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  “You better stay here,” I said. “I’m going to track Collins down.”

  “Mr. Singh, be warned. Mr. Collins has a gun.”

  “That’s just brilliant,” I said.

  TEN

  I knocked on the door to the Tories’ room.

  Julia answered, still in her blouse and skirt.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  “All quiet on the Western Front—and back,” she said with a smile.

  She opened the door to let me see. Mistress Tania and her two partners, all in leather corsets, holding cat-o’-nine-tails, stood next to the bed while the Tories were trussed up naked like hogs, blindfolds, ball gags, and earplugs keeping them in a form of sensory deprivation. They were moaning quietly and, I could have sworn, rather enjoying this. Those were moans of pleasure, not suffering.

  “All right?” Mistress Tania said.

  “Good thing you came with a full arsenal of equipment,” I said.

  “Have a bit of faith, love,” she said. “We’re all professionals here.”

  “Sorry I doubted you.”

  I filled Julia in on what was happening.

  “Now, none of you feel strange, like you’ve been drugged?” I asked.

  “Right as rain,” Mistress Tania said. Her assistants giggled and gave me the thumbs-up.

  “I might be having a bit of a contact high,” Julia said. “But that’s all.”

  “Sounds like your addiction talking,” I said.

  “I have it under control,” she said. “None of them wanted to have sex with me, so no worries there.”

  “You might have to bring this up in group therapy,” I said.

  Julia looked at me in mild annoyance.

  “Wait, why did Kleiner see a Valkyrie?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s obsessed with death and Wagner.”

  Since Julia and Mistress Tania already had things well under control here, I told them to lock the door and keep the Tories safe. Three more guests safely tucked away, now I only had to find the most dangerous one.

  ELEVEN

  Collins was stumbling around the hall waving his pistol. Benjamin helpfully told me on the Bluetooth that it was a Glock 9mm semiautomatic.

  “Ravi? Is that you? I never thought it would be like this,” he stammered.

  I approached him slowly, my palms out, conscious of the gun in his hand.

  “Mr. Collins, give me the gun. You don’t want to be shooting at anything tonight.”

  “I’m not relinquishing my weapon!” he screamed.

  Great. He was completely off his rocker.

  But wait, if he’d been doused, too, that would mean it wasn’t him who drugged the guests. He didn’t strike me as someone who would drug himself with a psychoactive hallucinogen to throw suspicion off. That meant the saboteur was someone else.

  “I see you now!” Collins cried, pointing his gun at Lord Shiva and Kali, who both stood in front of him, smiling with drinks in their hands.

  “You see the gods?” I blurted out in surprise before I could stop myself.

  “The arms, the blue skin . . .” he said. “Her black skin . . .”

  Shit. He was definitely seeing my gods.

  “Mr. Collins, you never want to point a gun at gods,” I said.

  He quickly lowered his arm.

  “I’m sorry! I meant no disrespect!” he cried.

  “None taken,” Lord Shiva said, his voice surprisingly debonair.

  “I have so many things to ask you,” Collins said.

  Shiva and Kali just burst out laughing.

  “Don’t mock me!” Collins screamed. “I serve a greater power! A greater cause! You will talk to me!”

  “Silly, foolish little man,” Kali said, licking her lips with her frighteningly long tongue. “You do not presume to make demands of the gods.”

  They laughed again, even more mocking now.

  Collins began to shake. Sweat was flooding off him. He was having a really bad trip. This was definitely not anything he’d signed on for. He couldn’t have been behind the dousing. He would never agree to an experience like this. Losing control was his greatest fear.

  “How do you know we have any answers for you?” Shiva said, smiling.

  “You must! You’re gods!”

  I slowly moved closer to Collins, hoping to take the gun off him.

  “What if the gods aren’t in control?” I said. “What if they were never in control? Suppose they’re witnesses to time as much as we are. They can just see the threads that we can’t?”

  “Are you saying everything is preordained?” Collins asked, blinking. “That we have no free will?”

  “Free will is an illusion,” Lord Shiva said, and took a sip of his cocktail.

  Collins looked at him, stricken, then turned back to me.

  “He was talking in your voice!” Collins cried.

  “I didn’t say anything,” I said.

  “I knew it! You and the gods are in on it together!”

  “No, we’re not!” I said. “I’m trying my damnedest to ignore them!”

  “Yet you still manage to do what needs to be done,” Lord Shiva said, winking at me.

  “You really are the instrument of the gods!” Collins cried.

  “The gods don’t control what I do!’ I said. “Listen to me! I think the gods are as helpless as we are in the wheel of time! There is no real order in the universe! There’s a randomness that’s just cause and effect! That’s all there is to it!”

  “Is that what the gods tell you?” Collins asked.

  “I don’t talk to the gods about metaphysics because they only exist in our heads,” I said.

  “Yet you and I are both seeing them now!” Collins said. “That is what I’ve wanted! To commune with the gods!”

