aircraft carrier was being built. The maintenance work wouldn’t begin for another week, so Juan thought it would be a good chance to chase history and solve the mystery of the Nine Unknown Men at long last.

Once they had found the underwater passageway marked by the lion-head pillar with the swastika symbol of the Nine on it, he and Max secured some scuba equipment and went for a swim.

They finally surfaced again at a gate with yet another dead guard.

“I don’t think this one drowned,” Max said, taking out his regulator and removing his mask.

Juan did the same and said, “Looks like his larynx is broken. And judging by the smell of the corpse, he’s been lying here for a while.”

They laid down their air tanks, BCDs, and swim fins. The water had been so warm that they were just wearing lightweight neoprene diving suits and boots.

“Shall we take a look around?” Juan asked.

“Lead the way,” Max said. “Can’t get any worse than what we’ve already seen.”

“Famous last words.”

As they explored the dank building, their flashlights occasionally supplemented by skylights built into the stone, Max said, “Do you think someone’ll try to build the Vajra system again?”

“If they could, they would. But Lang told me the CIA discovered that the Vajra records were destroyed. Mallik must have done it before he was killed.”

“He didn’t want anyone to figure out a way to disable them.”

Juan nodded. “That’s my guess, too. Because the same thing happened with the Colossus records.”

“What do you mean?”

“When Murph and Eric went to look at Gupta’s files again after we took down the satellites, they found that all records about Colossus had been erased. That made it easier to discover the one mention of the Library among all those files.”

Max scratched his head. “Who do you think is responsible for deleting them?”

“Not who,” Juan corrected. “What.”

Max gaped at him. “You mean, Colossus did it?”

“Makes sense. If it was powerful enough to detect us infiltrating its ships, I wonder if it thought that any other records about it were a threat as well.”

“That would have required Colossus to search and delete records across the world in a matter of minutes.”

“Scary thought, isn’t it? Maybe it was afraid it would be shut down if someone could find those records.”

“Afraid? It’s a machine.”

Juan shrugged. “Self-preservation. It’s the most primal instinct.”

“This is making my brain hurt,” Max said. “I’m just glad Colossus is gone.”

They turned a corner, and Juan stopped when he saw the room ahead. It was a dome with a huge circular table in the middle, and it was filled with more bodies. The stench was horrific.

None of them had bullet wounds. Their faces were contorted in agony.

“Don’t take another step,” he said to Max.

“I guess I was wrong. It did get worse.”

“I’m pretty sure Novichok killed them, and there could be lingering traces of it. I recognize that look from when Rasul died in front of me.”

“And I recognize that guy,” Max said, pointing at a man lying outside the room. “That’s Jason Wakefield, one of the CEOs who’s been reported missing in the last week.”

Juan pointed to another. “That’s Daniel Saidon. He owns one of the biggest shipbuilding companies in the world. I met him at a party a few years ago.”

“Do you think Mallik killed them?” Max asked.

“Makes sense. His brother-in-law was the one with the Novichok on the Triton Star.”

“But Carlton and Gupta somehow escaped to finish the Colossus Project.”

“That explains the blood feud between Carlton and Mallik,” Juan said.

“So now we know where the Nine Unknown Men met in secret, and it seems some of them are still here. That’s a pretty big find.”

“We’ll have to give the Indian government an anonymous call after we leave. I think they’ll want to know about this.”

Juan kept walking past the domed meeting room and soon saw another one. This one looked similar to the first, but there was neither a table nor bodies.

Instead, there were nine sarcophagi surrounding a tenth in the center.

“This place wasn’t designed as a meeting place,” Max said.

Juan nodded. “You’re right. It’s a mausoleum.”

They walked in and saw that each of the stone caskets was marked with writing that looked like stick figures.

“I’ve seen this type of writing before,” Juan said.

“Where?”

“On the pillars of Ashoka. When Eric and I were researching the Nine Unknown Men, we found out that Ashoka placed pillars all over India to proclaim his edicts. These characters are the same ones used in the edicts. About twenty of the pillars still exist today, more than two thousand years later, and they’re the first tangible evidence of Buddhism.”

Max stared in wonder at the tomb. “Do you think these are the original Nine Unknown Men?”

“Archaeologists will have to determine that,” Juan said, “but it could be why the Nine continued to meet here.”

“And the sarcophagus in the middle?”

Juan went over to it and saw that the lid was etched with the head of a lion and a wheel containing twenty-four spokes.

Max joined him and pointed to the wheel. “I suppose you’ve seen that symbol before.”

“I have,” Juan said with awe. “You have, too.”

“Where?”

“On the flag of India. It’s called the Ashoka Chakra, and it’s their national symbol.”

“Then this could be Ashoka himself.”

“Another riddle for the archaeologists to solve,” Juan said.

They left the tomb without touching anything and walked on. Juan could see that there was one more room ahead.

When he and Max got to the room’s entrance, both of them stopped and stared, slack-jawed, at its contents.

The circular dome contained hundreds of cubbyholes stacked from floor to ceiling. And inside those cubbyholes were thousands upon thousands of parchment scrolls. Given the age of the building, some of them could have been more than two millennia old.

At least the mystery of how this place had been named was now solved. Clearly, the Nine Unknown Men knew the importance of preserving a library.