‘He’s going to want a lot of money for this, sir,’ Vikrant had warned Mirza.
‘Yes, boy,’ Mirza had snapped sarcastically. ‘The government is really going to argue with us over money on this one.’
Now, as he sat down, Kamran looked around the room, feeling sorry for those in it.
‘They’re so young,’ he said. He was unscrupulous for the most part, but he had two children and could not imagine either of them falling prey to drugs.
‘I know.’ Rehmat sighed. ‘I try to keep them occupied with any activity that appeals to them – reading, drawing, anything. But I’m always afraid I’m going to find them stoned out of their minds on some footpath a week later.’
She reached into her purse and handed him a list. Her voice lowered to a near whisper.
‘These are some brokers who have recently acquired new clients. They all moved in over the last three months into houses in the Kausa area.’
‘How did you even get this?’ Kamran asked.
Rehmat smiled.
‘You’d be amazed at how much we love our gossip. A single man staying alone is always talked about. Not just the brokers, even bored housewives in the neighbourhoods like to talk about them. Some of those housewives have kids, and some of those kids…’
Rehmat let the sentence hang and Kamran shook his head, smiling.
‘Lady, you’re a wonder.’
‘I’ve spoken to these brokers and told them you’re looking for a place for your brother, who’s coming here on work for a couple of months. I’ve also dropped Ashok bhai’s name, so they’ll be more than cooperative. They’re ready to show you around. The rest is up to you.’
Kamran thanked her and stood up to leave.
‘Bhaisahab,’ she said, and Kamran squatted again.
‘How serious is this thing you’re working on?’ she asked earnestly.
‘Truthfully, I don’t know all the details myself. But the people who sent me sounded pretty worried and they don’t get worried easily.’
‘I don’t want bloodshed in my town,’ Rehmat said, looking dead serious. ‘The people here have already been through a lot.’
Like any other locality populated by minority communities, Mumbra had gone through its fair share of suffering. Every time there was a terror attack, the police would go into overdrive, picking up men from all age groups from the area, questioning them for days. As was bound to happen, more than a few innocents always got caught in the crossfire.
Rehmat’s fear also stemmed from the fact that the current government had done little to hide its anti-minority stance. Political leaders from the ruling party were openly giving speeches about ‘cleansing the country of traitors’ and everyone knew exactly who they were referring to. Across the country, in workplaces, on social media, even on local trains, the tide was slowly turning more and more extreme.
‘I live in a similar area,’ Kamran told Rehmat, looking her in the eye. ‘And I have two kids that I love more than anything in the world. So, when I say I understand, I mean it.’
‘I’ll keep my eyes and ears open,’ Rehmat promised and Kamran left the hall, taking one last look at the kids lying around.
Quickly, he found a cigarette shop, bought a smoke and started calling the brokers’ numbers. Between two consecutive calls, he also shot off a text message to Vikrant, telling him that all was going well.
9
Police Inspector Sushil Kadam popped a mint into his mouth and leaned back in the driver’s seat of his car. His right hand rested lightly on the steering wheel while his left hand cradled his cell phone.
Across the street, two of his constables sat at a tea stall, sipping cutting chai, each watching one end of the road.
All three cops were in plain clothes and extremely alert. They had been waiting for the last two hours in Waliv village in Palghar. Their prey was about to show up any second, and the case was too big for anyone to screw up.
There was a tap on Kadam’s window. He looked up from his cell phone to see a uniformed traffic constable peeping in.
With a muttered expletive, he rolled down the window.
‘Does this look like a parking lot?’ the constable snapped.
He was about to go on when Kadam slid his ID card out of his pocket and showed it to him, taking care not to raise it too high. The constable’s face changed and his body stiffened in a precursor to a salute.
‘Don’t,’ Kadam hissed. The constable caught himself in the nick of time.
Cursing, Kadam turned the ignition, firing up the engine.
‘Sir … sir sorry, sir … I didn’t know…’ the terrified constable began.
‘Shut up,’ Kadam said under his breath.
