‘And rightly so,’ the bearded man smiled. ‘He is Allah’s gift to us. We are his followers.’
‘You’ll have to forgive me, brother,’ Vikrant said respectfully. ‘Would you mind telling me who he is?’
‘Maulana Mahmood Azhar. He is leaving now to address his followers,’ the man said, as he began to walk away. ‘I’d better get going. Ma assalaam.’
‘Khudahafiz,’ Vikrant said.
The man looked at him with a strange expression in his eyes.
Vikrant raised his voice several notches: ‘Khudahafiz, Maulana Mahmood Azhar. Khudahafiz.’ He muttered under his breath, ‘And I mean every word of it.’
Vikrant rushed back to Kang’s room and nodded at Brijesh and Kang. Their target had been identified, now it was time to move in on him. Kang and Brijesh began to arm themselves. Brijesh pushed his gun into a holster below his armpit, and put on a waistcoat. Kang, meanwhile, gently caressed his little box of powdered cyanide with the tip of his index finger as he began moving towards the door.
They headed for the staircase, on their way to Azhar’s floor. Their heels clicked as they walked down the staircase; softly enough to avoid raising an alarm, but loud enough not to sound like they were sneaking anywhere.
‘Remember, Kang,’ Brijesh instructed him. ‘Once you’re in, you’re on your own. We can only cover the floors above and below.’
‘There’s one guard right outside his door,’ Vikrant said. ‘Brijesh and I will stage a scene and get him out of the way. That’s when you sneak in.’
They reached Azhar’s floor, where a bearded guard stood right outside his room door. Big, burly and brutish looking. The perfect security guard to protect someone as sought after as Azhar, Kang reasoned, before quickly moving aside into a blind spot. He waited for a while to see if he had inadvertently attracted the guard’s attention. But the large man seemed to have a limited sense of awareness about his surroundings and Kang gave the other two the go-ahead.
Vikrant and Brijesh burst out of the stairwell and walked down the corridor towards the guard, talking in loud and hostile voices.
‘You FUCKED me over, you bastard!’ Brijesh yelled at Vikrant. ‘I trusted you with all my money, hoping this business would flourish!’
‘And what do you think I’ve done? Absconded with the money?’ Vikrant argued back. ‘I’m RIGHT HERE, ASSHOLE! I lost money too!’
They caught the guard’s eye. He looked at them warily.
‘I don’t give a FUCK! I want all my money BACK!’ Brijesh ranted, grabbing Vikrant’s collar aggressively.
‘DON’T TOUCH ME,’ Vikrant yelled as he threw a wild, inaccurate punch at Brijesh’s chest. Brijesh fell backwards. The guard had seen enough. He rushed over to them, trying to break up the fight as Kang sneaked in from behind and walked towards the room. By now, Brijesh had recovered.
‘Is there a problem here?’ the guard said, as he stood between them. ‘If there is, sort it out elsewhere.’
‘You bet your ass there’s a problem, mister. Imagine putting a million dollars into a dud business. Have you seen a million dollars? Do you even know how many zeroes there are in a million?’ Brijesh yelled at the guard, who grew red in the face.
‘This is the last chance I’m giving you to walk away,’ he said sternly.
‘Last chance or you’ll do what?’ asked Brijesh. The guard lurched forward with the intention of grabbing the man who had just spoken to him so insolently – when everything suddenly went dark. Moments before blacking out, the guard had seen a blur from the corner of his eye. The blur bore some resemblance to Vikrant’s foot as it flew through the air and connected squarely with the guard’s large head. He crumpled to the floor like a gunny bag of potatoes and lay there motionless. Lights out!
Vikrant and Brijesh dragged the man’s body to one side of the corridor. Vikrant positioned it in a space where he would attract the least attention, while Brijesh made sure the coast was clear. They had bought Kang enough time to have begun his mission in Azhar’s room. The rest was upto him. Vikrant began to pull the guard towards the staircase, and watching him struggle to move the heavy gorilla of a man – he probably weighed 100 kg, they conjectured – Brijesh joined in to help. They pulled him down the stairs and, in the process, eventually lost sight of the door. Reaching for the edge of the floor carpet, Vikrant ripped it off and rolled the guard over it, wrapping him up in its folds in the process.
