Samuel was a long-time MOSSAD operative whose role was to liaise between MOSSAD and Indian intelligence agencies. Having grown up in Mumbai, he spoke Marathi as well as any Mumbai native and even his English and Hindi were slightly accented to suggest that he was a Maharashtrian, a fact that he used to his advantage.
‘So what does this nasty fellow you caught know about the incident in Bandra last week?’ Bhatia, whose real name was Shahwaz Ali Mirza, asked.
‘Nothing. A specific incident is only known to those directly involved in planning it,’ Samuel said, aiming his cell phone’s camera at a natural canopy of trees up ahead. The boat was entering the dense mangroves at a slow pace.
‘But we cracked his cell phone, and his browsing and chat history had an interesting story to tell,’ Samuel added.
Mirza said nothing.
‘Over the last two years, according to the conversations he’s had through various chatting apps, his interaction with known elements who provide forged identity documents has dropped drastically. And this guy was in touch with elements in almost every Asian and Middle Eastern country where the State has been recruiting,’ Samuel went on.
‘They can’t have stopped recruiting,’ Mirza said, not looking at Samuel.
‘No, but they’ve stopped bringing the recruits to the centre of the action.’
What Samuel meant was that ISIS was no longer spending time and resources on bringing recruits from countries like India and Pakistan to Syria.
‘What happens to their cause, then?’ Mirza asked.
‘It has evolved. The whole mission objective for them has changed. It is no longer restricted to one place. The mission is now the entire world.’
‘Meaning?’ Mirza asked, although he feared he already knew the answer.
‘Suppose you have a group of ten people in a distant country willing to do anything for you. And I mean literally anything. But getting them to cross international borders attracts too much attention and there are enough other recruits from countries close by to come and join you. What, then, do you do with these ten people in a far-off country?’
‘I’d set up a franchise,’ Mirza said.
‘Exactly,’ Samuel said. ‘The strategy is now to set up franchises at a local level and give them missions to carry out in their own countries. It deals damage to the concerned country and also spreads your name, and fear of you, in that country.’
‘Are you saying that what happened last week was the State’s doing?’ Mirza asked, taking pictures of a snake crawling through the mangroves.
‘I’m saying that there were cells trained years ago just waiting for a call. And we have enough reason to believe that these cells, which were earlier pledging allegiance to agencies from various countries, are now being passed on to the State. Hell, in some cases, the cells don’t even know they’re working for the State. Even the interrogation of the fellow we caught confirms this. He’s only recruiting people in various countries and putting them in touch with handlers in the State. Travel budget’s dropped to less than half.’
Mirza thought hard. If Samuel was to be believed, sleeper cells set up by the ISI in India were now working for ISIS. At least some of them were.
‘How sure are you about this?’ he asked.
‘Very. The guy we caught? This was his crowning glory, his defining moment. After years of being on the periphery of some semi-important terrorist activities, he was finally made part of something big. He was the messenger between whoever planned this and the fellows on the ground in Bandra. We have hours and hours of intercepted calls and mapping of online activities, all of which point to this.’
‘Is there a direct link?’
‘Well, not exactly. There was another layer between the four men who died there and the fellow we caught. We don’t know who this is, but he seems to have been leading or instructing the men.’
‘And you’re sure this isn’t P-town?’
‘What happened in Bandra was definitely not P’s doing. Forget balls, they don’t have the imagination to dream up something like this. The State, on the other hand, is getting bigger and bolder. They’re encouraging their recruits to do something daring in their own countries which will firmly put the State’s fear in the people there.’
‘Bloody hell.’
It was the first English phrase Mirza had uttered since the conversation began.
‘You’ve always been saying it, right? That homegrown threats are much more serious than external ones?’
‘Yes, but to have it loom in front of you like this…’
‘Disconcerting, isn’t it? Believe me, you’re not the only one.’
‘We need to act fast,’ Mirza said.
‘Agreed,’ Samuel replied. ‘And hence, purely out of goodwill, I have a gift for you. Completely free of any strings.’
‘You serious?’
‘If this is as bad as we think, we could all benefit from the Bandra case being unravelled.’
‘Okay, hit me with it.’
‘The fellow we caught was in touch with a particular IP address that has been tremendously active for the last one month and has gone quiet immediately after Bandra. I’m emailing you all the locations we tracked it to.’
‘And?’
‘And it’s moved around a lot. But it’s based in Mumbai for sure.’
7
The hotel suite in Bandra was silent.
Mirza had just finished summing up the contents of his report, which they were now calling the ‘Homegrown’ report. Vikrant had had some idea of how explosive it was, but even he was not prepared for its full impact.
Mankame, of course, was dumbfounded. The fact that the Bandra attack, according to every indication so far, had been carried out by a sleeper cell, only made the report seem more real. Both Vikrant and Mankame were faced with the same overwhelming feeling of disconcertedness that Mirza had felt while talking to Samuel.
‘This is like the bloody ’93 cache all over again,’ Mankame said after he found his voice again.
Mirza winced. The barb he had faced during his meeting with the prime minister was still fresh in his mind. Vikrant chuckled at his mentor’s displeasure and earned a murderous look in return.