The constable, however, scared of a negative report going to his superior, leaned forward and continued pleading. At the same time, Kadam’s cell phone buzzed and he took the call.
‘He’s coming directly towards you, sir,’ one of his constables said urgently through his hands-free device.
‘Get away, you idiot,’ Kadam snapped at the traffic constable and leaned out of his window. Their target was walking towards his car and slowing down with each step.
As the man took in the scene in front of him, he stopped. He saw a uniformed constable bending respectfully in front of a man in plain clothes. Kadam could see his face change as he turned on his heel and started running.
Kadam slammed the car into gear and made a dangerously tight U-turn, speeding off after the man. The two constables also started running, trying to find an opening in the traffic so they could cross the street.
The man looked around and saw the car bearing down on him. Turning to his left, he dashed into a narrow lane. Kadam’s car came to a grinding halt. Quickly, Kadam ducked under the dashboard, brought out the sign proclaiming ‘POLICE’ and placed it behind the windshield. Then he got out, locked the car and started running just as the constables caught up with him.
Kadam was lucky. He had been in his office in Unit XII when he had got the call from DCP Akhil Jaiswal. After getting his orders, he exited his cabin and took the only two constables he saw with him. Everyone else had been out at the time.
Fortunately, one of the constables was a young man who had excelled in sports during his training, particularly running. This constable, Pramod Nikam, sped up without being ordered to, getting closer to their prey with every stride.
It was then that the man made a huge mistake. He turned around and tried to attack Nikam with a dagger that he whipped out from under his shirt.
Kadam, who saw this from afar, smiled and stopped running. Apart from being a fast runner, Nikam was also extremely short-tempered. Kadam found a stone platform and sat down to catch his breath, knowing what would follow.
With one furious blow, Nikam knocked the dagger out of the man’s hand just as the other constable caught up with them. Together, the two cops rained blows on the man till he curled up in a ball on the road.
Then Kadam calmly walked over, caught the man by the scruff of his neck and dragged him to his car. A small crowd had gathered around the vehicle by this time, and one of them, a local youth, saw Kadam and the procession he was leading.
‘Hey!’ the youth called out. ‘What is this? Why are you treating the poor man like…’
His voice trailed off as Kadam lifted one side of his shirt, revealing the 9mm pistol tucked in his belt. Kadam crammed his prize into the back seat, and the two constables got in on either side.
The journey was relatively uneventful. Nikam made the man empty his pockets and found a PAN card in the name of Ramesh Pawshe. He passed the card over to Kadam, who nodded with satisfaction. It was the same name that Jaiswal had given him on the phone.
No one said anything till they reached the Unit XII office in Dahisar. Pawshe kept waiting for the questions to start. Instead, he was calmly marched into the unit and to the lock-up, where two men w
ere sitting on chairs. DCP Mankame was smoking a cigarette while DCP Jaiswal was watching something on his cell phone. Both of them smiled when they saw Pawshe.
‘Good work, as always, Kadam,’ Jaiswal said with a smile. Kadam acknowledged the compliment with a stiff salute and nod.
Pawshe was made to sit on the floor, barely a metre away from the two senior cops.
‘Ramesh Pawshe?’ Mankame asked.
Pawshe nodded.
‘What do you do?’
‘I sell construction equipment in Palghar, saheb.’
This time, Mankame nodded.
‘You sold thirty gelatin sticks to someone recently,’ Jaiswal said from his chair.
Pawshe shook a little but he managed to keep a straight face.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.’
His response earned him a resounding slap. Mankame leaned forward, bringing his face close to Pawshe’s.
‘Dekh bey, saale.’ Mankame breathed in his face. ‘Those gelatin sticks were used to blow up a government vehicle. People have died. You know what this means?’
Pawshe said nothing.
‘It means,’ Jaiswal said, ‘that this is now a terror case. Terror. You’re a suspect in a terror case.’
Pawshe’s hands started trembling.
‘Saheb, I’m telling you the truth, saheb. I don’t know anything about any terrorist attack. I had nothing to do with those soldiers’ deaths.’