Meanwhile, Kang had made his way into Azhar’s bathroom and found three units of miswak with minimal effort. It seemed almost too easy, but then he reasoned that miswak wasn’t exactly something that a person would hide. He spread a generous amount of cyanide over all the pieces. Then he returned them to their original position, looked around to see if he had left any clues and made his exit, closing the bathroom door carefully behind him.
As he stepped out of the bathroom, he took a moment to address a nagging feeling at the back of his head like he’d forgotten something. He had covered each stick with cyanide, and made sure to wipe off his fingerprints, and he hadn’t messed with the bathroom curtains or doormat. There wasn’t anything else he was meant to do, was there?
And that’s when Kang felt a powerful thud at the base of his skull. Had it been another man, who wasn’t blessed with a skull as thick as Kang’s, he would have passed out at once. But Kang countered the blistering numbness and, only slightly disoriented, turned and threw an expansive righthook – and hit nothing but air. He could barely see his opponent, his vision still blurry and his ears ringing from the blow to the back of his head.
He braced himself too late against a punch to the chest. The unidentified assailant then unleashed a stinging kick to Kang’s solar plexus. That was enough to make him collapse to the floor, much as the guard had done. The only difference was that Kang was still conscious. He felt a sudden flurry of kicks to his ribs and his head. Even in his groggy state, he realized that there was obviously more than one hostile in the room. A second later, Iqbal Kang had been rendered unconscious by a kick between the eyes.
A man watched the action blow-by-blow on a little LED screen. I’ve got you now, you bastard. It was just a matter of time before he had Kang spitting out a confession in a bid to save his own life. He had seen many men blurt out secrets, hoping to be granted a new lease of life. And if they didn’t die while being tortured, he always extracted their secrets and then put the little squealers out of their misery. It was the only humane thing to do. This man would be no different.
Just then, the screen showed two other men running up the corridor and kicking the door open. Two men he had never seen before. He froze and stared silently at them, hoping to get a clear view of their faces. Something with which to identify these violent, good-for-nothing mother …
And then, they turned and looked right into the camera without knowing it. One of the men was shouting an order furiously into the phone. The other one ran towards the staircase. Finally, Arif Afridi had some faces to work with. He grinned as he turned his eyes away from the LED screen. He had not only thrown a spanner into the works of these Indian agents, he had gained the upper hand.
‘Yes, Brijesh! I can see the car,’ Laila yelled into her phone, as she got behind the wheel of her rented SUV. ‘I’m going to tail them. Just stay on the line and get a car of your own as soon as possible.’
She sped off, shifting gears and driving as fast as she could. The only thing going at a quicker speed than her car was the pounding of her heart. The game had just changed.
20
‘Your bastard father,’ Kang spat out – along with a mixture of blood, saliva and fragments of tooth. Clearly, being pummelled unconscious had no effect on his defiant spirit. One of the two men restraining him in the back of a speeding, unmarked black SUV grabbed him by the throat, while a third man punched him in the abdomen and asked the same question for the fourth time.
‘Who sent you?’ This time, Kang said nothing, winded after the last punch.
The m
ission to eliminate Maulana Mahmood Azhar was a colossal failure. It had been a failure because they failed to take out their target, and because a team member had been captured and was going to be interrogated, probably beaten, possibly broken – but definitely killed.
Kang had blacked out on the floor of the hotel room and had no idea who these men were. What he knew for sure was that this man in the group, the interrogator, was definitely in charge, while the goons restraining him were the muscle. And the man behind the wheel was the driver.
Without warning, the interrogator slapped Kang right across the face, leaving his cheek stinging.
‘This is the last time I am going to ask you this question,’ he said and added, ‘then, I will start cutting off parts of your body.’ The man grinned as he brandished a rusty cleaver. The cleaver came to settle on Kang’s cheek with the sharp edge resting on his ear.
‘So … Who sent you?’
‘Maybe I was wrong … It was your real father,’ said Kang matter-of-factly, unconcerned about the sharp blade against his face.
