The Hunt for Shambhala

20

Leaving the wreckage of the gangway fight behind them, Decker, Selena, Riley and Charlie made their way inside the yacht and soon found themselves in a labyrinth of carpeted corridors and plush private suites.

“Which way now?” Riley said.

Selena looked at the plans they had researched. “This way, I think — up these stairs.”

They walked up two flights of stairs and then stopped in a short corridor lined with doors. “I don’t like this,” Decker said. “This place is too quiet for me.”

“Me too,” Riley said.

Selena pursed her lips as she studied the plans. “It’s like a sodding maze. I think this door leads to…”

“That’s far enough,” Kaleka said.

They turned to see him leaning back against a wall and pushing a beedi between his lips. With the same hand, he raised a lighter to the tip of the thin, Indian cigarette and fired her up. Decker was more interested in the Micro-Uzi in his other hand. “All right, now drop them.”

“Please, there’s a lady present,” Charlie said.

“The guns, Mr Valentine… drop the guns.”

Charlie glanced at the others. “How do you know my name?”

“Mr Madan knows everything about everyone. Now lose the guns.”

Decker lowered his first and the others followed suit.

Blowing smoke above his head, Kaleka smirked and waved the gun in the direction of the double doors at the far end of the corridor.

“You watch your back, Kaleka,” Decker said. “I don’t forget and I don’t forgive.”

The Indian was unmoved. “Please, I beg you — give me a reason to punch you full of holes with this gun. Any reason. I beg you.”

“Leave it, Mr Decker,” Selena said.

They marched forward with the Indian at their backs, Micro-Uzi in hand, and when they passed the double doors they found themselves in a level of opulent luxury none of them had ever dreamed of before. A vast ocean of plush, white carpet spread out before them, sunken in the middle where they immediately saw Diana Silva seated opposite Rakesh Madan on a long leather couch. On the table beside them was Arthur Stanhope’s battered journal.

“Diana!” Selena said. “Are you okay?”

Diana turned to reveal the shiny, purple black shiner around her right eye, but before she could reply, the entrepreneur saw them and gave a warm smile. “Ah!” he said, twisting around and rising to his feet. “How kind of you to join us. There was I, thinking I would never get to meet you in the flesh, and yet you were stupid enough to walk right into my life.”

“What have you done to her, you bastard?” Selena said.

“I’m sorry to say Dr Silva needed a little encouragement to assist me in my travails.”

Selena rushed to her old friend and studied the black eye. “So you hit her in the face?”

“It was him,” Diana said, nodding her head in the direction of Kaleka. “He knocked me out earlier and when I woke up I had this on my face.”

“Problem is,” Riley said, “if you hit a woman, then I have to hit you three times harder. That’s the rules.”

Madan and Kaleka looked at one another and then burst out laughing. “It looks like your knight in shining armor has failed to appreciate the predicament properly,” Madan said.

“You can’t always carry that gun,” Riley said.

“True but sadly for you, none of you will be here long enough to exact your pathetic revenge fantasies.”

“You’re going to kill us?” Decker said.

“I had considered slavery, as a matter of fact.”

Selena was horrified. “Slavery?”

“It is a sad truth that India has some of the worst slavery problems in the world, with nearly half of the entire world’s slaves right here in this country. Your fate was to join the ranks of these lost causes. I know an individual who needs people to work his granite quarry free of charge. Those people were to be you.”

“Were to be?” Charlie said.

“I decided against it. If you escape then you would be too dangerous to me. I cannot spend my life worrying about this. For this reason you are to be killed.”

“How thoughtful,” Selena said.

“Think nothing of it,” Madan said. “I shall enjoy watching it.”

“You’re sick, mate,” Riley said.

“Yes, I am, apparently. A good doctor in Switzerland once told me I was a dacnomaniac. Can you imagine that?”

“What the hell?” Decker said.

“Someone who kills just for the sake of killing,” Diana said. “There’s no hatred or revenge or sick pleasure — they just kill to kill.”

“Jesus,” Riley said. “You really are sick…”

Madan gave a quiet shrug. “What can I say? Kaleka! Get Laghari and take these people to the insectarium on Deck 2.”