‘Who said anything about soldiers?’ Mankame asked, a slight smile on his face. Pawshe looked like he had been slapped again.
Jaiswal stood up and went over to a table, where he picked up a sheaf of photographs and walked back. One by one, he started throwing the photographs on the ground in front of Pawshe.
‘Those are CCTV grabs. You know what CCTV means? Cameras. They’re all over the city. And some of them captured you selling the gelatin sticks to this man in the pictures.’
Pawshe’s arrest was the result of hours and hours of effort put in by a team of ATS officers, who had scanned footage from nearly hundred cameras, from Grishma society in Bandra to the office of Shakeel Mansoori in Kherwadi, Bandra East, for days before the attack. One of the four attackers, Aslam Sheikh, was finally seen leaving Grishma society on the first night that they came to stay in the compound while working on the boundary wall. Aslam went all the way to Jogeshwari by autorickshaw, where he met Pawshe and took a package from him.
Then, instead of hailing another autorickshaw, he just crossed the street and got into a black SUV, which was waiting for him. The SUV had semi-tinted windows and raced from Jogeshwari to Grishma society, where Aslam quickly got out, handed the package over the wall to his fellow terrorists and then coolly walked to the gate while the SUV sped away smoothly.
‘That has to be their handler in the SUV,’ Vikrant had said while viewing the footage.
The ATS team had traced Pawshe from Jogeshwari to Dahisar, where he entered a modest housing society. A second ATS team had tracked the SUV all the way to Thane before it got lost, because the city didn’t have as many CCTV cameras as Mumbai. Local ATS officers were still trying to pick it up on any cameras they could find after the Mulund toll plaza.
Meanwhile, the IB team was currently matching the movements of the SUV to the movements of the IP address that Joseph Samuel had given Mirza.
After watching the footage, Vikrant had called up Jaiswal, who was the Crime Branch DCP in charge of the western and northern suburbs, and passed on Pawshe’s last location in Dahisar to him. Jaiswal, in turn, had put Kadam on the job and Kadam had been waiting outside Pawshe’s building when Pawshe left with his wife in the morning. Kadam, with his two constables, had followed Pawshe to Waliv, where his wife’s parents lived, a fact Kadam had already found out through local informants.
And so they had waited outside that locality, waiting for him till he came out alone.
‘Listen to me, you bastard,’ Mankame thundered. ‘We have enough to link you directly to this man in the picture, who was one of the terrorists we killed in Bandra last week. With this, we can brand you a terrorist and splash your face across every newspaper in the country. You know what happens after that?’
‘Let me tell you,’ Jaiswal said, leaning back in his chair, crossing one leg over another. ‘People will shun you. Politicians will crucify you in their speeches. Bloodthirsty mobs will gather outside your house and burn it down to the ground…’
Pawshe was sobbing like a child. Mankame smiled.
‘You’ll take his confession?’ he asked Jaiswal, who nodded.
‘Get him cleaned up and bring him to Kadam’s office,’ he told a constable and left the room.
He stepped out of the unit, fishing out his pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and saw Kadam standing near the entrance.
‘Still leading from the front, I see,’ Mankame said, patting him lightly on the shoulder. Mankame had been Kadam’s reporting head before he got transferred to the ATS and was replaced by Jaiswal.
Kadam nodded, but seemed lost in thought.
‘Everything okay with you?’ Mankame asked as he lit his cigarette.
For a second, Kadam wondered whether he should tell Mankame about Jaiswal and the Darshan Seth episode. He knew that the Crime Branch was known to cut corners when it came to dealing with organized crime, but what had happened with Seth that night didn’t seem to fit the bill. And if his superior officer was shielding a known drug dealer, it would permanently tarnish the Crime Branch’s reputation when it was revealed. Kadam knew that these things had a way of coming out sooner or later.
But Kadam also knew that Mankame trusted Jaiswal, having worked with him on the Lakshadweep operation.
