Khan knew that he had been dismissed, but he did not leave.
“What is it?” Jadoon asked impatiently.
“You have seen what is in the box? And the . . . modifications . . . that Adnan and I have made?”
“Yes,” the HeM leader acknowledged reluctantly.
“You have seen the timer?”
“I have.”
“And you know what will happen when the numbers reach zero?”
“Allahu Akbar. I do.”
“Do you see any advantage in all of us traveling together to meet Allah?”
“What are you getting at?”
“I would volunteer to stay behind and guard the bomb while you lead the others back to Lahore. This will surely be but the first great blow in the coming battle with the Hindus. There will be other blows to strike, and there is no need for the Hand of the Prophet to lose all of its finest fighters at the outset of the struggle.”
Jadoon considered this. Khan could read the eagerness on his face. He wanted to accept the proposal. He wanted to live. But he would have to be led to that conclusion gently so that he would not consider himself a coward.
“We have our orders,” Jadoon insisted.
“Our orders are to carry out the mission, and to die if we must. But if we do not have to die, then it is simply suicide, and suicide is sinful.”
Jadoon took his time thinking this over.
“It would be unfortunate to sully this great triumph with even a hint of sin,” he offered finally.
“That’s right,” Khan agreed, letting the HeM commander reach the conclusions himself.
“You are the most qualified among us in matters related to the box,” Jadoon said, seemingly unable to say the word bomb.
“Yes, I am.”
“Very well. At the twelve-hour mark I will lead the rest of the team out of the city. We will go to Lahore. You will stay behind with the box. Your sacrifice will echo with honor through the centuries.”
Khan bowed his head. This was his mission. This was jihad.
• • •
Whatever Jadoon’s mystery job was, it involved leaving the studio. Khan had not been outside since he had persuaded—no, he corrected himself, kidnapped—Lena from her apartment and brought her here. He blinked in the unaccustomed sunlight as his eyes adjusted to the brightness. The colors of everything around him seemed intense and vivid as though he had just crawled up from underground.
The same gray panel van that Khan had used in his surveillance of Lena was parked in a garage attached to the studio. Khan drove, following directions from a GPS unit fixed to the dashboard. It took them more than an hour to reach their destination, a two-story brick house in a leafy, residential part of Mumbai. High brick walls surrounded the property.
A gate slid open to admit the van. Khan parked alongside the house.
“Stick close to me,” Jadoon instructed. “You may need to translate.”
Jadoon knocked on the door with his knuckles. The sound was dull and heavy. The door was painted to look like wood, but it was made from steel.
An older man with a shaved head answered the door wearing a long sherwani jacket embroidered in gold thread. There was a bulge under the jacket that Khan knew was a firearm.
“Welcome,” he said in English. “You are expected.”
The door opened to a foyer with a set of stairs at the far end. There were rooms to both sides, a living room to the left and what looked like a library to the right. The house was tastefully appointed, but it was all impersonal. There were no photographs, nothing that indicated the house was lived in rather than used.
The bald man ushered them into the library. A dark-skinned man in a Western suit was sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair. Khan recognized him. This was the man he and Masood had met with on their visit to India. He was the one who had provided the HeM with the information that had allowed them to acquire the bomb.
If the man recognized Khan, he gave no sign of it. Khan reciprocated.
There was another wooden chair and a sofa in the room. Khan took the chair. Jadoon sat on the couch. It was, Khan thought, a mistake on his part. He should have mirrored the host. The couch would make him feel soft and inferior. He thought he saw the dark-skinned man smile slightly as though some prediction had been confirmed. But perhaps he only imagined it.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” the man said. “We will speak English. We will not use names.” These were the same ground rules he had established for the meeting with Masood.
Khan translated for Jadoon.
“I am not used to being summoned like an errant schoolboy,” Jadoon said irritably. “I would therefore skip the pleasantries and get to the point. What is so urgent that it calls me away from our operation?”
“This is about your operation,” the man answered, when Khan had translated. “Some information has come to the attention of my organization that we must share with you.”
• • •
Although he listened attentively to the translation, Khan suspected that the man understood Jadoon’s Urdu perfectly. He had the advantage of listening to what Jadoon had to say twice and then having the time to formulate his response. Moreover, speaking English would help disguise any regional accent and preserve anonymity.
The bald man in the embroidered jacket entered the library with a tray of spiced tea. The dark-skinned man remained quiet while the bald man served the tea.
“The issue concerns your young guest, Ms. Trainor. You were most efficient in the way you brought her under your protection.” He looked at Khan as he said this, as though he knew who had been responsible for the kidnapping. “We also appreciate the speed with which you responded to our request for a proof-of-life recording that could be shared with her father. Perhaps you know why you are holding her and perhaps you do not. It is immaterial. There have, however, been some . . . complications . . . of which you should be aware. Various members of the Dalit community in Mumbai, the group you might know better as untouchables, have been searching for her. Evidently, this young woman had an unusual group of friends and associates. The intensity they are bringing to this activity is really quite remarkable, unlike anything I have ever seen. They have a few leads, including the make, model, and license plate of your van. I do not know how they acquired that information.” Khan did. It was, he was certain, the legless beggar boy. Maybe he had been wrong to let him live.
