‘His name is Sohail Ansari, and he is the prime suspect in the Bandra attacks,’ Mirza said simply.
Shetty stared at Mirza’s face without blinking for several seconds. His breath caught in his throat. His chest started heaving and he almost fell off the chair.
‘Get a doctor, someone!’ Goyal yelled, running to the door.
Mirza caught hold of Shetty and laid him out on the floor. ‘Breathe,’ he said. ‘Breathe.’
Shetty’s handcuffs were removed, and the top button of his shirt was unfastened. Mirza kept telling him to breathe till his chest stopped heaving.
‘It was just a panic attack,’ Mirza said.
Shetty struggled to come to a sitting position and Mirza helped him up. Goyal came in with a bottle of water. Shetty drank the water in big gulps, a wild look on his face.
‘I swear…’ Shetty began.
‘Keep breathing!’
‘Yes, yes,’ Shetty said between deep breaths. ‘I swear, saheb, I don’t know anything about any terror attack. I deal drugs, for God’s sake. I sell cocaine and heroin. I really don’t know anything else!’
‘Okay,’ Mirza said. ‘So tell us what you do know.’
24
‘This fucker is good,’ Mankame grudgingly said to himself, peering at the CCTV feed.
Senior Inspector Manoj Borade of the Mumbra police station had, on Mankame’s instructions, obtained CCTV footage from the cameras around the building where Ayyub had been staying, from where he had kidnapped Rehmat. Then he got the footage from cameras covering all the routes leading from the building to the exit points of Mumbra.
It was completely a hunch, but Mankame believed that Ayyub would not risk staying inside Mumbra with a hostage as well known as Rehmat. He would prefer to get out fast. Mankame firmly believed that the video of her execution had been shot outside Mumbra. And to know where, he had to find out which route they had taken.
Scanning through hours and hours of footage, some of it blurred, some jerky in its movement, Mankame had identified the car which Ayyub’s neighbour had driven them in as they exited the building, both wearing burqas. Ayyub wasn’t really tall, an advantage that worked to conceal his gender as he walked past the police surveillance team, disguised as a woman.
The neighbour, Ayyub and Rehmat had got into the car and from there Mankame tracked them till the weekly market in Mumbra, where they got out. Ayyub leaned into the driver’s window and said something, holding Rehmat’s hand all the time, after which the car turned around and drove back to
the building.
Ayyub and Rehmat, meanwhile, slipped into the sea of burqa-clad women thronging the market. From there, it was virtually impossible to identify them.
Mankame leaned back and pulled out his pack of cigarettes from his pocket. As he absently looked for his lighter, he tried to put himself in Ayyub’s position and figure out his next move.
The swinging doors to the room creaked and Mankame turned around to see Borade walk in.
‘This is the other set you asked for, sir,’ he said.
Mankame took the pen drives from him and nodded.
‘Good work. How’s the mood out there?’
‘Honestly? I’m worried. I’m used to seeing these people react with anger and outrage to everything. Seeing everything so calm makes me uneasy.’
‘All the more reason why we should move fast. How are the interviews coming along?’
Mankame had tasked a team with speaking to every resident of the building that Ayyub had stayed in to glean every single bit of information about him. Anything, big or small, had to be put down in writing.
‘That’s the other thing I wanted to tell you. On at least three occasions, a man came to visit the suspect at his house. We’ve put together a sketch and we’re running it through
our databases.’
‘Send me a copy. I’ll send it to our friends in central agencies,’ Mankame said, finally finding his lighter.
‘I have a printout here, sir,’ Borade said, handing it to him.
Mankame took it in his hand and glanced at it. His other hand, which was raising his lighter to his cigarette, stopped in mid-air.
‘Safdar?’ he said, puzzled.
‘Sir?’ Borade asked.
‘I’m pretty sure that’s Safdar Ghazi. He’s a mover. Specializes in smuggling contraband. Drugs, weapons, anything. He’s got this huge network and knows all the right roads to slip contraband under the radar. We’ve had a few brushes with him in the past.’
‘Is it, sir?’ Borade asked.
‘He’s a freelancer, works for anyone as long as the price is right. We suspect that he moved stuff for some pretty bad people in the past, but there’s never been any proof.’
‘Till now?’
‘Let’s be sure,’ Mankame said, turning around and plugging one of the three pen drives into the computer.
‘Do the witnesses remember dates when this man was seen at the building?’
‘No, sir,’ Borade said, sitting down on another chair and sliding it close to Mankame. ‘But it was within the last month and it was a Friday. Anyone here would remember a Friday.’
Mankame nodded. He checked the calendar on his computer and jotted down the dates of all the Fridays in the last two months, leaving a wide margin for error. Then he started viewing the footage of only those dates. Borade followed his lead, grabbed another pen drive and plugged it into another computer.
It was slow work and both the cops had to take multiple breaks to rest their eyes from the strain. During one such break, Mankame called up several of his informants and asked them to find out what number Safdar was currently using. Thanks to the easy availability of SIM cards, criminal elements could simply discard a SIM card after every job and some of them did it routinely, as it helped them evade capture.
