Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER THREE

Sunday, April 6, 2042

“Love you too,” Wrench grumbled. He glanced up to find Lessing beside him, awash with undulating, grey-green light from the row of security TV screens, like some archaic idol submerged beneath the sea.

“So you got me out of bed. Who the hell is it?” Lessing fingered the TV camera-control console, but the visitor had passed beyond the range of camera three and was not yet visible to camera two. He rubbed sleep out of his eyes. Goddamn it, he’d been meaning to splice in another camera to cover the blind spot between two and three. Camera twenty-six, down at the bottom of the garden by the factory fence, was also out. Lessing just didn’t have the energy. Northern India in April was a cauldron of white-hot heat, and May and June would be worse. Only after the rains broke in July would the parched plains cool off again. And then only a little.

“Looks like one of your scruffier friends.” Wrench remarked mildly. A small, neatly packaged man in his late thirties, his real name was Charles Hanson Wren, but his Army footlocker had borne the legend “WREN, C. H.,” and the nickname “Wrench” had stuck. He was Herman Mulder’s house security man. Lessing had charge of the compound and the buildings of Indoco’s chemical factory in India, just south of Lucknow, off the Kanpur road.

Lessing said nothing.

“Look, I’m sorry to get you up,” Wrench’s tone indicated that he thought it was funny. He smirked up at the wall clock, which read 0210, and showed teeth so white and even that everybody thought they were a plate. Actually they were his own. Wrench was just a trifle jealous: Mulder always chose Lessing as his beegee whenever he made one of his infrequent forays out into the chaos that was twenty-first-century India.

“Sure.”

“Sleeping’s a comfort in this heat.”

Lessing looked at him. Like everybody else in Indoco’s Lucknow operation, Wrench knew that Lessing shared his bed with Mulder’s Indian liaison girl, Jameela Husaini. Nobody gave much of a damn where or with whom the hired help slept, and Wrench didn’t care, nor was he himself interested in Jameela. She was over-educated for his tastes, a graduate of the Kennedy School for Special Children in Delhi and later of Columbia University. Wrench did enjoy knowing everything, however. Too damned nosy — and too much of a comic! One day somebody would hoist the little smart-ass by his head of glossy, dark hair, as wavy as an ad for gigolos, and drop him off a minaret!

An image moved on camera two’s small screen. The visitor halted before the outer gate, glanced around, looked up at the lens mounted above his head, and made a nervous gesture toward the bell.

“Uh… is Mr. Lessing there? I… ah… am sorry to bother you… him… at this hour.” It was the man Lessing had named Doe: Felix Bauer, as he had learned from Gomez a month after his return to India.

Wrench pressed a button. A ruby warning light flashed. “He’s carrying a popper. Or else he’s wearing a cast-iron jockstrap.”

Lessing picked up the microphone and said, “Hello, Bauer. Put your ordnance into the lockbox on the post next to you. Then follow the left-hand path around to the rear.”

The lockbox duly registered the weight of a good-sized pistol — and possibly a boot knife as well. The metal detectors pronounced Bauer clean. Only then did Lessing press the double buttons that opened the gate.

At this lime of night the verandah of the senior-staff quarters was deserted. Lessing met Bauer at the top of the steps and pointed him to a rattan settee as far away from the main circle of porch furniture as possible. The lighted area had two disadvantages: it teemed with flying insects, and the ceiling fan concealed a surveillance mike. Why make it easy for Wrench to eavesdrop?

Bauer sat, licked his lips, and looked about. His glance lingered on the gleaming, white refrigerator visible inside the screen door. Lessing took pity on him; Bauer’s journey out here from Lucknow at this hour of night must have been a hot, dusty, and thirsty one — and he must have paid the taxi-wala a fortune to boot! Lessing got up again and came back with two bottles of Indian beer.

“Well?” Lessing decided the German looked terrible. They hadn’t met since the New Mexico business in January, but then they had never been friends — or enemies either. Just two people doing a job.