“It would be my pleasure to dispose of your vehicle for you,” the man continued. “I have another car parked out front that you can take with you. It is a sensible precaution.”
“Yes,” Jadoon interjected. “I agree.”
“Do not underestimate the Dalit,” the dark-skinned man said. “Many of those conducting the search are well known to the police. Some are well connected. The line between crime and policing in Mumbai is somewhat elastic.”
“So what would you suggest?”
“Give them the answer they seek. Give them Ms. Trainor.”
“Let her go?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Kill her?”
The dark man shrugged.
Khan was translating faithfully and he kept his face an icy mask, but his emotions roiled just below the surface.
“Wouldn’t that just make them redouble their efforts?” Jadoon asked. “Only this time, instead of looking for the girl, they’d be after the people who killed her. I don’t see the difference.”
“The action would shift from the Dalit community to the police. The authorities would open a formal investigation and begin the slow, methodical work that leads to arrests. Before the lead detective had so much as filled out his first time card, the death of one American woman would be . . . overtaken by events.”
Khan knew what that euphemism meant. The smoking glass crater that would be
downtown Mumbai would make any murder investigation superfluous. What was it Stalin had said? The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of a hundred thousand is a statistic.
Jadoon understood as well.
“We will take your recommendation under advisement,” he said carefully.
• • •
They drove back to the studio in silence. Their new car was an inconspicuous dark green Tata Manza. Outwardly, Khan was calm and controlled. Inwardly, he seethed. He was angry with the dark-skinned man and fearful for Lena. While Jadoon had promised only to consider the recommendation, that was likely to save face. It was closer to an instruction than a suggestion.
Traffic was heavy and the trip back to the studio was taking longer than the trip out. He realized that they were close to Dharavi, not far, in fact, from Lena’s apartment. An open-air market on one side of the road covered almost half a city block. Impulsively, Khan pulled the car up on the sidewalk and parked. He did not allow himself to think about the possible consequences of what he was contemplating. If he did, he might not have the courage.
“What are you doing?” Jadoon asked, with a note of impatience in his voice.
“We need tea and rice and sugar. It will not take more than a few minutes. You can watch the car.”
“Be quick about it.”
On the backseat was a small pile of things that Khan had transferred from the van. He grabbed a canvas bag from the pile and slipped his wallet into its side pocket. The market was crowded, even by the generous standards of Mumbai. Here in the heart of the city, the sea breeze was too light to help break the heat. The by-now-familiar combination of alluring and repulsive smells assaulted his nostrils. A Rajasthani man with a magnificent handlebar mustache and a saffron-colored turban was selling rice from a stall not far from the entrance to the market. Different varieties of rice were displayed in woven baskets and measured out on a hanging balance scale that used metal weights. Khan picked a style of basmati rice that was similar to the Pakistani staple. He haggled over the five-kilo bag, not because he cared about the money but because it would have been strange—and memorable—if he did not. They settled on sixty rupees a kilo. It was a fair price.
It took Khan ten minutes to find the section of the market where the tea dealers set up shop. The proprietress of one of the stalls was an older woman wearing a dark-colored Indian shalwar kameez with a bright yellow hijab.
“As-salamu alaykum,” Khan said.
“Wa alaykumu s-salam,” she replied with a beaming smile.
“I am looking for black tea,” he said in Urdu.
“You are certainly in the right place,” the old lady said in Hindi.
Khan set the shopping bag down next to him on the market’s concrete floor.
“You look like a strong young man. I recommend a strong tea from a Himalayan hill station in the Mahabharat Range near Darjeeling. This is a rare tea, but I have my own supplier, so I can give you a good price.”
The haggling was good-natured, but Khan did not buy the tea.
When he reached down to retrieve his wallet, the bag was gone. One of Mumbai’s legion of thieves had made off with it.
Khan struggled to force a complex mix of emotions into some semblance of order. As so often he did, he found comfort in a passage from the Quran.
Those who believe and do deeds of righteousness, for them there is forgiveness.
MUMBAI
APRIL 30
It was like chasing ghosts. Ramananda’s vast network of informants had produced little but rumors and shreds of hearsay that led nowhere. Lena had simply disappeared. After two days of looking and questioning, Sam was no closer to finding his daughter than he had been when he had stepped off the plane. The few leads that the Dalit foot soldiers had uncovered had been dead ends. There had been one reported sighting of the gray panel van, but the kiosk owner who had seen it had been unable to follow the vehicle. It might not even have been the right van.
Privately, Sam was also obsessively tracking the movements of Prime Minister Rangarajan. He did not know which city would be targeted, only that Rangarajan was supposed to be there when the bomb went off, assuming that the fragment of the speech he had pulled out of the Morlocks’ burn bag was an accurate indication of the Stoics’ intentions. Unfortunately, the Indian prime minister fancied himself a man of the people who spent more time outside of Delhi visiting other parts of India than he did in the capital. The list of potential targets seemed endless.