‘This looks like him,’ Borade said from his terminal.
Mankame went over and peered over his shoulder. The man was seen entering where Ayyub, posing as Sohail Ansari, had been staying. The camera mounted over the entrance was of decent quality and the distance was not too great. As a result, Mankame and Borade could make out his facial features with only a little difficulty. In keeping with the descriptions provided by the witnesses, the man had a trimmed and shaped beard and very close-cropped hair.
Borade printed out a still of the footage and the two cops combed through the rest of it till they found him on footage from two more Fridays. Based on this, they established that Safdar Ghazi – if that was him – had visited Ayyub on three Fridays in a row over the last one month. Each time, he had had a small duffel bag with him when he arrived, and it was no longer with him when he left.
By this time, Mankame’s informants had started delivering results. Two hours after he had sought the information, he had already heard back from five informants. Two of them had given the same number, while the three others had given a different number each. Mankame called up one of his subordinates at the ATS HQ.
‘Need to know which of these numbers is active,’ he said, dictating them. ‘And their current locations. Also get their records and location maps for the last two months.’
The subordinate responded with a crisp ‘Yessir’. He was one of the ATS’s in-house experts when it came to cell-phone numbers.
Borade had already arranged all the stills of the footage in chronological order and was stapling them together by the time Mankame was finished.
‘See what you can find out from your own people about this guy,’ Mankame told Borade, taking the stills. ‘He’s obviously been in and out of this town a lot over the last month.’
Borade nodded and left the room to start the task. Mankame had only one more call to make.
The number was on his speed dial and he waited impatiently for the call to connect.
‘Little busy here, lad,’ Mirza said, picking up at the first ring.
There was a silence.
‘How soon can you get to the ATS Juhu unit?’ Mirza asked.
‘I’m leaving right away, sir,’ Mankame said.
Quickly, he walked to his vehicle and was getting in when his phone rang again.
He looked at his phone and saw that it was a call through an Internet-based app. Making calls through the app was popular for two reasons. One, they were cheaper than normal calls. Secondly, they were difficult to intercept and impossible to tap. The number was unknown to him.
‘Yes?’ he said impatiently, answering the call.
‘Safdar Ghazi bol raha hoon,’ the voice on the other end said. ‘I hear you’re looking for me, Mankame saheb.’
25
‘How did you know it was him?’ Vikrant asked.
‘His nose,’ Mazhar said. ‘Our father broke it when he was a kid. It never healed properly because the old bastard was too high on street smack to take him to a doctor. And I had no money. The bridge of his nose is slightly crooked. You’ll only recognize it if you’re looking for it.’
Mazhar had driven down from Pune and Vikrant met him in Thane, which was far enough from the hotel in Bandra and yet not too far. They were sitting in a café at Upvan, a popular area where people flocked in huge numbers every evening.
Mazhar’s new-found life as Irshad Sayyed had not exactly been easy. It had taken him almost a year to get used to the feeling of normalcy. After he went undercover, suspecting everyone and getting ready to fight for his life had become second nature.
The sheer monotony had been excruciating in the beginning. Every morning, he would wake up and call his manager, who handled the daily affairs of the gym that the IB had set up for him. Then he would go to the gym and work out for two hours, even as the customers looked on in awe at his rippling physique and his apparent inability to feel tired. After a hot shower, he would go over the accounts, take care of any problems and go back home.
Then came the harder part. He had no family and was wary of making friends. There was no reason to go to the gym again in the evening, simply because it wasn’t that big an enterprise and his manager was very efficient.
The only thing that gave him solace was reading. It was a habit he had picked up after beginning his new life. He had never had much use for books earlier. When they were growing up, his brother Ayyub had been the studious one.
After becoming Irshad Sayyed, one evening Mazhar found himself in a quaint little café tucked away in a corner of the locality where he was staying. The owner, a homely old lady, would always be bustling about while her daughter managed the customers. There were only a couple of people in the café at any given point of time and Mazhar, who liked quiet and isolated places, had entered with a vague idea of having a cup of coffee and enjoying the peace.
Along with his order, the owner placed a book on the table with a smile before walking away. Curiously, he picked it up. It was a thriller by a writer he had never heard of. But he found the premise mildly interesting and started reading.
It was only after he finished it that he realized he had been sitting in the café for three hours. Embarrassed, he went over to apologize to the lady, who told him he was welcome any day.
Since that evening, he would devour book after book. It became his favourite part of the day. He also started noticing that the old lady’s daughter was showering quite a bit of attention on him. The girl was about his age, unmarried, very pretty and just as warm and caring as her mother. The problem was that he had never been romantically involved with anyone in his life and had no idea how to deal with it.
That morning, Mazhar was occupied with these thoughts as he let himself into his house. Still thinking about the old lady and her daughter, he reached for the remote and turned on the TV. What he saw on the news left him too stunned to react.
‘You recognized his nose after all these years?’ Vikrant asked, a little incredulous.
Mazhar smiled faintly.