‘Tell me something, sir,’ a still shell-shocked Mankame asked. ‘These threats … from inside the country … homegrown threats, as you say. How many might there be? How many of our own citizens, currently living and walking and sleeping among us, have been secretly radicalized? How many might have at some point visited Pakistan to receive training at an ISI camp?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, boy,’ Mirza said. ‘It’s not exactly something that we can Google.’
‘But we should have known!’ Mankame said. ‘Someone would have known.’
‘How?’ Vikrant asked.
Mankame opened and closed his mouth several times before giving up. The reality of exactly how easy it would be for a sleeper cell to stay under the radar for years was slowly dawning upon him.
‘This doesn’t leave the room,’ Mirza said and both Vikrant and Mankame nodded.
‘Of course, sir,’ Mankame replied.
‘Right,’ Mirza said, turning around to the board behind him.
The IP address given to Mirza by Samuel was tacked onto the board. Under it were the photographs of the four attackers, taken after the autopsy had cleaned up their faces.
The meeting was headed by Mirza and attended by Vikrant and Mankame. There was an abundance of additional manpower from the NIA and the Mumbai Police available to them, but only a select few would be allowed inside the daily meetings, for security reasons.
‘Some of the IB’s best are tracking this IP address as we speak. We’ll have its real-time location soon. Meanwhile…’
Mirza paused and glanced at Mankame, who stood up and cleared his throat.
‘Faizan Sheikh, Ali Sheikh, Raahat Sheikh an
d Aslam Sheikh. Not related, but all of them from the same district in Azamgarh. All in their early thirties. All of them unmarried and unemployed as of the last four months. All of them, however, were regularly sending money to their families back in Uttar Pradesh. And these were good amounts. Their families were happy.’
‘They were staying together?’ Vikrant asked. He was sprawled out on a couch, his head resting on a cushion, eyes closed. Mirza called it his samadhi position.
‘No, but all of them were living in rented houses in Madanpura, sharing with one or two others. We’re grilling their roommates right now, and they swear that these four were super reserved and hardly talked about themselves. Four months ago, they all quit their jobs in various repairing shops in south Mumbai without giving any reason. Since then, they claimed to be working odd jobs in electronics repair for a living, and none of them displayed any extravagance that might raise suspicion.’
‘Cell phones?’
‘Not in the last four months. At least not in their own names. We found nothing registered with the service providers. But it is hardly surprising because no one bothers to check the credentials of their customers as long as they’re buying SIM cards.’
‘Don’t we fucking know it,’ Vikrant growled without opening his eyes.
The negligible – or rather non-existent – checks conducted by cellular service providers while selling SIM cards were a bane for law enforcement agencies. The companies would hardly glance at the documents provided by prospective customers before approving them and activating their SIM cards, and because there was no law that made checks mandatory, the service providers, technically, were not doing anything wrong. Hundreds of SIM cards were bought for nefarious uses and discarded daily by criminal and terrorist elements, and it was maddening for the law enforcers to be unable to do anything about it.
‘Go on, Mankame,’ Mirza added.
‘All of them left their rented houses within a few days of each other in the first week of this month and disappeared. That was the last that their roommates or neighbours saw or heard of them. Then they suddenly turned up at the civil contractor’s office seeking employment. The contractor, Shakeel Mansoori, is always on the lookout for cheap labour, and these men were willing to work for as less as half the usual pay. Around the same time, the renovation job at Grishma society came up, and they pleaded their way in.’
‘We know anything about their past?’
‘This is where it gets interesting. Ten years ago, when they were still staying in UP, they made a trip to the UAE. According to their immigration records – which were a bitch to get, by the way – they travelled together, stayed in Bahrain for fifteen days and came back. The reason declared was tourism and they did nothing to make the authorities believe otherwise.’
‘Maybe this is when they travelled to Pakistan?’ Vikrant asked.
‘Makes sense,’ Mirza replied. ‘It’s a favourite tactic of the ISI to smuggle recruits to their training camps via the UAE. The recruits land there, are received by ISI agents and taken to the training camps on fake passports. They’re brought back the same way.’
‘Ten years is a long time, though, isn’t it?’ Mankame asked doubtfully.
‘Yes, but all these men had to do was to remember how to assemble and fire a gun. And there are videos available online, which they could have used to refresh their knowledge regularly. Hurrah for the fucking Internet,’ Mirza said.
Vikrant chuckled mirthlessly.
‘I’m assuming we have something on the IP address, at least?’ he asked.
‘Yes. It was in touch with four other IPs over the last four months, the same time period as when the four Sheikhs were unemployed. We’re assuming these guys were in touch with their local handler using SIM cards bought with fake documents. Easy enough,’ Mirza said.
Just then Mirza’s cell phone beeped and he checked the text message.
‘Okay, lads. IB has just traced the IP’s last location to Kausa in Mumbra. They also tell us that it’s moved from Mumbra to Bandra quite a few times in the last two months.’