Kaleka loomed forward and raised his gun. “Yes sir.” He made a short call and a moment later another tall man dressed in black appeared. Unlike Kaleka he was clean-shaven and he was wearing a Glock in a shoulder holster.

“You called?”

“We’re taking them down to the scorpions,” Kaleka said.

Decker and the others looked across at Diana. “Scorpions?”

She gave a sad nod. “He keeps them downstairs. He’s obsessed with them.”

Kaleka and Laghari marched them downstairs to Deck 2 and assembled them in a darkened windowless cabin. It was lit only by gentle blue lights arranged around the outside of the room.

As they moved further in they saw they were actually standing on a walkway that went around all four walls of the large cabin with one stretch cutting across the center of the space like a bridge. Leaning over a steel rail, Selena looked down into what looked like any number of the insectariums she had seen in dozens of zoos over the course of her life.

Small trees and shrubs fought for supremacy among specially arranged rocks and the only sound was the hum of some kind of humidity-control equipment.

“And this is on a bloody boat!” Riley said, almost enjoying himself.

On the far wall was a switchable privacy window, and without warning it cleared in a heartbeat to reveal Rakesh Madan. He was watching them from the safety of a private room, and an expectant smile was on his thin, trembling lips. Behind him a guard was holding Diana at gunpoint.

He leaned forward, pushed a button in front of him and spoke into a small microphone. “You may proceed.” His voice emanated through speakers hidden in the black walls, and it was weirdly distorted.

Kaleka waited for no further commands. He spoke to Laghari and raised his gun toward the prisoners. It was all very quiet and respectful. Kaleka marched Decker, Selena and Riley over and Laghari gently guided Charlie and Diana. “Walk onto the viewing gantry, please.”

“What do we do?” Selena asked Riley.

“He’s pointing a gun at us, Lena. We do as he says.”

A moment later, Diana slipped free of Laghari’s grasp and pulled the Sig Sauer from his belt holster. In a heartbeat she fired a shot into his shoulder. He gasped, but before he had a chance to react, she fired a second time, striking him in the upper leg. She heard the bone shatter and then the man cried out, collapsing to the floor with his hands wrapped around his leg in an attempt to squeeze the burning, agonizing pain away.

Charlie seized the moment and booted the wounded man backward over the rail. He fell into the enclosure with a muffled scream but Kaleka ended the uprising by smashing the gun out of Diana’s hand with a powerful karate chop and firing his own weapon in the air.

“Enough!” Madan shouted while Laghari was still crawling around inside the enclosure, half-dead. “Now move to the gantry!”

They started to walk onto the central bridge section that Madan obviously used as a platform to view the insects from high above, but then his voice boomed around the room once again. “Not you, Professor Moore. You stay with Kaleka.”

She looked at her friends for a moment, confused.

“What’s going on, Madan?” Decker said.

“With the journal translated I no longer need Dr Silva, but I feel it would be wise to take Professor Moore with me to Shambhala. She has an encyclopaedic knowledge of these things. She lives, you die.”

She walked back to Kaleka and before the others had a chance to respond, the viewing gantry dropped away and Decker, Riley, Charlie and Diana tumbled into the scorpion pit.

“Where are the bastards?” Riley said, desperately using the light on his wrist watch to light the floor.

“I’m releasing them now!” Madan purred. He pushed a button on his control panel and the ceiling fell open above their heads. They could see now it was a false ceiling, and it was raining scorpions.

“Holy crap!” Charlie said. “Take cover!”

Riley dived for the cover of one of the trees. “Crazy bastard keeps them up there and drops them on his victims!”

“There must be hundreds of them,” Diana said.

“Over one thousand,” Madan said.

With the lethal shower now over, Decker stepped up on a small rocky island in the center and stared at the floor. It was literally crawling with scorpions, and now he saw vents opening in the walls.

Madan smirked. “Some cobras and kraits to keep you company. Don’t say I’m not generous.”

“This is a God-damned nightmare!” Decker said, flicking a scorpion off the rock with the toe of his boot.

“Let them go, you sadistic bastard!” Selena urged Madan.

“Never… I must see them die. I have to kill them.”

She looked down into the pit and saw the terror on her friends’ faces as the scorpions and snakes grew in number and gradually surrounded them on their tiny little rocky island.