The Last Oracle (Sigma Force 5)

He swung the door wide. “Time to go to work, Yuri.”

The man stood up, his eyes flashing. “Sasha?”

“We shall see.”

Yuri crossed to the door. Trent didn’t like the resolute cast to the man’s expression and grew suddenly suspicious. Rather than beaten, Yuri had an edge of steel to him, like a sword’s blade pounded and folded to a finer edge. Maybe all the old man’s strength didn’t just come from injections into his ass cheeks.

But resolute or not, Yuri was under his thumb.

Still, Trent waved for the guard to follow with his sidearm. Trent had planned to walk Yuri back himself. Well over six feet and twice the man’s weight, Trent hadn’t been worried about needing an escort. But he did not trust the cast to Yuri’s eye.

They headed out.

“Where are we going?” Yuri asked.

To put a final nail in Archibald Polk’s coffin, he answered silently. Trent had orchestrated the death of his old friend, but now he was planning on putting an end to one of Archibald’s shining successes, his brainchild, a secret organization that the man had dreamed up while serving the Jasons.

A team of killer scientists.

Basically Jasons with guns.

But after murdering the professor, Trent must now destroy the man’s brainchild. For his own work to continue, Sigma must die.

12

September 6, 7:36 P.M.

Punjab, India

As the sun sank into the horizon, Gray admitted that Rosauro’s choice of vehicle proved to be a wise decision. In the passenger seat, he kept a palm pressed to the roof to keep him in his seat as their SUV bumped along a deeply rutted muddy road. They’d left the last significant town an hour ago and trekked through the rural back hills.

Dairy farms, sugarcane fields, and mango orchards divided the rolling landscape into a patchwork. Masterson had explained that Punjab was India’s abundant breadbasket, the Granary of India, as he described it, producing a majority of its wheat, millet, and rice.

“And someone has to work all these fields,” Masterson had said as he gave them directions from the backseat.

Kowalski and Elizabeth shared the row with him. Behind them, Luca sat in the rear, polishing his daggers.

“Take that next left track,” Masterson ordered.

Rosauro hauled on the wheel, and the SUV splashed through a watery ditch, almost a creek. Small downpours had dumped on them throughout the trip up here. Punjab was Persian for “land of five rivers,” which was one of the reasons it was India’s major agricultural state.

Gray checked the twilight skies as night approached. Clouds rolled low. They’d have more rain before the night was over.

“Up ahead,” Masterson said. “Over that next hill.”

The vehicle slogged up the slope, churning mud. At the top of the rise, a small bowl-shaped valley opened, ringed by hills. A dark village lay at the bottom, a densely packed mix of stone homes and mud huts with palm-thatch roofs. A couple of fires glowed at the edge of the town, stirred by a few men standing around with long poles. Burning garbage. A bullock cart stood beside one fire, stacked high with refuse. The single horned bull stirred at the approach of their vehicle down the hill.

“The other side of India,” Masterson said. “Over three-quarters of India’s population still live in rural areas. But here we have those who live at the bottom of the caste system. The Harijan, as Gandhi renamed them, which means ‘people of God,’ but they are mostly still derided as dalit or achuta, which roughly translates as untouchable.”

Gray noted Luca had sheathed his daggers and turned a more attentive ear. Untouchables. These could be the same roots as his clans.

Lit by flames, the village men gathered with scythes and poles, wary of the approaching strangers.

“Who are these people?” Gray asked, wanting to know more about whom they faced.

“To answer that,” Masterson said, “you have to understand India’s caste system. Legends have that all the major varnas—or classes of people—arose from one godlike being. The Branmans, which include priests and teachers, arose out of the mouth of this being. Rulers and soldiers from its arms. Merchants and traders from its thighs. The feet gave rise to laborers. Each has its own pecking order, much of it laid out in a two-thousand-year-old collection known as the Laws of Manu, which details what you can and can’t do.”

“And these untouchables?” Gray asked, keeping an eye on the gathering men and boys.

“The fifth varna is said not to have risen from this great being at all. They were outcasts, considered too polluted and impure to mix with regular people. People who handled animal skins, blood, excrement, even the bodies of the dead. They were shunned from higher-caste homes and temples, not allowed to eat with the same utensils. Not even their shadows were allowed to touch a higher caste’s body. And if you should break any of these rules, you could be beaten, raped, murdered.”

Elizabeth leaned forward. “And no one stops this from happening?”

Masterson snorted. “The Indian constitution outlaws such discrimination, but it still continues, especially in rural areas. Fifteen percent of the population still falls into the classification of untouchable. There is no escape. A child born from an achuta is forever an achuta. They remain victims of millennia-old religious laws, laws that permanently cast them as subhuman. And let’s be honest. Like I said before, someone has to work all these fields.”

Gray pictured the vast rolling farmlands and orchards.

Masterson continued, “The untouchables are a built-in slave class. So while there is some progress made on their behalf, mostly in the cities, the rural areas still need workers—and the caste system serves them well. Villages such as this one have been burned or destroyed because they dared to ask for better wages or working conditions. Hence the suspicion here now.”

He nodded to the welcoming party carrying farm instruments.

“Dear God,” Elizabeth said.

“God has nothing to do with this,” Masterson said sourly. “It’s all about economy. Your father was a strong advocate for these people. Lately he was having more and more trouble gaining the cooperation of yogis and Brahman mystics.”

“Because of his association with untouchables?” she asked.

“That…and the fact that he was looking for the source of the genetic marker among the untouchable peoples. When word spread of that, many doors were slammed in his face. So much for higher enlightenment. In fact, after he disappeared, I was convinced he’d been murdered for that very reason.”