Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'The air-conditioning unit is under here,' he said.

I put a hand down, and the hum came into my shoulder. Now we knew we were right. The boys scraped at the ground, clawed at the grass, calling for the lanterns. I went out beyond the light, unmindful of the sting in my knees as I went over roots and rocks. The secret was underneath, I could feel it close. The gold was close. I had searched it out always, the prize, the advantage. And so I found it.

There was a length of the same metal as the air-conditioning panel. It lay between two old trees, making a slight rise in the earth. There was a thin covering of leaves and twigs, and under it the riveted steel. 'Here,' I shouted. 'Here.'

We cleared off the top of it, and now in the lamplight I could see that it was a trapdoor. Five feet by five, with slots let into one side to allow for lifting. Jatti caught hold and gave it an experimental tug. 'Locked,' he said, pointing at a keyhole between the handles.

'Look on the dead chutiya,' I said.

I was shooting deadly straight that night, no misses. They found the key on a dirty nada around Kirpal Singh's neck. It was a big, heavy, three-inch slab of steel, one of those computerized keys, now stained with blood. But it turned effortlessly in the lock, and we were in. A ladder angled down. A light-switch conveniently positioned next to the door provided clean, even, blue-white illumination. There were three large rooms, decreasing in size. The first two were efficiently filled with bookshelves, filing cabinets and computer tables. But the shelves were empty, and there were no files, and no computers. The extension cords were still in place, though, and there was a mess of other computer cables behind the desks. On the white surface of the desks, we could see faint outlines where the computers had rested. Nikhil ran his finger around the brown outline of the bottom of a cup on one of the keyboard trays, where someone had put down his chai. There was one very large printer that sat in a corner of the second room, and that was all the equipment that they had left behind.

The third room was a storage space, now completely empty. A wire rubbish bin held only the wrappers from two reams of computer paper. Jatti went down the room, opening cupboards. He stopped at the last one. 'Bhai.'

There was a steel trunk on the bottom shelf, not one of those tinny things that you can buy in any bazaar, but a sleek silver cube of foreign make. You could tell that from the locks alone, which were built into the shape of the trunk itself. 'Bring it out,' I said.

It was heavy. It took two of them to drag it out into the central room. 'That key was the only one on the commando, bhai,' Nikhil said.

So Jatti got out his ghoda, leant close to the first lock and squeezed one off. There was a whine that sped around the room and went by my head, and we all dropped, cursing. 'Maderchod,' I said. 'Everyone all right?'

They nodded. But there was a hole in the printer. And only a small dimple in the lock on the trunk.

Our blood was up now. We looked at each other, and then at the shiny, plump curves of the trunk. 'Get me a rod,' I said, 'or something.'

It took us forty minutes of hacking at the locks with picks and shovels to open a crack in the trunk, to get it to reveal the seam that ran around its circumference. Then we inserted two crowbars into the split and heaved in opposite directions. It flew open finally with a shriek of tortured metal, and all of us fell to the floor. And then we were silent.

The trunk was three-quarters full, and what it contained was dollars. I reached out – and I noticed that my hand was skinned and bleeding and trembling – and picked up one of the little stacks, wrapped around with a paper band. The denomination was hundreds.

'How much, bhai?' Nikhil said.

'A lot.'

I moved the boys fast, then. We took the trunk, closed the trapdoor, went back to the house. I had everyone wash under the pump in the courtyard before we went out to the car. We were going to be on the road, near the border, early in the morning, and if we were stopped I didn't want to get into a shootout because of a blood-stained shirt. There wasn't much we could do about Chandar's hand, which was swollen into a football. He had a fever now, besides. So we wrapped him up in a blanket and put him on the back seat. Then we were ready to go. But not quite yet. There was one more item of business, and we all knew it. Jatti was the one who finally spoke.

'What about the old man, bhai?'

Yes, the old man. He was senile, he was half-mad, but he had seen our faces. There was a dead body in the house, and the old man could perhaps connect us to it. I had taught the boys what needed to be done in such situations. 'I'll do it,' I said. I went back in, past the snuffling of the cow, through the corridor – towards the slow tapping of water – and into the courtyard. I opened a door, and Jagat Narain was sitting on a bed, his hands resting on his thighs, watching. He was waiting for me.

'Come,' I said. 'We're leaving now. You can come out.'

He didn't move. I went in, took him by the arm, and he stood up easily enough. I walked him out, and as we stepped over the high sill, he whispered, 'What time is it?'

'It's going to be five.'

'Morning or evening?'

Now, under the starlight, I could see his big thatch of white hair, and his high forehead. In his cracked lens, there was my face, broken in half. 'Morning,' I said, overcome by a sudden tenderness for the helplessness of old age. He didn't know whether it was day or night, where he was or where he was going. It was all the same to him. 'Look, there is the moon.'

He raised his face and blundered away from me, his arms up. 'Yes,' he said, pointing with both hands.

There was a small sliver of moon, a piece of an arc, rising or setting – I didn't know. I took a step back, raised my ghoda, levelled it and fired. The flash filled my eyes, and then he was lying on the brick, his hands extended. I leaned over him, and gave him another in the head.

And then I ran. I don't know why, but I ran all the way to the car, and jumped in, and Nikhil didn't need to be instructed. He turned the wheel, and we were moving. But even through the spray of gravel, and over the sudden reek of exhaust, the smell of mogra followed me all the way to the canal. We raced through the dawn, and reached Amritsar safely. We paused only for a short visit to a doctor, and then I split up the team and sent them on their various ways. I understood well that this was the end of our mission. We had not found Guru-ji, but what we had found was something finally valuable enough to attract a lot of attention. There were, in that trunk, exactly nine hundred and eighty-four thousand, three hundred and twenty-two dollars. The boys called it a million, but the true amount was a little less. So Nikhil and Jatti caught a train to Delhi, and Chandar a plane to Bhopal, and that evening I flew to Bombay with the money. There was a car waiting for me at the airport, and a new safe house ready in Juhu. But I wasn't yet safe when my satellite phone began to ring. We were ploughing through traffic on the highway when I heard the ring, muffled but distinctive. It was my Guru-ji phone, my latest encrypted satellite one. I shouted at the driver to pull off to the side, hit the back of his head when he was slow to batter his way across the weaving streams of cars, and then I dragged him out to open the boot. I knew exactly where the phone was, in the outside pocket of my shoulder bag, and then I had it out and up to my ear.

'Hello?'

'You took my money.'

'Yes.' Yes, it was Guru-ji. Yes, it was that familiar voice, that chesty, resonating boom which was so reassuring, so comforting. Yes, there was the precise enunciation of every word, especially the last. Finally, after all this searching, I had found Guru-ji, I had brought him back to me. 'Where are you?'