INCARNATION
THE DEAD RETURN AND A CHILD ALONE KNOWS THE SECRET OF THE TRAITOR IN OUR MIDST
In northern India a twelve-year-old boy is being interrogated by three intelligence officers. A tape recorder turns; Everyone but the boy is sweating: his tale is so incredible that none dares believe it.
The child appears to be the reincarnation of a dead British Secret agent: his knowledge is that of a grown man, Matthew Hyde, who disappeared in China's Sinkiang province whilst investigating the links between Iraqi nuclear scientists and Chinese research bases. Somewhere-and only the boy knows the secret – there is a massive conspiracy to supply Saddam Hussein with a weapon against which there can be no defence.
This crackling Easterman novel explores war, the weaponry which feeds it, the men who will lie and cheat to attain power, and the innocent lives caught up in the struggle. From the corridors of power in London to the lost cities of Taklamakan Desert, it encompasses fear, love, heroism and extraordinary adventure.
By the Same Author
FICTION
The Last Assassin: The Seventh Sanctuary
Brotherhood of the Tomb
The Jaguar Mask
Night of the Seventh Darkness
Name of the Beast
The Judas Testament
Day of Wrath: The Final Judgement
The Ninth Buddha
K
NON-FICTION
New Jemsalems: Reflections on Islam, fundamentalism and the Rushdie affair
AS JONATHAN AYCLIFFE
Naomi’s Room
Whispers in the Dark
The Vanishment
The Matrix
The Lost
A Shadow on the Wall
The Talisman
HarperCollinsPublishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Daniel Easterman 1998
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-002-25610-0
Contents
PROLOGUE
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
PART II
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PART III
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
PART IV
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
PART V
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
PART VI
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
CHAPTER SEVENTY
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
PART VII
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
CHAPTER EIGHTY
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
PART VIII
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
CHAPTER NINETY
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
CHAPTER NINETY-TWO
CHAPTER NINETY-THREE
About the Author
PROLOGUE
Srinagar, Kashmir, Northern India
June
The sun lay across the city like a copper charing dish, baking everything in sight with its dull, oppressive warmth. It was the hottest summer in living memory, perhaps the hottest since time began. The sky was empty of clouds and birds. Today, not even the orioles were in flight. On Dal Lake, abandoned houseboats lay strewn like broken flowers, and the floating gardens wilted and died. To the east, the blue foothills of the Himalayas rose up behind a ragged haze. In the city, people looked up at them from time to time, thinking how cool it must be up there.
A woman’s voice rose in song from the lake’s southern shore, light and easy, a hymn to Shiva. First from the Jami Masjid, then from the mosques of Hazratbal and Rosahbal and Shah Hamdan and Pathar and Dastgir, the voices of the city’s muezzins rose in the call to the noon prayer. A very different god, and a very different love.
As the worshippers made their way on foot to their places of prayer, clutches of soldiers watched suspiciously from their bunkers. No one walked easily in Srinagar, no one went anywhere unobserved.
Two men stepped down from a four-wheel-drive vehicle that had just drawn up in front of the General Post Office on Guptar Road. They’d scarcely set foot on the parched earth before a chirruping bevy of would-be porters and guides swallowed them whole. V. S. Mukerji’s Top Number One Taxi Service’ was always the choice of rich foreigners coming in on the morning flight from Delhi. Except that nowadays foreigners in Kashmir were as rare as teeth in an old man’s gums.
The guides and porters vanished back into the lanes near the Post Office as quickly as they had come. A small Indian wearing cream-coloured kurta-pyjamas and impenetrable dark glasses had emerged from the Post Office and was greeting the newcomers, hands folded in the namaste, bobbing, smirking, and apologizing for the undignified confusion that had welc
omed them to the jewel of the north.
His greetings over, the Indian hurried them past a heap of sandbags topped by a light machine-gun, down narrow steps to the river. The Jhelum was low, its normally muddy brown water stinking and putrid now, as it moved sluggishly between the tall houses that crowded in upon it from either bank.