The other gulped cold beer. Then he said, “Einar Hjellming… the Swede you called Panch… is dead.” Lessing grunted. “How?”

“Shot. From ambush. They tried to kill Hollister… your Teen, the Britisher… too. Missed him by five centimeters.” Bauer pawed at his greying hair with thin fingers.

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“People said you would know.”

“Me? I don’t know anything.” He did have a question: “What about Cheh, the Australian girl? Rose Thurley is her name.”

“I haven’t heard. She went back to Canberra, I think.”

“Well, uh, fine. I… I’m sorry about Hjellming.” He wasn’t, but it seemed to mean something to the other man.

“May I speak frankly?”

Lessing watched him. “Sure.”

“I came to ask you to leave me alone. You don’t have to say anything, just let me go my way. Don’t thumb me.”

Lessing snorted up a nose full of bitter beer. He coughed, wiped his mouth, and growled, “What?”

“I mean it. I don’t cause problems.”

There were stories, of course, of mercenaries who were later “thumbed” by their employers or by their comrades. Too much knowledge wasn’t smart. Such incidents were fewer since it had become acceptable for nations and corporations and causes and even individuals to hire meres to do their “spesh-ops” — special operations. Now the world, the Western world anyway, thought of mercenaries as glamorous Samurai, an honor-bound warrior class, the stuff of endless TV series.

Bauer knew Lessing ‘s reputation: no one had ever accused him of thumbing before. And, supposing that he had been paid to thumb his squad, Bauer should realize that he’d do the job himself and not hire some grimy, city hit-man to handle it.

Lessing kept a straight face and said only, “Mercs get killed all the time. One of the joys of the trade.”

The blunt numbness of the accusation was wearing off, and Lessing’s mind began to work again. Bauer was clearly frightened: his rigid jaw line showed it. Was he sane? Paranoia was a common ailment amongst mercenaries. You didn’t learn to suspect every bush, every door, every footstep, and not have some of that caution sift down into the cracks of your immortal soul.

Bauer clutched his beer bottle with both hands. “People… we… do get killed. But not by hit-men, not in Copenhagen or Rio! Lessing, for God’s sake…!”

“For God’s sake what? I haven’t anything to do with this… not with Hjellming, not with Hollister. Not with you! Who gave you this idea? Who said I was thumbing my squad?” Even a breath of this kind of rumor could end a man’s career. Worse, it could get that man himself thumbed.

Bauer hesitated. “Nobody said… nobody came right out “

Lessing glared at him. “You’re stupid, Bauer, really stupid. If I am thumbing, then this is my chance to finish you off! Inside our fence, nobody questions Indoco’s business. You could vanish without a trace!” He spread his hands on the table, palms up. “But think: if I’m not thumbing my squad, then I am going to find out where the rumor started and what I can do about it. If I have to kill… or worse… to keep my reputation clean, I will. Either way, you lose.” He began to get to his feet. “Do we chat easy? Or hard?”

“Look, please ” Bauer’s eyes reflected the flickering light

“We have a room in the garage,” Lessing remarked. “We keep our auto repair tools there. It’s soundproof.”

“Gott, I never meant… I only wanted—”

“Who, Bauer? Who?”

“Copley… in Paris. He never said you were thumbing. Just that… some people around you might die! I… I took him to mean… I imagined he meant…” Bauer shifted his grip on his beer bottle, holding it horizontally so that he could smash it against the table edge and jab it into his adversary’s eyes. Bauer had studied barroom brawling with experts.

So had Lessing. He pointed. “Go ahead, try. The table is woven rattan, and there’s a good chance the bottle won’t break. Do you want to take that chance?” He smiled.

Bauer sat back down. “Just give me your word, a? No harm to me. I don’t want to know anything. I could even pay you… a little.” He tapped his rumpled shirt pocket.

“I don’t want your goddamn money. There’s nothing to know. No thumbing. And I can’t protect either of us until I know what’s going on.”

“Then why? Why Hjellming and Hollister? Why Copley? He gossips a lot with the Euro-mercs. He must’ve heard something.”

