Kingdom (20 page)

Jack turned as she hesitated, and said, ‘I’ve taken care of all that. Just come straight through.’

Surely, she thought, it couldn’t be that easy to leave a country without alerting the authorities. Yet when she looked back over her shoulder the guard was still watching television, as if she had never been there.

‘How did you do that?’ she hissed to Jack Adams, or to his back, as he was setting such a pace she could scarcely keep up with him.

‘Are you happy to do this my way?’ he said, not turning round.

‘I guess I have to be.’

‘Great, now let’s hurry. The plane has to leave any minute.’

He could make a vague effort to be a little friendlier, she thought. Yet as she came alongside him, she wondered if he was nervous, or just focused on the job in hand. She looked ahead. The tarmac of the airport stretched out into the darkness, a great lake of black. There were lights in the distance, scattered aircraft waiting to take off. Beyond them, the control tower and the low roof of the passenger terminal glowed with artificial light.

‘Whose plane is it anyway?’

‘A friend. Khaled Hussein.’

She glanced at Jack, expecting him to say something else, perhaps tell her something more about Khaled Hussein, but his lips were pursed. A small airport vehicle towing half a dozen trolleys laden with baggage motored past, an orange light flashing on its roof. Jack barely paused as it passed right in front of them. After another minute of walking, it became obvious which aeroplane they were heading for. She could see the refuelling vehicle packing up and a man in shalwar kameez waiting at the foot of the steps. Jack waved at him.

The aircraft engine was making so much noise that it was impossible to hear anything, so when they reached the steps the man simply gestured to them to board the plane.

Once inside, Nancy did as she was told and strapped herself in next to Jack Adams. The engines were humming noisily; the main door was still open. She nodded briskly when Jack asked if she was ready to go. He seemed less tense now they were on the plane; she acknowledged that to herself, and then she found her thoughts returning to what James had told her and what she had learned on the Internet and from Maya. She could scarcely take it all on board, and so many questions were going round in her head that she found it impossible to gain any distance on it all. The biggest story the world had ever known? What did Herzog mean by that – or was it just a strange boast he had made to his impressionable fiancée? And did the Book of Dzyan really exist? Was there any truth in the old myths? And what about the strange glyph, the symbol on the medal, the hallmark of the Thule Gesellschaft?

She shook her head in despair. And what about Anton, how did he carry the burden of knowing that his father had been a member of a strange esoteric sect, allegedly involved in some of the Nazis’ more arcane activities? No one on the
Trib
had ever known about any of this: but then why should they? Herzog had every right to his privacy and it should make no difference whether his father was a pillar of the community or a notorious serial killer. He was his own man; everyone deserved to be judged on their own merits. Nancy had no belief in genetic predetermination, that an evil man would breed an evil son. She would never condemn someone for their parents’ sins. But she was aware that while acknowledging the logic of this statement, she was thinking of Herzog differently already.

It was perhaps because of how Anton had behaved. Rather than wanting to forget his father’s dubious activities, he appeared to have been reaching back into Felix Koenig’s past, trying to draw it into the light. Thousands of Germans, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, had family members who were intimately involved in the sins of the Nazi regime. But to resurrect their obsessions, indeed to make this resurrection the driving focus of your own life: that was highly abnormal, not to say dangerous. Perhaps Anton was just taking a historian’s interest in his father’s work; that would be the generous thing to think. But then he was apparently prepared to abandon his pregnant partner in pursuit of his dream.

The idea that the ancient Aryans, the forefathers of the Germans, had anything to do with this part of the world seemed far-fetched to Nancy, though she knew she was no expert. Still she kept coming back to her central question: why would an intelligent man such as Herzog – and everyone was in agreement on that point – be chasing Nazi myths? From the little she knew of Nazi mythology it was a hotchpotch of old Norse gods and Wagner’s Ring cycle, with a little bit of Satanism thrown in for good measure. In much of the history she had read about this period, the Nazi emphasis on Germanic mythology was treated as pure propaganda, window dressing for the party’s lust for power. But the Thule Gesellschaft was no mere window dressing. If the article in the
Guardian
could be trusted, it was the fount from which the entire evil ideology had sprung. And deluded as the Nazis were, the region had a genuine lure, for at least some of them, beyond fetishism and ritual performance. Perhaps there was some truth in what they believed? Anton Herzog clearly thought so; that was the inescapable conclusion.