A shikara was waiting, tied up to a wooden pole whose lower half was seeing daylight for the first time in over two hundred years. The boatman, an old man with grizzled hair, helped them into the narrow vessel, as he had helped thousands of tourists in his day, and pushed off towards midstream. But today’s passengers were not tourists. They did not carry cameras, and they did not stare at the sights of Old Srinagar as the little boat weaved its way between a clutter of barges and floating shops. Their only luggage was a large, heavy-looking briefcase.
The two foreigners made a curious sight, if anyone had been willing to pay more than passing attention. The Indian sat up front, whispering directions to the boatman as he steered. Behind him sat the visitors, one old, one young. Bewildered by the heat that pervaded its smallest crevices, the city seemed to sigh as they passed, recognizing in them descendants of a vanished Raj. No one would have turned a hair if a band had appeared out of nowhere and struck up ‘God Save the Queen’.
The old man’s name was Dennison. No first name, no title, no tactless entry in Who’s Who. He had the air of tired menace that walks with men and women of a certain age and class. Not even the city’s heat could penetrate the invisible wall that stood between him and his surroundings. He sat upright in the pirogue, as aloof as any Rajput prince on a palanquin. His eyes fell on the dun walls and shuttered windows of the jumble of houses clinging frantically to the narrow banks, but he gazed at them with the practised indifference of a demigod.
A drop of sweat beaded the tip of his nose and fell at last to his knee. Another formed, but he did not lift a finger or furrow his brow. He’d been sent here on a wild-goose chase, and he knew it. The business had a smell about it, a smell not much unlike the stench that rose from the muddy river through which he was being rowed. The boy would turn out to be a fake and an illusion, the whole thing a clever trick to wheedle money out of Dennison’s bosses in London.
The boatman flexed his arms, twisting the heart-shaped oar through water and sunlight, propelling them deeper into the ancient city. The scent of fear was everywhere. Buildings carried the marks of bullet-holes, the traces of fires, the scars of bombings. It might have been Beirut a decade earlier. Eyes peered through broken lattices, watching, surmising. Two Europeans passing in an open boat: sitting targets for a band of kidnappers. And the Indian, calm and collected as a petty god moving among his worshippers. He looked up the narrow course of the river, humming a bhajan to himself.
A faint sound of hammering came to them from beyond a bend.
‘Habba Kadal,’ said the Indian, without turning his head. ‘Here is where they make copper goods. Advised to stop up ears.’
They passed beneath the old bridge with its weathered beams of deodar. The din of the copper workshops took possession of them for a while. The young man let his hand fall into the water, letting it trail for a moment before pulling it out again as though stung. He shook water from it like a dog. The water was unpleasantly warm to the touch.
‘I don’t think. I watch and wait. They didn’t send me here to like or not to like.’
‘You won’t understand. He isn’t what you want him to be.’
‘And what, pray, is that?’
‘An impostor.’
He’d found the boy during his last tour of duty up here. It had taken him until now to make them send someone out. He hated to think how much time had been wasted.
‘We’ll see.’
The young man’s name was Ross, Douglas Ross. Born in Edinburgh, into the service. His father had died in a cold room somewhere in East Berlin. The Wall was gone now, but the room remained. In memory. In his mother’s heart. She’d told him once her heart was nothing but a single memory.
He let his hand fall limply to the water again.
‘He’ll frighten you,’ he said. Something made him want to goad Dennison.
Dennison shook his head. He was beyond fear.
‘He told me things he couldn’t have known,’ said Ross. ‘Not if he was a fake.’
The shikara glided under another bridge and continued to the next.
‘Zaina Kadal,’ said the Indian. ‘We are getting out here, please.’
The boatman brought the craft up against the bank. No one was waiting for them. People glanced at them with curiosity. Tourists seldom came this way. It was too dangerous. There had been too many kidnappings, and a killing only last week.
The Indian told the boatman to wait, then led them into the tangle of alleyways that made up the quarter in which the boy lived. Stalls festooned with skeins of silk and wool lined the street, narrowing it until there was almost no room in which to pass. Always the Indian went ahead, making space for them. Twice they were stopped by military patrols, but each time the Indian showed a pass and brought them through without further questioning.