“He heard rumors! Just crap. Bullshit. Talk!”

“Hjellming and Hollister… they weren’t just talk,” Bauer muttered defiantly.

Lessing made a derisive noise. “Personal grudges? Violent crime? It’s going the rounds, you know.”

Bauer took the remark seriously. “No. Not so. You assassinate execs. You kidnap execs and technicians. You shoot spies. But nobody kills off-duty mercenaries! We’re only the soldiers, the Soldaten, the muscles and the bones.” He paused and then finished on a defensive but stubborn note: “Why should Copley lie? He said people around you might die!”

“Who’s going to kill them, goddammit? Who? Indoco?” Lessing relaxed a trifle, still keeping a wary eye on Bauer’s bottle.

Bauer had regained both his composure and a measure of defiance. “How should I know? Copley only made warnings about you. Maybe somebody else thumbs you too, later.”

Bauer sounded crazier than Lessing had thought. He stifled a yawn. It would be good to rid himself of this unwanted guest and get back upstairs to Jameela. It was going on three in the morning!

The German peered into the beer bottle, but it was empty. “It was the job… the New Mexico thing… I think.”

“What about it?” It was Lessing ‘s turn to sound defensive. “Hell, Indoco owed me a vacation, and I needed the money. An agent I know made me an offer: see the American Southwest on the budget plan! His plan and his budget! I did what I was told, and I got paid. I don’t ask, and I don’t tell.”

“Yes, but….” Bauer pursed his lips, the picture of a prissy, European bureaucrat. Then: “You have seen nothing, been told nothing?”

Lessing pressed one hand to his pajama-top. “Nothing. Scout’s honor.”

Bauer missed the sarcasm. “Truly? Nothing?”

“Not a thing. All we get out here are student protesters: ‘Yankee, go home!’ That sort of stuff. The police stand around until they think we’re going to be overrun, then they make a lathi charge and knock a few heads. It’s a local ritual, like the peacock’s mating dance!”

Bauer blinked at him.

Lessing said, more kindly, “Look, it’s too late for you to go back to Lucknow tonight. Stay over here and take it easy. We can put you up. Tomorrow, after breakfast, we’ll talk. Hell, maybe Wrench can gel you a security job at the factory.”

“A post? No… I….”

“You frightened of contamination? Pollution? Cyanide-laced rosewater? Radioactive kumkum powder? That’s what the Indians claim we make here.” He grinned to show he was joking.

Bauer only stared at him wide-eyed. “I have to get back. My… my taxi is waiting, down by the factory gatehouse. The driver is drinking tea with your watchmen.“He got to his feet: stiff, dignified, determined, and apologetic all at once. “Thank you.”

Lessing let him go. He couldn’t blame the German for not trusting him. Who would? He watched Bauer march down the walk and out of sight around the six-car garage. Then he trudged back upstairs to the air-conditioned company flat he shared with Jameela.

If somebody had it in for their squad, why hadn’t they come for him? After all, he was the mission leader. Yet he hadn’t heard or seen a thing. His trouble-smelling instinct had never failed him yet. Was he becoming complacent? Senile? Blind in his old age?

He decided — tentatively — that Bauer was probably suffering from battle fatigue: the “mere jerks,” as the tabloids cutely named the syndrome.

The three-room flat in the squarish, whitewashed senior-staff quarters building was semi-dark; only Lessing’s imitation Aladdin’s lamp — electric, with a 220-volt bulb instead of a wick and oil — burned dim in what the Indoco employment brochures gushingly described as “the sitting room.” The flat was hot and stuffy; even the big, German air-conditioning unit couldn’t cope with India’s heat.