‘Two months?’ Vikrant asked, opening his eyes and sitting up. Both Mirza and Mankame walked over to his couch and sat down on chairs beside him.
‘Are they sure?’ Vikrant asked.
Mirza nodded. He clearly trusted whoever in the IB was giving him the information, and Vikrant knew better than to doubt the people that Mirza trusted.
‘You thinking what I’m thinking, lad?’ Mirza asked.
Vikrant nodded.
‘Naidu sir met with his accident fourteen days ago. Kumar sir announced his visit after that. And yet, this local handler was in and around Bandra over the last two months?’
‘Bloody hell!’ Mankame breathed.
‘Exactly,’ Vikrant said. ‘When Kumar sir himself did not know he was going to be in Bandra, how did the handler know?’
No one could answer that.
‘Where are the interrogation reports?’ Vikrant asked. Mankame pointed to a glass table strewn with documents. Vikrant went over. The other two followed him.
‘What’re you looking for?’ Mankame asked.
Vikrant didn’t answer but kept leafing through the reports of the interrogation till he found what he wanted.
Straightening up, he started turning the pages.
‘Mansoori?’ Mirza asked, looking over his shoulder.
‘Yeah. The contractor who hired the four men,’ Vikrant said, coming to a stop at a page. Both men leaned forward.
‘Here,’ Vikrant said, pointing. ‘He says they only joined on a daily-wage basis the same day they were given the Grishma society job. In fact, they all but begged for the job.’
‘That means…’ Mankame began but Mirza cut him off.
‘That means they joined the exact day when Kumar announced his intention to come to Mumbai to visit Naidu,’ Mirza said.
There was silence.
‘How the hell did they know?’ Vikrant said again.
8
The sun was shining down mercilessly that April afternoon as the man entered the hall.
The single-storey structure in Mumbra was barely big enough to be called a ‘hall’. Teenagers of various ages were lying around while a small team of doctors milled about, checking on them. Some were reading books, a couple of them were writing something and one was drawing. Two others were lost in their cell phones, earphones plugged firmly.
‘Excuse me,’ the man asked a passing doctor. ‘I’m looking for Rehmat aapa.’
Without slowing down, the doctor pointed to the far end of the hall. The man walked over to a salwar-kameez-clad woman in her late twenties, who was sitting next to a boy no more than thirteen.
She looked up and smiled as he approached.
‘Ashok bhai’s friend?’ she asked, using Mankame’s first name.
The man nodded.
‘Go finish reading,’ Rehmat told the boy. ‘And then you can go home.’
The boy stood up somewhat shakily and walked off.
Rehmat Khan ran a small rehabilitation centre for drug addicts in Kausa, with the help of some doctors who specialized in the field and worked with her on a pro-bono basis.
The sprawling town of Mumbra was filled with angry families battling decades of discrimination and the resentment stemming from it, and the hatred easily percolated down to their sons and daughters. While the daughters, thanks to the still-conservative nature of most families in the area, were relatively safer, the sons quickly fell prey to street smack, which was sold on corners by myriad peddlers.
Rehmat had made it her life’s mission to try and rescue as many children from this menace as she could by catching them at the beginning of their addiction and confining them to the rented hall till the drugs left their system completely. She worked in collaboration with some local policemen, who held awareness campaigns at the hall to tell the kids what drug ad
diction could do to them in the long run. A few of the rehabilitated youngsters had joined her group as volunteers.
However, despite the earnest efforts of Rehmat and her friends, she knew she was only saving a handful of the scores of addicts that were formed on the streets every week.
Mankame first met her when he was a DCP of the zone, way before he was posted with the Mumbai Crime Branch and worked with Mirza on the Lakshadweep operation. He quickly realized that Rehmat, due to the sheer number of locals that she interacted with every day, was very well clued into the town of Mumbra. And this made her a valuable asset.
Like any good cop, Mankame set about cultivating her. He enlisted the aid of some builders in the Thane district that he had helped in the past and set up a system so that Rehmat never found herself lacking funds for her initiative. The builders got tax relief for their ‘corporate social responsibility’, and Rehmat’s programme flourished, with the centre expanding from her two-room house to a small hall.
As a result, Rehmat became Mankame’s go-to person every time he needed to feel Mumbra’s pulse. And she had delivered results more than once.
Rehmat’s name had come up when, during the briefing, Mirza mentioned that the IP address provided by Samuel had been last traced to Mumbra.
‘It was active six days ago and has been silent since then,’ Mirza had said, reading out a text message that had just arrived from the IB.
‘That’s the proverbial needle in a haystack,’ Vikrant had said. ‘We’re going to need local support.’
‘I might be able to help,’ Mankame had replied, with a slight smile on his face.
Because Mankame had worked in the zone, he didn’t want to go to Mumbra himself. He would easily be recognized and within the hour, the entire town would know that the ATS had its eye on Mumbra.
Finally, Vikrant had come up with an idea. He called up Kamran Sheikh, an informer from Cheetah Camp, Trombay, who had provided him the first lead in the Lakshadweep operation. Kamran would easily blend in with the locals – he spoke their language and could think on his feet.
The Endgame Page 4