‘It was something we’d always talk about. We would say that even if we got separated from each other, which was a very real possibility at the time, we’d still have these signs to recognize each other years later. Him by his nose and me by this scar on my neck,’ he said, turning his head slightly to reveal a short, jagged scar running down his neck.
‘Your father again?’ Vikrant asked.
Mazhar nodded. Vikrant sighed.
‘Funny thing.’ Mazhar chuckled. ‘Sometimes I still wonder what became of him, although I really couldn’t care less.’
‘You want to find out?’ Vikrant asked.
Mazhar shook his head.
‘We have more important things to talk about right now,’ he said.
‘Look, I’m sorry. You had a right to know and we should have told you the minute we learned about it.’
‘How long have you known?’
‘Not too long. The day Naidu sir died. You heard about that, I suppose?’
Mazhar nodded.
‘Saw it on the news. Even debated whether I should reach out to Vaishali. But you’d told me that I should have no contact with anyone except you, and that too in an emergency. Still, it felt bad to not offer my condolences.’
‘I’m sure she understands. She was right in the middle of the Lakshadweep operation and you played a huge part in saving her life.’
Mazhar brushed the praise aside.
‘How did you know it was him?’ he asked.
‘We traced him to Mumbra with that girl’s help. The same one he killed on TV. Put him under surveillance. Recorded his voice. We still had that video he left back when he went missing, the one in which he said that he was renouncing the world for jihad. I had my people run some tests, compare the samples.’
‘And it took me only a few seconds.’ Mazhar smiled wryly.
Vikrant was about to smile back when he stopped.
‘How sure are you that Ayyub will recognize your scar?’ he asked curiously.
‘He once drew a perfect sketch of it, the shape exactly like it is, without even looking at it. You’re forgetting he was always the brainy one. Why?’
Vikrant reached for his cell phone and speed-dialled a number.
‘Where have you been, boy?’ Mirza asked from the other end.
‘Yes, hello,’ Vikrant replied. ‘I have Irshad Sayyed with me. There’s something you might want to hear.’
There was a pause from the other end while Mazhar looked on curiously.
‘There have been some other developments too,’ Mirza said finally. ‘Goyal and Jaiswal are here. We have a safe house in Mahim. I’m moving the operation there.’
26
‘Where’s Mankame?’ Vikrant asked, looking around as he entered the safe house, Mazhar right behind him.
‘He was on his way here, but then called saying he had a fresh lead. He should be in touch soon. His lead is directly connected to what Goyal and Jaiswal have to say,’ Mirza replied.
The ‘safe house’ was quite unassuming, especially in light of the hype associated with the word, thanks to Hollywood. The popular perception of the term is of an isolated structure in some remote location, with no approach roads, plenty of trees around and cameras all over the place.
In a city like Mumbai, however, that was a luxury one could only dream of. This safe house was a bungalow in a small lane in one of the quieter localities of Mahim. The locality was dotted with other similar bungalows, which were no more than a single storey, with walls high enough to afford privacy. Most of them were unoccupied, having been bought only as investments.
This particular bungalow, which had been bought by RAW years ago through a front, was kept clean and maintained by a caretaker who came once a day and then left after placing the key in a flowerpot. Not exactly state-of-the-art security but there was nothing to
steal anyway. No sensitive data was stored inside. The purpose of the safe house was only to provide shelter for anyone needing it.
Mirza arrived first with Jaiswal and Goyal. Also in attendance were Inspector Sushil Kadam, Unit XII, Crime Branch, and Daniel Fernando. He’d had to lie to Vaishali again, but he didn’t think she was ready for the truth yet.
Vikrant and Mazhar arrived shortly after. Mazhar first went over to Jaiswal and Goyal to exchange hugs with them. They were meeting for the first time after the Lakshadweep operation and both cops held him in very high regard for the work he had done undercover.
Mazhar turned towards Mirza, who looked decidedly uncomfortable. The older spy cleared his throat.
‘Look, lad…’ he began.
‘There’s no need to say anything, sir,’ Mazhar said, smiling faintly. ‘Vikrant sir told me on the way here that it was his decision to keep me in the dark. I still don’t fully understand that choice, but his choices have pretty much kept me alive all these years. So I can live with it.’
Mirza turned to look at Vikrant, who only stared back at him without saying anything. Mirza shook his head and went over to a large round table surrounded by chairs in the middle of the room. He sat down without saying anything.
Goyal and Jaiswal came out with bottles of water, which they set on the table before sitting on chairs themselves. Mazhar and Vikrant followed suit, sitting next to each other.
‘Which of you two wants to start?’ Mirza asked and Jaiswal half-raised his hand. Mirza nodded to him.
‘So, around a year ago, we were posted as DCPs with the Mumbai Crime Branch. With the organized crime racket not being as active as it was in the ’80s and ’90s, we decided to turn our attention to drug peddling in the city, especially in the western suburbs, with all their party hotspots. The advantage we had was that having worked with the NIA earlier, we could get better cooperation from police commissionerates and agencies based out of Mumbai as well. We decided to put that advantage to good use.’
The Endgame Page 12