Jameela was asleep in the bedroom, one slender arm flung out upon Lessing’s pillow, a tumble of raven-wing hair visible above the thin sheet. She stirred, and Lessing paused to look at her. Unlike American women with their broader shoulders and boyish waists, Jameela Husaini came from a softer and more curvaceous mold. She reminded Lessing of the Ajanta frescoes: an oval face with a high forehead; long-lashed eyes; skin the hue of old gold (“like a South German on a cloudy day,” Wrench said); a tall, slender, long-legged figure; firm, uptilted breasts; a narrow waist; and thighs like some Hindu goddess from a sculptured frieze. He had once tried to tell Jameela how much he preferred her beauty to American angularity, but he was not good with words. She took him to mean that her hips were — to be blunt — fat, and she hadn’t forgiven him for a month. She still played tennis furiously every morning with Indoco’s seven European women staffers, and he knew how jealous she was of the prettiest of them. She had no need to be; it was they who envied her.

He did not wake her but lay down close by upon the thin, hard mattress. Jameela moved against him, and he began to spiral down into sleep, her unbound tresses tickling his shoulder and filling his nostrils with pungent, jasmine perfume.

Yells and noise ripped the fabric of his dream to shreds.

He sat up, groaned, combed back his thin, ash-blonde hair, and fumbled his way out onto the flat’s tiny balcony. He hadn’t dreamed it; there were more noises below. He looked out over black-satin darkness, the impenetrable night of India, to the tangled, diamond spider webs of the factory’s lights: strings of bulbs hung on every tank, pipe, catwalk, and tower, turning the prosaic factory into fairy spires and oriental palaces, richer than Sindbad, more wondrous than the Thousand and One Nights. He squinted down into the courtyard closer by, just beneath the balcony. In the stark glare of the gate floodlights he saw a dancing jumble of white pants, white shirts, white teeth, black beards, and dark faces and skins, like cut-up scraps of a black-and-white photograph tossed into the air. At first he could make out nothing.

One splotch of scarlet in the midst of it all was clear, however: a body on a company stretcher.

He could not see the face, but he sensed it was Bauer.

Wrench was already at the gate when Lessing arrived. Both had dutifully endured Indoco’s Hindustani lessons, but this was Jameela Husaini’s special duty, and Lessing had to go back, wake her up, and then wait impatiently while she donned the shalwar-qameez costume she favored, essentially a tunic and slacks, much different from the Hindu sari. She took along a shawl, which she wrapped around her head and shoulders when she went forward to speak to the plant watchmen, the Pathan chaukidars Mulder had hired to supplement his European security people. The Pathans surrounded her, reporting, re-enacting, and gesticulating. Enough dramatic talent for a TV series.

He looked down at the stretcher. An arm moved, and he heard breath bubbling beneath the rustred company blanket. Bauer was alive.

God, he was tired. His head hurt, and he couldn’t concentrate on poor Bauer. Let the company doctor, the little Bengali gentleman now chattering with Jameela, handle that. He just waited, an automaton whose motor functions had been turned off but whose sensors were still on. His eyes were a TV camera, recording but not comprehending. Sharp gravel pricked his slippered feet, and his skin was simultaneously clammy and dry with the unforgiving, relentless heat of the Indian night, the harbinger of the scorching morrow. The air smelled of baked brass, charcoal, alien spices, and warm earth as old as God, all mingled with animal manure and flower scents and people. Endless people, now over a billion in this fifth decade of the twenty-first century.

Jameela said something soothing to the senior chaukidar of the plant. She came back to Lessing and Wrench.

“The taximan struck him, they think. He’s not with his vehicle now. Nobody saw any fight. The stranger…” she shot a quizzical glance at Lessing “…returned from the compound and went straight toward his taxi. The watchmen didn’t see him again until he came staggering up from the auto park, all bloody. Mahmood Khan took him inside and called the others.”

Jameela was good, Lessing thought. He had served with dozens of meres who couldn’t make a report as concise as that. He smiled at her, then realized she would think he was patronizing her.

“Who is he?” Jameela asked. It was her job to make any statements to the Indian police.

“He vill live,” Doctor Chakravarti interrupted excitedly. “Live, if’ve get him to Balrampur Hospital in time! Mr. Wren, Mr. Lessing, please to give permission for the station vagon. Kuldeep can drive.”