  “For what?” I asked. “I tried the enlightenment route when I was doing my PhD in religious studies. It didn’t work for me. What little faith I had instilled in me as a child didn’t hold up by the time I became a teenager. I tried to stick at it because my father wanted it, and every day in university calling myself a religious scholar just put more and more pressure on me until I had a nervous breakdown and quit. That’s what religion’s done for me. It took years for my father to forgive me for dropping the studies. That just proved to me again that there’s no order to anything. There’s only us and what we do, and what happens after we do it.”

  Collins was sweating and twitching profusely. He was having a much more externalized version of the crisis I had when I was twenty-five, and it looked like he was having it even worse.

  “But I have such plans!” he said.

  That only made Lord Shiva and Kali laugh uproariously again. Shiva in his tuxedo and Kali in her designer cocktail dress, her multiple arms adorned in gold and jewelry. This was their late-night dinner theater. It occurred to me the gods were treating this evening as one of those country house murder mystery weekends where the guests could wander around the mansion following whichever actor or plotline took their fancy. Of course laid-back Ganesha would just hang with Mark in the garden. Of course Lakshmi was at home in this palace of wealth. Of course Bagalamukhi would happily wander the place from one group to another and then go back to hang out with Benjamin, at home with all this deception and duplicity. The gods could pick and choose their fun on this weekend in the country. Of course Shiva and Kali would follow Laird Collins and fuck with him for a laugh. His ridiculous ambitions for bringing about Armageddon and the Rapture must have looked very amusing to them. And while I thought I was just doing my job and earning my salary, I was their unwitting tour guide through this whole weekend. Stuck in the middle again.

  “Mr. Collins,” I said. “You might want to put that gun down.”

  He looked at the Glock in his hand, astonished, as if he’d just remembered he was holding it.

  “The Wheel of Time,” he muttered.

  “Sorry?” I blinked.

  “If everything is predestine
d, that means everything that’s going to happen was supposed to happen,” Collins was thinking out loud.

  I didn’t like where this was going.

  I especially didn’t like how intently Shiva and Kali were watching us.

  “And if the gods don’t intervene or influence,” Collins said, “they won’t stop me from shooting you right now.”

  He pointed the gun at my head.

  Shit.

  It occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t have been talking to him like I had been and winding him up. I could have just lied my arse off and told him whatever the fuck he wanted to hear to calm him down, but I probably just hated him and his arrogance so much, that arrogance that he used to justify all the people whose lives he destroyed and deaths he caused in the name of lucrative contracts and a ludicrous Grand Plan. For all the social engineering I did on the job, the little white lies, the false identities I adopted to get the truth on my cases, I couldn’t lie to the likes of Collins or Roger or my colleagues, because we were all in the same club. Lying to our own never worked. I was thinking all this possibly as a way to keep from panicking at the prospect that I was about to get my brains blown out by a religious zealot. I felt oddly detached about everything unfolding before me.

  What if all this was truly predestined? Was I fated to get my head blown off in a country mansion by some nutter off his face on drugs in an idiotically bad scenario straight out of the Daily Mail?

  Collins was hyperventilating. I could see all the sweat drenching his face as he tried to focus and aim the gun at my head.

  “Maybe this is the final test,” Collins stammered. “God has been testing me. Maybe if I shoot you, your gods go away, and it’ll just be my God.”

  “What if you’re wrong?” I said.

  “Oooo-er!” Shiva cooed.

  “What if you kill me and this continues?” I continued. “Let’s say my gods are not just mine. They’re actually here. If I’m their chosen shaman, do you think they’ll be happy if you kill me? What if they decide to visit their wrath on you?”

  “My God is the one true God!”

  “Yeah, and what if he’s fucking with you as much as mine are?” I said. “There is no order to anything! It’s all just random! It’s all just us and what we do!”

  “I have faith!” he cried.

  “Where is your God in all this?” I said. “Shouldn’t you be seeing Him tonight as well as mine?”

  Confusion and shock crossed his face. He turned and looked around. Even then I didn’t think it was a good idea to run or dodge. We were in a large hallway with nowhere for me to take cover behind. I had thought about rushing forward and at least grabbing his gun arm and turn it upwards away from me, when Kali appeared behind Collins and stuck a syringe in his neck.

  He turned around to face her in surprise before his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed in a heap. His gun was transferred to Kali’s hand—no, Ariel’s hand.

  As time slowed down and I waited for my life to flash before my eyes, my senses must have played a trick on me to see Ariel as Kali. Kali was standing ten feet away with Shiva, watching. They applauded. The look in Kali’s eyes indicated she knew what I was thinking. She enjoyed my apprehension.

  “Babe, talk about cutting it close,” Ariel said, smiling. “Admit it, you really do like living on the edge.”

  TWELVE

  After she had secured Collins’s gun, put on the safety, and tucked it in her jacket, Ariel and I carried the unconscious man back to his room. I took his shoulders, Ariel took his feet. Bloody hell, he was heavy.

  “I think he’s broken,” I said.

  “Poor Laird,” Ariel said. “He wouldn’t stop talking about how much he envied you. He wanted to touch God.”

  “That’s never a good idea,” I said.

  “He just found out the hard way,” she said.

  “How did you find me anyway?” I asked.

  “I was looking for him,” she said. “And I knew he would go off looking for you.”