‘Nothing, sir,’ he said to Mankame, who was staring at him. ‘Just the wife being difficult.’
10
Even those who knew Mirza well knew very little about his personal life. And Mirza preferred it that way.
Vikrant, after almost a decade of working closely with him and becoming the closest thing Mirza had to a son, had quickly learned that his mentor did not like to talk about his personal life. Despite all the history that the two shared, Vikrant had never been to Mirza’s house. He wasn’t even sure if the ‘house’ he knew – a flat somewhere in Andheri – was actually Mirza’s real house or just a cover, like everything else in his life.
Pradeep Singh, who had been Mirza’s former boss, once let it slip that Mirza had decided never to get married after a mission early on in his career had affected him very badly. Mirza never mentioned it himself, and Vikrant knew better than to ask.
Still, Vikrant couldn’t help wondering if Mirza would have turned out any different had he got married and had a family.
They were sitting in the back seat of an SUV on the outskirts of Mumbra, with Mankame in the driver’s seat. A second SUV was occupied by Senior Police Inspector Shirish Deshpande, who headed the Thane unit of the ATS, and three constables. All of them had handguns, and there was an MP5 sub-machine gun stashed under the front seat.
Mirza had been clear during the briefing before they left from their hotel in Bandra.
‘We’re not here,’ Mirza had said. ‘As in, the RAW was never here. Not even when Kumar was killed. So whatever happens, we let the ATS take the lead and hope they don’t screw up.’
Turning to Mankame, Mirza added, ‘Whatever happens, lad, don’t screw up.’
The two vehicles were parked across the road from each other. Around them, small-time traders hawked their wares along the length of the highway. There was a mosque visible from where Mankame had parked and the afternoon namaaz had just ended. A group was filing out of the mosque and heading towards their motorcycles. The elders headed to the nearest paan-bidi shop to get their fix. The youngsters, stealing glances at the elders, sped away quickly. They were going to their own regular paan-bidi shops, well away from the stern eyes of their fathe
rs and uncles.
Every man on the team was tense. This was an area filled with civilians, and their target was a very dangerous man.
It was during missions like these that Vikrant wondered, what if Mirza, or even he, had had kids?
Any of the teenagers filing out of the mosque could be shot down, their lives ended before they had even begun, if their mission went sideways. That, Vikrant realized, was a very real possibility. Almost every cop that Vikrant had interacted with expressed the same fear: that one day, his son or daughter might get killed for no fault of theirs.
Did Mirza deliberately not have a family? Vikrant would often wonder. Because he had no time for such fears to occupy his mind while he was busy chasing down threats to his country?
He glanced at Mankame, who had recently proposed to a long-time friend of his. They were going to get married in two months, and Vikrant wished him nothing but happiness. He knew that Mirza also felt the same way. But still, a shadow had crossed his mentor’s face when he had congratulated Mankame.
The tip-off had come from Rehmat when Mankame was interrogating Ramesh Pawshe at Unit XII. A single man in his late thirties, who had rented a house in Kausa two months ago, had been missing for the last one week but had suddenly come back.
Contrary to the typical profile of a terrorist, this man, who had called himself Sohail Ansari, did not keep to himself and shun all contact. He mixed freely with his neighbours, sang songs with the youngsters sitting on the staircase in the evening and was a regular at the local mosque. When asked about his absence, he had genially told his neighbours that his uncle had come down from Saudi and he had spent the week with this uncle in Mumbai.
Still, it was the only lead they had. Mankame had sped from Dahisar and joined Mirza and Vikrant on the highway, while simultaneously instructing Senior Inspector Deshpande to get to the spot with a team.
‘Eyes up,’ Mirza said softly, and they all looked at the entrance to the mosque.
The man matched Rehmat’s description – medium height, hefty build, a full beard and thick hair. He was dressed in a white kurta and blue jeans, and was taking off his prayer cap as he walked out, smiling and talking to another man. Both men walked to where an array of vehicles was parked and Sohail Ansari, as he was known, got onto a Bajaj Pulsar.
The Endgame Page 5