“Any other problems?” Wrench threw in, speaking over the doctor’s head to Jameela. “Other breakins? Trouble with the students? The villagers? Outsiders?”

She rubbed at her forehead, pushing her heavy tresses out of her eyes, then translated for the senior chaukidar. A babble of voices answered her. She replied, “No… nothing.”

“Somebody go get Mr. Mulder up!” Wrench ordered “Search the plant, the perimeter.” He was visibly excited. But then Wrench struck Lessing that way: an over-reaction for every occasion.

“Bring him on inside,” a new and deeper voice said. “We can see to him there. If he’s critical, we’ll have to drive him to Lucknow.”

Lessing turned his head to see Bill Goddard, Mulder’s senior executive officer. Behind him, a hulking shadow in the darkness, stood Herman Mulder himself. The commotion had brought him down from the mansion.

Dr. Chakravarti would have gone on insisting on the station wagon, at once if not sooner, but nobody argued with Goddard. The man was a rock: huge, massive, as solid as the ramparts of the Delhi Red Fort itself.

Goddard said, “You, Lessing. You, Wren. Come with.” He ignored Jameela as though she didn’t exist. He disliked Indians, even those with European features and light skin like Jameela, and Lessing had often wondered why the company had sent him out to Lucknow, of all places.

Lessing gestured, and two of the chaukidars took up the stretcher and carried it through the gate, past the staff quarters, and up the inner drive to the Director’s house. What a parade: squat, hairless, old Mulder lurching along in front, his bald head as shiny as a dress helmet; then Goddard, wrapped in his own self-importance; then the two Indians with Bauer, the main float; then Dr. Chakravarti trotting behind; and Wrench and Lessing bringing up the rear: the trained-dog act, the big, rangy German shepherd and the nervous, yapping, little terrier.

The big house was cement block and concrete, a pink monstrosity that looked more like a transistor radio than a residence, the sort of “modem bungalow” one found everywhere in the “best” suburbs up and down the subcontinent. It was air-conditioned throughout, so cold that it was almost an affront after the sticky night outside. It smelled of furniture varnish and the disinfectant with which the servants mopped the concrete-chip mosaic floor.

The cavernous “drawing room” beyond the screened verandah was empty. There was indeed a Mrs. Mulder, but she appeared so rarely that Wrench called her the “Fairy Godmother”: “Comes out with her wand three times a year… Christmas, the Fourth of July, and Indian Independence Day… to sprinkle stars and bless us all. Then, poof!… back to limbo!”

The watchmen set Bauer’s stretcher down, and Dr. Chakravarti knelt for a better look under the popping, fizzing fluorescent lights.

“Not so bad as I had “

“Fine,” Goddard snapped. “Fix him up. Who the hell is he?”

Lessing stepped forward before Wrench could offer any snide, little sarcasms. “Friend of mine. Came to see me. No idea who knifed him… or why. Some quarrel with the taxi-wala, maybe.”

“Charming. All we need is a tangle with the police. Prime Minister Ramanujan’s government would love an excuse to send all foreign companies packing. And confiscate our installations in the bargain.” Goddard looked to Mulder for confirmation, but the old man was watching the doctor, puffy, heavy-lidded eyes as blank as a temple statue’s.

“The wound is in the chest,” the doctor went on, clinically and precisely, as though no one had spoken. “A bandage, antibiotics, rest. He will be all right.”

Lessing saw that Bauer’s eyes were open. “Who stuck you? The taxi driver? Can you talk?”

The other grunted something in German — or maybe it was Flemish or Dutch. Then he said, quite clearly, “Not the taximan. Another. Come for you, maybe, or something else important. I was just a… a by-the-way.”

Mulder opened his mouth to ask a question, but he was interrupted. The double doors at the far end of the room swung open to reveal Mrs. Mulder herself. Without makeup, coiffure, and French chiffon, her fairy-godmother magic was sadly lacking: a gaunt, vinegary American housewife in the latter years of menopause. She bore neither wand nor sparkling stars.