They passed into a lane that became a cul-de-sac. It was hotter here than in all the rest of the city, Ross thought. He fingered the pistol in his pocket. If they got caught here, they’d never make it out again. He’d have brought the boy to Delhi, but he’d refused to go, and there’d been no making him.
A wooden door barely wide enough to pass through stood at the end of the alley. The Indian stopped and turned. He took off his sunglasses and looked directly at them for the first time.
‘You must understand, Mr Dennison,’ he said, ‘you are
not in your own world any longer. Whatever happens here, it will not happen according to your rules. Do you understand that?’
Dennison nodded. He only had to sniff the scented air to understand the truth of the man’s words.
‘Let’s go in’ he said. ‘I haven’t come all this way to stand gaping at a bloody door.’
Part I
CLEAR LIGHT
CHAPTER ONE
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Secure E-mail Communication via Cadenza Central.
Not for retransmission. Time: 17:14:09 hours IST Date: 20/6/99
To: Controller, East Asia Desk [ConEA@6.gov.uk]
From: Dennison, P. J., London Operations Chief, India Section, Srinigar [dennison@embassy.delhi.gov.uk]
Subject: Reincarnation
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Maurice,
I recommend we get the boy to London a.s.a.p. I’ve made arrangements for him and his family to be taken to Delhi tonight. There’s a flight out just before the curfew starts. Dubey is being co-operative, but I don’t know how long it will last. Depends what he tells his own people. They may decide this is more their line of country than ours. Ordinarily, I’d say bloody right, but in this case …
I think it’s vital for UK security to have the boy and his parents on a plane out of Delhi by tomorrow noon at the latest. I leave that to you, it’s what you’re good at. Put Ross and myself on the same flight. I need authorization to deal with Dubey.
Is he what he claims to be? Buggered if I know. I’m not a Buddhist or a Hindu, I’m not up to these tricks.
C of E and the Apostles’ Creed suit me down to the ground. But… To tell you the truth, I’ve never been more scared in my life than I was this afternoon.
Dennison
CHAPTER TWO
From transcription of a tape-recording made at 10 Pampore Alley, Zaina Kadal, Srinagar,
14:30 hours 1ST, 20. June 1999
Operator: D. Ross, Field Agent MI6 Delhi Recording Time: 2:17:35
Tape logged: 20:15 hours GMT, 23/6/99, Vauxhall
Access: Nil access below Chief M16/Chairman Joint Intelligence Committee
Transcript logged: 14:07 hours GMT, 24/6/99, Vauxhall annexe
Access: Nil below Chief MI6/CJIC/Controller East Asia
Ross: Testing, testing. [Puff, puff, puff.] Hello, one, two, three, testing … I think it’s working. Right, this is Douglas Ross. I’m about to interview the boy called Yongden whom I last met here on the eighth of June. Also present are Captain Sunil Dubey of the Indian Intelligence Service, and the man you sent out to act as an observer, Dennison.
I’d like to set the scene for you, if I may. Dennison is sitting on my left, Dubey to my right. We’re in a small room, maybe twelve by ten, with a low ceiling. It’s hot in here, very hot. We’re all uncomfortable, except for the boy. I can feel sweat coiling down my neck, my back is soaking, my socks are wringing wet. Yet the boy is as cool as a cucumber, he looksas if he’s sitting on ice. He isn’t even bothered by the flies.
He’s about twelve years old, I think, good-looking, with jet-black hair and a winning smile. He’s simply dressed in white, in the Indian fashion. It’s impossible not to like him. And just as impossible not to be frightened of him.
The humming sound you can hear is the big fan up above that goes churning round and round. All it does is cut the hot air into slices and then send dollops of it down on top of us, making us hotter than ever. I find it distracting. I think we all do. Dennison looks up at it from time to time. The kid doesn’t seem to notice it. Nothing distracts him. He could be on another planet. Maybe he is.