‘You asked for it, you son-of-a-bitch,’ said the interrogator, as he pulled Kang’s left ear outwards and readied the cleaver to chop it off.
Kang clenched his fists, gritted his teeth and prepared for the pain that was about to surge through him.
‘Stop fucking around, and keep him intact,’ the driver of the SUV turned back and said derisively. ‘If you turn him over to the boss without an ear, you’d better be ready to chop your own off and hand it over.’
Clearly, it wasn’t the interrogator but the driver who was in charge. Kang allowed himself to breathe again. The spilling of his blood had been delayed for now. But for how long?
The tyres screeched as Laila hit the brakes, narrowly avoiding an oncoming vehicle as she hurtled the wrong way on a one-way lane in an effort to cut off the SUV in which Kang was being held captive.
‘What are you doing, Laila? Do you have a visual?’ Brijesh’s voice screamed out of the speaker on Laila’s cell phone.
‘No visual. But I haven’t lost him,’ she said, as she craned her neck to look down the narrow lane to ensure that there were no more oncoming vehicles.
She was accompanied by Rizwan Bashir, a local asset cultivated by Waris five years earlier. After a careful and rigorous screening process filled with multiple background checks and interrogations, Waris had decided that he was just the man to keep in reserve for a situation like this. A banker by day, Rizwan had been told that he would be contacted should the need arise – and his knowledge of the streets of Jeddah was just what was needed for this mission. In fact, it was he who suggested they take this ‘short cut’ to intercept the SUV.
Laila’s reading of the onboard GPS system led her to believe that he had a point – if she went up this one-way street, she would be able to intercept the other vehicle before it had the opportunity to turn off into any lane. Their plans hinged heavily on the hope that the other SUV would not take a U-turn and give them the slip.
Brijesh knew she was gambling and that this was a high-stake gamble. She had to be allowed to work calmly and in peace, so he signed off with a simple ‘Keep me posted and stay safe’.
Laila burst out of the lane and onto the main road, having safely managed to drive the wrong way up a one-way street. She looked left and then whipped her head around to the right, but there was no sign of the black SUV. Unless it was travelling at a speed in excess of 180 km per hour, she calculated, there was no way it could have passed her.
Rizwan confirmed this by saying, ‘There’s no possibility of them having gone ahead of us. Turn back.’
This meant one of two things: either the car had gone off the road or a deft U-turn had taken the SUV beyond their reach.
Laila drove out onto the main road to retrace the black vehicle’s movements. Her eyes scanned the road, but to no avail. And that was when her phone began to ring again. She answered it immediately and regretted her decision milliseconds later. ‘Did you find him, Laila?’ came Brijesh’s concerned voice. Her silence spoke volumes. ‘What is the status? Rizwan?’ There was no response.
‘Oh shit!’ screamed Laila, as she finally spotted the black SUV.
‘What happened? Did you find them?’
The vehicle was parked on the side of the road.
Laila reached into the glove compartment for a pistol as she pulled over. Her field experience was very limited, but she had no choice. ‘Cover me,’ said Rizwan, as he jumped out of the vehicle with a sidearm of his own, and headed for the parked car.
Cautiously, he crossed the fairly busy street and walked up to the SUV, his gun raised and ready to fire. Laila looked on, her gun primed and ready to take out anyone who jumped out of the black car. Looking around the side to see if he could sneak a peek into the car via the wing mirror, Rizwan noticed that the front door was slightly open.
‘What is the status, Laila?’ Brijesh’s voice enquired again.
‘They’ve parked at the side of the road and Rizwan has gone to investigate. I’m covering h-’
A blinding flash of white light and a loud explosion made Laila’s blood run cold. Their failure had just turned into a massive clusterfuck.
‘It was a trap!’ She screamed in panic, struggling to regain her composure.
It was a low-intensity explosion that caused superficial damage to a passing vehicle, but was enough to gut the SUV from within. Rizwan must have triggered it by opening the door. She sprinted across the street without a care for the speeding traffic, hurdled over the divider on the road and ran towards the SUV. Then the possibility of a second bomb made her stop in her tracks and walk around to take a look from a safe distance. The two-bomb strategy was a common one among terrorists. The first is always a low-intensity one to cause panic and draw in the crowds. The second is the lethal high-intensity explosion.