The aeroplane had begun to taxi, and Jack finally smiled and said to her, ‘Cat got your tongue?’

She smiled grimly back at him.

‘No. I’m just a little tired. Is everything OK?’

‘I hope so,’ he said, his smile ebbing away.

‘How did we evade all the security people?’

‘I have friends if not in high places then at least in the right places,’ Jack said, with a shrug.

‘Well, it’s always nice to take a trip, get to know the region,’ said Nancy, trying to make light of the situation. Jack didn’t bother to reply.

Nancy was just wondering why his moods seemed to shift around so much, why he was almost debonair one moment and then profoundly charmless the next. But her musings on the compelling subject of Jack’s personality disorder were interrupted when Khaled Hussein appeared through the door to the cockpit. He was dressed in shalwar kameez trousers and a small pakul hat. He was handsome, almost feminine with his high cheekbones and delicate features, and he had a neatly clipped beard that framed a wide smile. A quite different prospect from Jack, she thought, though he was probably as inscrutable in his own way.

Khaled sat down in the pilot’s seat in front of her and shouted over his shoulder, ‘So Jack tells me you are going walkabout in Tibet – you’d better watch out for those crafty old lamas.’

‘What do you mean?’ Nancy yelled back.

‘They’ll rip you off. A nice girl like you – full of naive ideas about Tibetan Buddhism. They might even try to buy you as their wife . . .’ He was still smiling, though Nancy was not sure if he was being entirely jovial.

‘You seem to have a very low opinion of them,’ she said.

Khaled put his seatbelt on and tapped the co-pilot on the shoulder in a friendly manner. The co-pilot, who was already wearing headphones, gave him the thumbs-up sign. Hussein turned round in his seat again and leaned towards her so that he could speak at a more normal volume.

‘Well, that’s probably because I have spent so much time up there. I know what you Westerners think . . . and I know what the lamas are like too.’

Nancy glanced at Jack. He was smiling to himself now, a snide, quite ugly smirk, which made him look like a fox.

Meanwhile, Khaled was continuing. ‘I’ve seen lamas using their rosaries as abacuses, to calculate profit and loss. I’ve seen some of them attach their prayer wheels to water mills, so that they don’t have to turn them themselves. And I’ve been into monasteries where in public they’ve denounced the killing of animals but the kitchen storerooms are piled high with mutton and yak meat. And do you know how they kill the animals?’

‘No.’

‘They are driven over the edge of a cliff – so they kill themselves!’ Now Khaled slapped his thigh with grim amusement. ‘You see, they are great theologians, those lamas! They know how to get around the word of Buddha!’

Now Jack interrupted. ‘I suspect you’re boring our guest with your travel tales, Khaled . . . And she doesn’t believe you anyway.’

Khaled ignored him.

‘And the best thing of all are the nunneries! Once I was travelling in the Kongpa region, I was going through a valley, and the nuns were all in the fields, bringing in the wheat. And you know what? They were all topless, toiling away in the hot sunshine! I can tell you, it was quite a sight. About one hundred beautiful young maidens all in the peak of physical condition, and as I passed by the field, every single one made eyes at me. It was incredible! You see they get locked away in nunneries at the age of sixteen – but they are only human. Anyway, that night the Abbess invited me to the nunnery to see them perform a rare Tantric ceremony . . .’

Jack Adams had started to laugh.

‘Now, Khaled, you’ve just lost any credibility you might have had. What kind of young maiden would so much as even look at you, you lecherous old Pashtun?’

Just then the co-pilot said something to Khaled in a language Nancy didn’t understand. Khaled snapped his headphones over his ears and said, in a more businesslike tone of voice, ‘OK – I’ll finish this story later . . .’

‘I’m sure Ms Kelly will be on tenterhooks,’ said Jack, patting him on the back.

As they turned towards the runway, Nancy said between her teeth, ‘Nice friend.’

‘He’s just trying to entertain you,’ said Jack, with a sardonic smile.

‘Interesting idea of entertainment. Is there any truth in what he was saying?’