  “With a gun. Was he always planning on shooting me? Did he think he could take over my gods after he got rid of me?”

  “I never thought he was going to take it that literally,” Ariel said. “We always figured he’d hire you away from Golden Sentinels and treat you like the company shaman. He’d probably have given you an office and consulted you on a daily basis.”

  “All that bollocks about Armageddon,” I said. “I can’t believe he picked Interzone’s contracts in countries he believed he could bring about the Apocalypse. How many tens of millions of dollars in contracts did he get just to sow perpetual war?”

  “Actually,” Ariel said. “The board of directors has been raising a lot of questions about that lately. They think we might have lost out on some major contracts because of Laird’s Armageddon agenda.”

  “Armageddon agenda. Catchy name for a plan to end the world,” I said.

  “We’re not the only PMC with that kind of plan, you know,” Ariel said.

  “Somehow I don’t find that reassuring,” I said. “Do you believe in all that, Ariel?”

  “Not really. I’m on my own spiritual journey. Kali’s my gal.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  “I don’t believe in ending the world, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “I’ve read enough of the Bible, then Buddhist scriptures, Sufism, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, and I don’t believe in a final end. I think things just keep going. It’s not a single race with a finishing line, it’s a cycle.”

  “You don’t have any religious agenda when you shoot people,” I said.

  “Nope, but it’s still fun.”

  “That’s where you lose me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re more comfortable marrying Julia ’cause she doesn’t like to shoot people. Hey, Kali likes me.”

  “Don’t start.”

  I groaned. Out of the corner of my eye, Shiva and Kali walked behind us, listening intently and sipping their drinks.

  “How do you know I don’t have a relationship with Kali and she doesn’t point me in your direction?” Ariel said. “If you ask me, Laird here totally missed a trick. Instead of serving gods, why can’t we be gods?”

  “That’s just bloody insane,” I said. “Why would anyone want to be a god? It’s narcissism and egotism. And how the hell would you do that in the real world? You’re not a god just because you might shoot people and have the power of life and death over them. That’s where you fail, Ariel.”

  “Chill, Ravi,” she said with a laugh. “Being a god is way too much responsibility. I’m just messing with you.”

  We got to Collins’s room and put him to bed.

  “Hey, he’s out for the next six hours,” Ariel said, lying back in the bed next to Collins. “Wanna fool around?”

  “Good night, Ariel.”

  I left, collected Julia from the Tories’ room, and we retired to ours for the evening.

  THIRTEEN

  The guests left on Sunday morning. We watched their people guide them into their cars, but not before they shook Roger’s hand. They all looked refreshed and in a good mood. They complimented Roger for the presentation and the general do. None of them brought up tripping their faces off and running around in terror the night before. The gods were gone. The show was over. They didn’t need to see the help dismantle the set. Everything felt grayer, like the world was having a hangover. The comedown from a Midsummer Night’s Dream was always anticlimactic.

  After the guests had gone, Wittingsley handed all the girls a nice, thick envelope for their night’s work.

  “Courtesy of Mr. Golden,” he said. “For a job well done.”

  “Might as well be combat pay,” Mistress Tania said. She was out of her dominatrix gear and wore a denim jacket and jeans. Gone were all the expensive dresses as Madame Felicity’s girls were finally off the clock.

  The girls were very happy with their bonuses, a tip to them outside of the fees Roger had already paid to M
adame Felicity. They piled into the two vans and headed back to London, back to their lives when they weren’t moonlighting as call girls.

  As for our lot, Ken and Clive were their usual surly selves, as if this was just another job. Benjamin was slightly bleary-eyed from staying up most of the night, until everyone was safely to bed, but nothing that two cans of his favorite energy drink at breakfast wouldn’t sort out in short order. Mark was in a very good mood because he’d gotten to experience something he’d wanted for a long time. He finally met my gods. Julia was perfectly chipper. Only Marcie was not happy. I’d never seen her so genuinely nonplussed before. She sussed out when she woke up that someone had drugged her so she fell asleep and missed all the night’s excitement. Someone had made sure of that. She would spend the next two days at the office grilling me at every spare moment for every single detail I had about what happened the night before. She was actually going to play detective on her own. I’d never seen her want to go after someone before, and I wouldn’t want to be her target again.

  We went through the mansion, took down Benjamin’s webcams, packed our overnight bags, and put it all in the boot of the cars. Benjamin inventoried the cameras and microphones and put them back in their cases along with the screens he’d brought to watch the footage on. We made one last round of the mansion and the grounds to clean up and make sure we left no trace of us behind. The staff had woken up none the wiser to the night’s events and were cleaning up whatever mess had been made, which was surprisingly minimal. Soon after we left, the furniture would be covered up and the mansion shut down for the season. The estate agents would come around shortly to assess the place for sale. Some foreign oligarch was probably going to end up buying it in the end. The memorabilia that commemorated Alfie Beam’s career would be auctioned off at Christie’s after their appraisers catalogued it all, which would fetch Stephanie another nice earner for her retirement to Marbella.

  I found Roger standing in the garden. He lit a cigar and took a long, luxurious, almost sexual drag on it.