There was an odd feeling of artificiality to the place, as if she were in an Indian palace-themed hotel room rather than the genuine article. She went to a window, where bright daylight flared through the slats. Expecting it to be locked, she tried it anyway and was slightly surprised when the shutters parted to reveal an expansive sweep of immaculate lawns and gardens below. She could see other parts of the building; it was indeed a palace, domes topping the pillared white walls. Again, there was the too-clean, too-perfect sense of its being a theme park replica.
‘Dr Wilde,’ said Khoil’s voice from behind her, making her start. ‘Good morning.’
The room had changed, a section of wall silently sliding open to reveal a giant screen. The Indian’s bespectacled face, three feet high, regarded her from it. She realised she was under observation, a lens glinting below the display. ‘Mr Khoil,’ she said tartly. ‘Been watching me sleep, have you? I didn’t realise you made your fortune through webcams.’
He ignored the barb. ‘The room has a motion sensor. The house computers alerted me the moment you woke. Welcome to my home.’
‘Yeah, I’m so glad to be here.’ If her sarcasm had been any more acidic, it would have blistered the screen. ‘Where exactly am I?’
‘My estate, east of Bangalore. It combines styles of the Mysore, Kowdiar and Laxmi Niwas palaces, only updated with modern architectural elements. And integrated with the most advanced technology, of course.’
‘Well, of course. So are you just going to lecture me from your telescreen like Big Brother, or . . .’
‘You may “freshen up”, as you Americans say, then you will be driven to us.’
‘Driven?’ Nina raised an eyebrow. ‘Just how big is this place?’
‘The main building has a hundred and sixty-five rooms over five floors,’ said Khoil, taking her question literally. ‘But we are not in the palace at the moment; we are at the sanctuary.’
‘Sanctuary? For what?’
A faint smile on the blank face. ‘Tigers.’
Tandon, politely menacing, collected her from her room after she had showered. He took her to an elevator, which brought them to a large underground garage beneath the palace. Dozens of cars lined the space, from a nineteenth-century Benz Motorwagen tricycle to a brand new McLaren supercar in gleaming gold. It was an odd mix of vehicles, a little British Mini beside the rocketship bulk of a 1959 Cadillac, a record-setting Bugatti Veyron hunched next to a minuscule Tata Nano. Some facet of each vehicle’s design had apparently made them worthy of inclusion in the billionaire’s collection.
The vehicle Tandon took her to was less impressive than any of the gleaming exhibits, however: an electric golf cart. They drove up a steep ramp into the open, following a tree-lined drive. About half a mile north of the palace was a huge enclave, encircled by a high concrete wall topped with chain-link and razor wire. A runway ran along one side of the enclosure, the long black strip showing Nina just how far the boundaries of the Khoils’ estate extended. The jet sat outside a hangar, the structure’s doors partially open to reveal a small, strange-looking aircraft. Its matt charcoal-grey fuselage, a propeller at its rear, seemed too narrow to carry any people - even a pilot. Then the jet obscured it as they passed.
Abutting the wall was a two-storey building, an architectural sibling of the palace. Tandon took her to the upper floor. The sanctuary spread out before her through a glass wall. The view was dominated by a leafy tree canopy, though she could also see a more open area of grassland and bushes. Sunlight shimmered off a lake near the enclave’s centre.
‘Dr Wilde,’ said Khoil from one side of the large room. The tycoon was seated at a control station, a bank of monitor screens before him. The biggest showed a view from the upper branches of a tree. Beside him stood Vanita, bent over a control panel with her body language suggesting tension and concern - though the look she gave Nina was one of utter disdain. The tongueless giant and the shark-toothed man waited nearby, eyes locked on the new arrival. ‘Welcome to the sanctuary.’
‘Impressive,’ said Nina. ‘You must really like tigers.’ ‘They’re magnificent animals,’ Vanita said, passion clear in her voice. ‘And they’re being slaughtered by poachers. Two of the country’s reserves had every single tiger in them killed in the last few years.’
‘So you set up your own?’
She smiled coldly. ‘Any hunter who tries to harm my tigers will regret it.’
A voice crackled over a loudspeaker: ‘Ready at station three.’
Khoil acknowledged via a headset. He examined a map on one screen, coloured markers slowly moving across it. ‘She has taken the bait,’ he told his wife.
Vanita regarded the monitors excitedly. ‘Show me.’
He tapped a keyboard. One of the secondary screens flicked to a new view. ‘Come and watch, Dr Wilde. You may find this interesting.’
Despite herself, Nina couldn’t help but be intrigued. Tigers had been a favourite animal of her childhood, even if the closest she had ever been to one in real life was at the Bronx Zoo. The combination of sleek beauty and power was appealing to many children, of either sex; Vanita had obviously carried that fascination into adulthood.
On the screen, a squat concrete bunker, partially camouflaged by vegetation, rose from the ground in a clearing. Adjoining it was an open-topped cage - in which stood a goat, tethered to a pole. Over the speakers she heard a faint bleat. ‘What are you doing?’
‘One of the tigers injured her paw,’ said Vanita. ‘We need to bring her inside so our vets can treat her.’
‘We have three tigers, two female and one male,’ Khoil added. ‘They keep to their own territories, so we have several stations linked by tunnels where we can enter the sanctuary and provide them with live prey.’
Nina gave the goat a sympathetic look. ‘Sorry, Billy.’
The billionaire turned back to the controls. The image on the main screen shifted as the camera moved. Nina saw that it was airborne, slowly descending into the clearing. Khoil touched a button, and a crosshair was superimposed over the centre of the screen. ‘Lower the cage.’
A metallic rattle came over the speakers as the cage dropped into the ground, leaving the goat standing on a metal platform. Vanita indicated one of the markers with a long red nail. ‘She’s getting closer! Pramesh, let me see.’
Khoil obediently adjusted the controls. The camera panned left, tilting downwards to show a patch of bush at the edge of the clearing. ‘Each tiger has a tracker implanted,’ he explained to Nina. ‘We can locate them to the metre. This one will come into view . . . now.’
For a moment, Nina saw nothing. Then she spotted a slight movement in the undergrowth - and suddenly what she had taken to be patches of light and shadow took on graceful yet deadly form.
A Bengal tiger, three hundred pounds of muscle, teeth and claws standing over three feet high and eight feet long. Even with a wounded paw, the animal moved with silent, precise purpose.
‘We would not normally tie up the goat,’ said Khoil as Nina watched, unable to look away from the spectacle. ‘We want the animals to keep their hunting instincts.’
‘Move the drone back,’ Vanita warned sharply. ‘If she hears it, it might scare her away.’
‘The vimana is eight metres away. The rotors are inaudible past six metres.’ But the camera retreated slightly after she glared at him.
The goat finally saw the danger. Bleating in fear, it tried to run, but was jerked to an abrupt stop by the tether. The tiger responded, a black and orange explosion of action as it sprang across the clearing faster than Khoil’s camera could follow. By the time it caught up, the tiger had already reached its prey, slamming the goat against the side of the bunker and biting down hard on the unfortunate ungulate’s throat. Blood gushed over the grey concrete. Even with a lethal wound the goat was still struggling; the tiger lashed out a paw, claws tearing open its abdomen and spilling its innards across the ground. Nina winced.