‘Sure. There’s some truth. You get bad priests in any religion, Buddhism is no exception.’

‘It sounds medieval.’

‘It’s not that bad – he’s exaggerating, or talking about how it used to be. Nowadays it’s different. Tibet is under attack. Nothing like a bit of oppression to focus the mind; even the Bon seem to be behaving themselves and getting behind the Dalai Lama . . .’

‘Are the Bon animists?’

‘No, not at all. They’re not primitive – it’s a sophisticated religion. They’re a sort of mirror image of the Tibetan Buddhists. You’ll have to ask Herzog when we find him – he knows all about them. I think they are all equally weird: the Bon and the Buddhists. They all wear the same robes and their gompas look exactly the same as the Buddhist gompas from the outside. But, apparently, in the gompa rituals everything is reversed.’

‘What, they literally do all the rituals backwards?’

‘Yes. Or maybe the Dalai Lama and his gang are all doing it backwards and the Bon have got it the right way round. Who knows? Ask Anton. Even their swastikas turn in the opposite direction to the Buddhists – the same way as the Nazis’ swastikas.’

At this she started.

‘So there are swastikas in Tibet – I thought it was a Hindu symbol?’

‘Everyone uses swastikas. It’s a Hindu and Buddhist symbol. The
Trib
must be going downhill if its correspondents don’t even know that . . .’

And now he was smirking at her again, that accusatory, almost hostile expression which made her pause and wonder: what was with this guy? She was wondering if it had something to do with institutions, if he despised her for being a company woman, a journalist within a big corporate newspaper. He had been rampaging around on his own, a lone creature, taking inconceivable risks for whatever he thought of as his work, for so many years, she wondered if he had got to loathing those who toed an official line, who yoked themselves to a particular organization. There was no doubting it, Jack Adams was a maverick, and she could see precisely why Krishna didn’t much like him. He was just so changeable. Sometimes he was quite the action hero, suave, confident, and then he became – well, like a drunkard, or a lost soul – clearly self-destructive, or destructive of everything. Everything and most likely everyone, she thought, and shivered in her seat.

Jack took the cushion from his seat and jammed it behind his head.

‘Right, I’m going to get some rest . . . In a few hours the sun will be up . . . Remember to wear your seatbelt at all times. Over the Himalayas, there are lots of air pockets – a small plane like this can drop a hundred feet in a couple of seconds. I’ve seen people break their necks on the ceiling . . .’

‘Kind of you to be concerned,’ she said.

‘Well, if you break your neck, I don’t get paid,’ he said, roughly, but again with a creeping sort of humour, and then he shut his eyes.

Nancy stared out the window into the darkness as the engines roared, and the lights of Delhi spread out beneath her.

In the darkness of the jungle, the Abbot’s deputy studied Anton Herzog with suspicion in his eyes and asked the question again, to make sure the white man understood.

‘You flew to Lhasa four months ago?’

Herzog nodded. He was calmer now, and he had opened his eyes. His dreams had receded. He saw the jungle all around, heard the clicking of prayer beads and the murmuring of the monks. And this old man before him, he knew him to be a lama, and he sensed he was afraid.

‘Yes,’ Herzog said quietly. ‘If you say we are in the Seventh month now, then yes, it was four months ago.’

The Abbot’s deputy breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, the white man was making some sense. He had taken a little food and water and his voice was stronger now, his train of thought more cogent. And yet, his claim was preposterous: he could not have been to Shangri-La. Speaking loudly and slowly, aware of the fragility of the white man’s reason, the Abbot’s deputy said, ‘Why did you go to Pemako?’

‘Everything that I have been working on led me to believe that, at last, I had a clear idea of where I ought to look.’ The white man broke into a fit of coughing before recommencing. ‘Through a process of triangulation, involving my father’s stories, and my own decades of research in the dusty libraries of a hundred Himalayan lamaseries and the thousands upon thousands of hours I have spent talking to gurus and monks, I had narrowed down my search to the high southern valleys of Pemako that open out on to the Tsangpo valley floor.’

‘How could you be so sure?’

‘All the evidence pointed to Pemako, but in the end, just to be certain, I consulted the Oracle. In one of the least ambiguous readings I have ever received from it in all my years of practice, it ordered me to go . . .’