Read Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) for Free Online Page A

known and most reviled faces on the planet. Lombard owned television stations, movie studios, internet giants and publishing companies on every populated continent, and was famous for his trenchant opinions, which were right-wing bordering on neo-Nazi. To his supporters he was the “Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” To his opponents, a far greater proportion of humankind, he was Satan from Down Under, a capitalist Beelzebub born and baked in the infernal heat of the Outback, a rapacious Antipodean Beast who would not be sated until he had bought up every last media outlet in the world and controlled the flow of information into every single household.
    He was a hulking presence in the flesh, far taller than I’d have given him credit for, with a lantern jaw and weathered leathery skin. He had been raised on a cattle station, destined to spend his life as a jackaroo rounding up livestock on horseback, until both his parents died within months of each other and he decided to sell the farm and buy a local radio station with the proceeds. That was forty years and countless hostile takeovers ago, but there was still a squint in those eyes that spoke of red dust vistas and searing sunshine.
    Lombard took point. He greeted me with one of the firmest handshakes I’d ever experienced, pumping my arm like he was cranking the motor of a vintage automobile as he said, “G’day, mate. Glad you could make it. I realise we didn’t give you much of a choice, but it’s appreciated anyway. Dick Lombard, of course.”
    “Of course,” I said.
    “And allow me to introduce my partners – not partners in the civil-ceremony sense of the word, I hasten to add; I’m no fudge packer. Scrawny Yid-looking bloke with the flash clobber and the rimless glasses is R. J. Krieger. From Texas, believe it or not. And he swears he isn’t Jewish but I know a Red Sea pedestrian when I see one. Look at that nose.”
    Krieger’s handshake was firm, but, mercifully, it was nowhere near as metacarpal-grindingly painful as Lombard’s.
    “Howdy,” he said, in a deep cowboy voice that could not have suited him less. His suit was a thing of sleek grey beauty, his shirt and tie sheerest silk. “Pleased to meetcha.”
    “And the brown chap’s Vignesh Bhatnagar,” said Lombard. “Don’t be fooled by that chubby cherubic little face of his. Looks all meek and mild, like he should be giving sermons and diddling choirboys on the sly, but he’s a merchant of death.”
    Bhatnagar heaved a rueful sigh, clearly used to his colleague’s blunt humour, if not amused by it.
    “Hello, Zak,” he said in cultured Oxbridge tones with the faintest trace of an Indian accent. “Try to ignore Dick’s casual racism and homophobia. He means nothing by it. He’s harmless. It’s just Dick being a, well, a dick.”
    I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or not, so to be on the safe side I didn’t. Krieger did, while Lombard himself let out a low chuckle which sounded not dissimilar to a growl.
    “Old joke, Vignesh mate,” he said. “Old joke. Heard it a million times.”
    “Doesn’t make it any less funny. Or true.”
    “Maybe not to a curry-eating turban-botherer like you. He sounds sophisticated, Zak, but he’s only a couple of generations away from shitting beside the railway track and wiping his arse with his bare hand.”
    “And you’re only a couple of generations away from deported convicts,” said Bhatnagar. “Let’s not get into ancestry, eh?”
    “I’m a self-made man,” said Lombard, puffing himself up. “Where I come from has nothing to do with where I’ve –”
    “Perhaps, guys,” said Krieger, putting himself between the two of them, “we could save this for another time. We’re all self-made men, okay?”
    “You aren’t,” said Lombard. “Your daddy was in oil.”
    “And he gambled away every penny he earned, leaving his family dead broke with nothing except debt.”
    “Still sent you to boarding school and Harvard. You had