They had converted the first floor of the house in Dharavi into a war room complete with an oversize map of Mumbai that they used to chart the few gossamer-thin reports that came in from the pickpockets and extortionists on Ramananda’s payroll. The midlevel managers in his criminal network provided daily updates under the direction of three of the Hard Men. The Dalit enforcers did not offer Sam their names, but each sported a sizeable tattoo of a different Hindu god and he had started thinking of the three Hard Men captains as Ganesh, Vishnu, and Shiva.
Sam hunched over the laptop on the table, trying to concentrate on a press release from the prime minister’s office about an upcoming trip to Chandigarh. This was near Kashmir, increasing somewhat the odds that this city could be the target for the Stoics or Ashoka or whatever militant group was playing the role of the cutout. But there was no way to know.
The air in Ramananda’s house felt hot and oppressive. Sam needed a break.
“I’m going to step out for a minute to get some air,” he announced.
“Why don’t you take one of the Hard Men with you?” Ramananda suggested.
Sam wanted to be alone with his thoughts, if only for a few minutes.
“I’ll be fine, Rama. I’m not going far and I’m your guest. No one here is going to hassle me.”
Outside, the temperature was only a few degrees cooler. But there was a light breeze and walking helped to clear the fog in Sam’s head.
Although it had been years since he was a regular visitor to the slum, Sam still remembered his way around. He walked toward one of the open squares where the children of Dharavi played soccer and kabaddi. It was late, however, and there were few people still out on the streets. The square itself was empty. Sam stood in the middle of the open area where he had the best chance to catch a hint of the breeze. A few pale beams of moonlight struggled through the clouds and smog that shrouded Mumbai in a perpetual haze to offer some dim illumination.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow move. At an instinctual level, Sam recognized that whatever was there was a threat. Too late, he turned to run. The shadow had cut off his line of retreat. The clouds parted for a moment, bathing the figure in moonlight. It was the Sikh Sam had first seen at the airport, his tangerine turban traded in for one that was blood red.
At his belt, the Sikh wore a kirpan, his religion’s ritual dagger. Most kirpans were small ceremonial objects. This one, however, was twelve inches of steel, and it made a thin, raspy sound as the powerfully built Sikh drew it from its sheath.
Sam was cornered. He had been stupid.
The Sikh closed in, confident. In his meaty hand, the long knife looked like a toy.
The shadows deepened as the moon was again obscured by the clouds.
Sam cast about for a weapon of some kind.
Without warning, the silhouette of the Sikh stiffened, and Sam heard a dull grunt followed by a thud as his assailant fell to the ground.
The moon reappeared.
The Hard Man with the tattoo of Vishnu on his forearm was standing where the Sikh had been. The blade of his knife was wet with blood that gleamed black in the moonlight against the steel.
“Ramananda sent you to follow me,” Sam said.
Vishnu nodded.
“Thank you.”
Vishnu nodded again. He wiped his blade on the body of the Sikh and it vanished into an unseen sheath.
Sam looked at the corpse at his feet. The Sikhs had a proud warrior tradition that stretched back centuries. This was no street tough. This was an assassin. The Stoics or maybe Ashoka.
How the hell had they found him? And what would they do to Lena?
• • •
Two days later, they were no closer. The prime minister had visited both Chandigarh and Ludhiana without triggering a mushroom cloud. Today, he was in Mumbai, which made Sam nervous. But he had no reason to believe Mumbai was the target any more than New Delhi or Chandigarh.
He did not know what the deadline was, but Sam sensed that time was running short. He could not sleep. He had to force himself to eat.
“You can’t help Lena by killing yourself, Sam,” Vanalika pleaded.
“I’m fine,” Sam insisted, all evidence to the contrary. He ran his hand through his hair. It was greasy. It had been days since he had showered or changed his clothes. His eyes were framed by dark circles and felt like they had been scrubbed with sandpaper. Sam and Vanalika were sitting at the small table in the war room at Ramananda’s home.
“Let me get in touch with some people I know in Indian intelligence,” Vanalika urged. “They may be able to help.”
“We can’t do that. Whoever you talk to at the Intelligence Bureau is going to communicate with others in your government over the phone or by e-mail. The NSA will vacuum that information up and put it into the system where Argus and the Stoics would have access to it. It would not take long for them to figure out that I’m in Mumbai turning over every rock I can find. Once they know, that son of a bitch who calls himself Zeno will kill Lena. I’m certain of it.” The Dalit communicated face-to-face. They had no computers and few phones. In the high-tech world of twenty-first-century espionage, the low-tech Dalit were a hard target for Western intelligence.
Ramananda limped into the room, accompanied by the boy, Nandi, who followed him everywhere when he was not out on the streets plying his light-fingered trade. Ramananda sat down heavily in the third chair at the table. Nandi stood beside him.
“We have news,” the Dalit leader announced.
Secrets of State Page 30