“Dear,” she trilled, “you told me to call you if the red lights came on.” She stopped, dismayed by the size of her audience. “Oh, I had no idea…”

“Red lights?” Mulder asked blankly.

Goddard said, “The security-alert lights! Somebody’s gotten inside…!”

“Intrusion!” Wrench cried. Neither he nor Lessing had brought weapons.

“Which light?” Mulder heaved himself toward his spouse, a plump and hairless white whale. People said he was over seventy, but he had the energy of a much younger man.

“The little one… on the end….” The woman dithered. Lessing had never seen anyone actually dither before.

“Get my…!” Wrench shrilled. The doctor and the two chaukidars were in his way, and he did a ridiculous dance to get around them.

Lessing knew which light was lit; he had helped install the system himself. Outside, beyond Indoco’s compound, lay wasteland, a crumbled mosque, and a deserted Muslim cemetery that the government wouldn’t let anybody uproot. Camera twenty-six there was out of order, whether by accident or design. That meant that an intruder who knew the layout had a clear route over the plant’s back fence all the way up into Mrs. Mulder’s formal rose garden behind the mansion, if it wasn’t a false alarm, the red light on Mulder’s panel indicated a security breach in the main house itself! “Weapons?” Lessing threw at Mulder.

The other, already ahead of him in the corridor leading to the rear of the house, waved a hand and shouted back something that sounded like, “Bedroom!”

Lessing rounded the comer at the end of the passage. He couldn’t see Mulder any more: the old man must have entered one of the two doors there or gone upstairs. Lessing chose the door to his left and skidded into the dining room The closed, stuffy darkness smelled of spices and cooking, but the woven -bamboo blinds and ornate, imitation-Mughal furniture were undisturbed. A door at the far end opened into a shadowy hall beyond which lay the pantry and the serving kitchen. Meals were actually prepared in a separate building, some twenty meters away. From there a train of servants bore the dishes up to the main house or over to the staff refectory. Even in these days of electric appliances and do-it-yourself housework old traditions died hard; India had swarmed with servants long before the British had arrived. Now it was only foreigners, the rich, and corporations like Indoco who could afford them.

Lessing glanced around and snatched up a heavy poultry knife from a drainage board. Any weapon was better than nothing. He checked quickly and found the back door locked Goddard habitually opened it at dawn for the “bearers” with their “morning bed tea”: another Indian custom, one that Lessing rather enjoyed.

He whirled and dashed back out to the hallway, then up the slippery, polished, concrete stairs two at a time.

Mulder knelt in the corridor by the door of the master bedroom, hands to his face. A trickle of dark liquid oozed between his fingers. Lessing stopped and made sure he was alive. He crouched down and peered around the doorjamb.

It was lucky that he had decided to duck. He found himself staring at a gleaming silver belt buckle, black trousers below it, so close he could see the weave of the fabric, and a dark jacket above. An Israeli stitch-gun hissed like a striking viper in his ear, and he heard the tiny, deadly explosions blasting three-centimeter craters in the cement-block wall across the stairwell behind him.

He reacted as training had taught him: he shoved the big poultry knife up between bis adversary’s thighs, into his abdomen. The other gagged, doubled over, tried ineffectually to bat at Lessing with the stubby gun barrel, and then crumpled over, full on top of him. Blood and entrails splattered Lessing’s chest. A gun bellowed from across the room, not a gas-powered stitch-gun this time but gunpowder.

Lessing felt nothing: the shot had missed. There were two or more opfoes, then. Grimly he set himself to getting free from the thrashing body on top of him — and to finding the damned stitch-gun.

Somebody behind Lessing yelped, and a second gun roared there. The voice sounded like Wrench’s. Goddard must have given him a weapon. With all the concentration of a man defusing a time-bomb as the seconds tick away to zero, Lessing fumbled around on the floor for the stitch-gun.

He found it, clutched at its blood-slippery butt, and rolled to avoid presenting a stationary target.