She saw Rizwan’s charred torso, motionless behind the smouldering black SUV. The rest of his body lay in a crumpled, bloodied heap around five metres away.
Not only had they given her the slip, but that bomb had probably been meant for her, she thought.
‘We’ve lost Rizwan, Brijesh! And we’ve lost Kang,’ she said, as she returned to her SUV and picked up the phone. There was no doubt any more, the enemy had fired its opening shot and they had hit their target. Now, with the explosion, the local authorities were bound to be involved and with the team’s cover virtually blown, the last thing they needed was for the Jeddah police to be swarming all over. Their dislike for Indians was well documented. It was time to run.
This wasn’t the first setback Brijesh had suffered and it wouldn’t be the last.
‘Head back to the rendezvous spot, Laila,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll deal with this.’
Arif Afridi paced up and down the corridor on the eighth floor of a little apartment complex in the city. Finally, he had a bit of luck going his way. One of the Indians had been captured and two others had been dragged out of the shadows of anonymity. As he paced, a battery of intelligence officers across the world were running a series of facial recognition programmes to identify the two men.
This was just one more debt of gratitude Afridi owed his cyber connections. After all, they had been instrumental in giving him the information that his own informants and agency were clueless about. The quest for screen grabs from Stockholm and Birmingham had been fruitless. But his meeting with Major John Hu Wang had made all the difference.
Because of the CCTV grabs taken from the camera outside the toilets at Edgbaston, they had been able to get a look at Brijesh from behind. Wang’s computer army did the rest. They pulled up a list of visitors to Bradley’s residence from the CIA database, and used it to check Nadia’s client list from the bordell mamma’s computer. It was interesting that the last people to meet Nadia, before she became Bradley’s final visitor, happened to be Indians. Using the CCTV footage from the bordello, in conjunction with facial recognition software, they were able to correlate the faces with a group
that included a man whose build almost exactly matched that of the cleaner at Edgbaston.
Tracking the men’s movements across the world became simple, as their fake passports carried real pictures. All Afridi needed was confirmation that these were the same men, and he got it when Vikrant and Brijesh looked into the camera after Kang had been picked up. Life was good again, as far as Afridi was concerned.
Brijesh and Vikrant arrived moments after Laila had fled the scene of the explosion. Vikrant pulled their inconspicuous dark blue sedan over to the side of the road and Brijesh walked over to the smouldering black SUV. He shook his head as he bent to look at the remains of Rizwan and signalled to Vikrant, who was keeping a watchful eye on the surroundings.
‘A low-intensity IED, there’s no doubt about it,’ said Brijesh, as Vikrant jogged up to him. ‘And the aim was to limit the damage to the person who opened the car door.’
‘That doesn’t tell us where they took Kang,’ said an agitated Vikrant.
‘We’ll find him … We just need to find …’
‘Need to find what?’ asked Vikrant.
Pointing at a CCTV camera planted on the building wall across the street, Brijesh ran over to the sedan and reached for his cell phone. After a disastrous day, this was the first glimmer of luck.
‘Hello? Yes, Laila, do you have your laptop handy? I need you to do something for me,’ he said as he crossed the road quickly and looked at the little plaque below the CCTV camera – Vigilant Security Systems. ‘I want you to do your magic with this security agency’s camera feeds and find me footage of what happened before you got to the scene. And make it quick. Every second we waste, Kang gets further and further out of reach.’
‘Got what you need?’ asked Vikrant as Brijesh ran back across the road and into the car.
‘Not yet, but we need to be ready for when I do,’ he said, as they got back into their vehicle.
They sat in silence, contemplating their next move and giving some thought to the very real possibility of having to continue the mission without their trusted companion. The ISI was undoubtedly onto them. But the Jeddah police might also have been given instructions to apprehend them. Leaving Jeddah was going to be no walk in the park, thought Brijesh. The phone rang just then and he snapped it up.
Mumbai Avengers Page 16