He needn’t have bothered. The room was silent except for someone wheezing just above him. He recognized Wrench’s breathing.

“You okay?” the little man gasped. “You dead? Hey, Lessing?”

“God damn it, I’m all right. See to the opfoes. And Mulder.”

“Goddard’s bringing the doctor. Stay put if you’re wounded.”

“I told you, I’m not hurt. Check Mulder. One of them hit him with a pistol butt or something when he entered the bedroom.”

He heard voices, noises, footsteps behind him. On the floor, a meter from his face, his erstwhile opponent still twitched feebly. He clambered to his feet and felt his way across the room, past the gigantic double bed with the satin coverlet Mrs. Mulder had imported all the way from Denmark There he stumbled over a spindly-legged chair and ended on all fours beside the second opfo.

Moonlight through the tangled drapes picked out splinters of white bone and a dark, liquid smear where the man’s face should have been. Wrench was a good shot for a non-mere. Or just lucky.

Lessing knelt to secure the man’s gun: a neat, oil-fragrant, Belgian 9-mm automatic. Darkness swirled and swam around him. Dimly, ebon upon black, he perceived shapes on the floor beside the body: flat, squarish things. A thought struck him, and he squinted up at the wall behind the bed.

A cavity yawned there: Mulder’s wall safe stood open.

So the object of the intrusion was just simple burglary!

Or was it?

Bauer’s visit so late at night? His talk of “thumbing?” The stabbing down by the vehicle park? Now this.

Too many coincidences.

Lessing groped on the polished terrazzo floor. His fingers touched a snarled mass of jangling, metallic objects: one of Mrs. Mulder’s necklaces, probably. Then five or six of the flat rectangles. They felt like record books of some sort, ledgers or diaries. He held one up to the fitful moonlight

The book’s cover was embossed in tarnished gold with a double lightning-bolt design above a line of numerals. He slanted it toward the window and read “1948-1955.”

It couldn’t be: that would make the book almost a hundred years old, a near antique!

Yet it felt real. He didn’t know what to think: Mulder had never evinced interest in anything cultural, much less in rare books. Lessing picked up another volume, his curiosity piqued. It was newer, dated 1985-1987. Perhaps a dozen similar volumes lay scattered on the floor beneath the safe.

Were these what the intruders sought, then? Were they so rare and valuable? They certainly weren’t Indoco ledgers: those were kept in the main office at the factory, and Lessing would have recognized them. Nobody had to risk a breakin to see those anyhow. The company was scrupulous about keeping “open books” for the benefit of the Indian government.

He looked again, carefully this time. Two or three more of the same set protruded from a black cloth bag under the dead man’s shoulder. The opfocs had been seriously desirous of reading material!

The double-lightning motif nagged at his memory. He turned the book around so that it was upright.

The symbols resolved themselves into a design he recognized, one known to every child who had grown up in America.

They were not lightning bolts but runic characters that stood for the letters “SS”: Schutzstaffel, the elite organization of the German Third Reich in the first half of the last century.

Lessing goggled at the volume, so surprised that he forgot even the corpse on the floor next to him. The SS was almost a century gone now; the last veteran of the Second World War had been in his grave since about 2025, seventeen years before. Yet the media kept the sides, the issues, and the propaganda as current as today’s soap operas. Movies, books, and TV dramas refused to let the war go the way of the Crusades, Napoleon, the American Revolution, or a dozen other conflicts. On TV the SS still marched— the same, ancient footage — and the black-uniformed troopers still murdered, tortured, and swaggered for the titillation of twenty-first-century American audiences. The SS was money: it sold books, movies, and deodorants just as well as heroic cowboys, sinuous starlets, acid-tongued private eyes, tough meres, or naked “Banger” pom-dancers, who were the latest craze back home.

None of which explained what these books were doing out here in India. They certainly weren’t sadomasochistic “Nazi-porn!”

Lessing looked up to find Mulder and Goddard standing over him. Wrench hovering in the rear.