KALYUG

by R. SREERAM

  The flying time from Mumbai to New Delhi is a little over two hours, time that Nawaz Qureshi spent dutifully ignoring Leela Sharma and thinking about his parents. The morning’s action had helped him overcome the initial shock of his father’s death, but now, with two hours of nothing on his hands, it hit him hard and heavy. His mother’s death had created a vacuum that had sucked a good part of the world inside; his father’s departure seemed to empty what was left. He wanted to cry, but the tears would not come. His father did not like tears.

  It took the team from Ghaziabad a little over two hours to reach the safe-house near the New Delhi airport. The two men in the truck had had little to worry about with the American spy they’d picked up – they could focus on the evasive measures they’d been trained in while on the road. The precautions were unnecessary, the concerns unfounded; they handed Llong Cox over to the warden and were on their way even before the American had settled into his cell right next to Leela Sharma.

  16th September, 2012. Singapore.

  The protégé – a dapper Chinese lad who reminded the Asian chief of his younger days – seemed to glide into the room. As was his custom, the younger man stopped near the edge of his mentor’s desk and bowed reverentially. The older man gave a slight nod of his head in acknowledgment, as was his custom.

  ‘We think they are moving Leela to New Delhi,’ said the younger man, placing a sheet on the tabletop.

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘Given that we have had no indication about a group moving into Mumbai – and I am sure we would have heard from Gyandeep if otherwise – I was sure that their base of operations must be elsewhere. Either an obscure location where a stranger would stand out, or one of the other cities where they don’t have to worry about our penetration as much as Mumbai. And it would have to be an area with a significant military presence, since that would provide a better cover than any of the civilian intelligence territories.’

  The chief nodded, impressed at the logic but expecting nothing less.

  ‘In the chaos, it was easy for one of our agents to call the ATC at the Mumbai airport asking about unscheduled aircraft flying in and out. There was a chartered flight that took off just over a couple of hours ago, headed for New Delhi, and the ground crew confirmed that the passengers appeared to be military. It is not certain, but there might have been a lady with them.’

  ‘Flight time from Mumbai to New Delhi?’

  ‘This one landed exactly two hours later. We checked with New Delhi ATC. By the time we could arrange for a crew, the passengers had vanished.’

  ‘So there is no way of confirming one way or another? This could be a wild goose chase?’ The chief’s voice was unusually harsh, but the younger man did not flinch. He had his answer ready.

  ‘We are putting together a crew to go in and look at the CCTV footage. It’s an important airport – some camera somewhere must have caught a shot of the passengers as they left.’

  The Asian chief of Powerhouse accepted that with grudging grace. ‘Get more men,’ he said, after a bit of thought. ‘If I am correct, there is an industrial park around the airport. Likely place for a safe-house if you want to take someone off the grid quickly. Check out the warehouses and offices. We might get lucky.’

  ‘As you command,’ said the younger man. The sarcasm was lost on his elder. He paused before he went to the next item on his agenda.

  ‘Gyandeep Sharma is still at the Infinity office. We were able to get a sighting from across the street.’ He passed over a grainy picture that showed the Indian standing near his windows. His posture reminded the chief of the way he himself preferred to stand near the windows . . . maybe it was a Powerhouse trait, he thought idly, humourlessly. But he was glad that the other man was alive and well. Gyandeep Sharma was far too important in their scheme of things.

  ‘We could take him if needed,’ the young man offered. ‘One way or another. A sniper. Or we could get a task-force assembled and grab him, if you want him safe.’

  ‘Do you have surveillance on him? Good ones? Ghosts?’

  ‘Some of the best, and round the clock. The men guarding him do not have a clue they themselves are being watched.’

  ‘Then let it be. Get a task force ready, but not in Mumbai – I don’t want to take the risk of their getting picked up in the raids that are happening all over the country. For now, leave Gyandeep in the hands of those who did this. They’ll keep him safe until they have what they need. That will give us the time to find out who they are.’

  16th September, 2012. New Delhi.

  ‘How did it go?’ Nelson Katara asked Jagannath the moment they were alone in the restroom. ‘Did he buy it?’

  ‘With Selvam, tough to be sure,’ Jagannath said, running a hand through his hair. ‘The bastard keeps questioning us at every step. I am not sure if he’s the right person for what we need. He’s too . . . volatile.’

  ‘But harmless,’ reminded Nelson, straightening his tie. ‘And we control his credibility. That’s where he becomes valuable. Where is he now?’

  ‘I took him to the Leela Palace. I thought of putting him in one of the talk shows tonight, but given the state of mind he’s in, it’s a risk. Much better to let him cool off tonight. Tomorrow, he starts his work.’

  ‘And what he knows, you will know?’

  ‘He’ll be surrounded by our people. Even if he suspects it, he’ll never figure out who’s reporting to us. I’m not worried about him creating a big problem, but he could still be a nuisance.’

  The unspoken request hung in the air between them.

  ‘Let him be, for now.’ Nelson said finally. ‘If and when he becomes a problem, we can take care of it. How about the others?’

  ‘Mrs Pandit reacted just as we expected her to. As soon as she was in Dubai, she got in touch with one of the minor sheikhs. We are verifying the route, but I’m pretty sure it was a conduit to Powerhouse. Once we have the entire thread in our hands, we can shut down that line.’

  ‘Keep the pressure on her until she loses her base here.’ Nelson splashed some water on his face. ‘Same for Patil as well. If we can keep the major parties quiet for a week, we should be able to handle them easily.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘By the way, where’s Raghav?’

  Jagannath’s hesitation was so faint Nelson almost missed it. ‘I’ve sent him to do one final search of Major-General Qureshi’s office. Just in case there’s something that we missed this morning.’ He held his breath as he waited to see how Nelson would react to his disobeying the direct order that INSAF agents were not supposed to be seen anywhere near the late major-general’s offices. With all the conspiracy theories making the rounds about the suicide – some of them planted by INSAF itself – it would be difficult to find a justification for an agent getting caught at the scene of the ‘crime’.

  ‘As soon as you hear from him,’ said his boss after a pause of his own, ‘let me know.’

  16

  17th September, 2012. New Delhi.

  I woke up feeling that I now knew what the dawn of 26th June, 1975, had felt like. I hadn’t even been born then, but the research from the previous night helped to put things in perspective. Sure, the world was a lot more different now than it had been almost four decades ago. Technology was a rampant intruder, whether it was personal or public, and it would be a lot harder for this government – or any government, for that matter – to censor its citizens’ reactions than it had been when Indira Gandhi had signed her tryst with dictatorship.

  I sat down in front of my laptop even before the first yawn of the morning had escaped my lips and clicked on the WiFi icon. A minute later, I was trying to connect using my 3G dongle. The last throw of my dice was the cellular network’s data service on my smart phone before I gave up.

  All attempts to connect to the internet had failed. Every attempt had yielded a ‘Page not found’ error. Given that the failure was across different service providers, I had little doubt that it wa
s a national blackout of the web, probably an effort to control the outpouring of reactions online.

  My only consolation, amidst a growing sense of dread, was that I had been able to go online at least for a few hours the previous night. I had read up on the infamous Emergency of 1975 and the parallels that various armchair pundits had drawn with the current scenario. One statement seemed to resonate among all the voices for and against the new Emergency.

  In 1975, it had been an attempt by the prime minister to protect herself from the corruption charges that were about to be framed against her. In 2012, it was precisely because corruption had become so rampant the charge-sheets were not even worth the paper they were filed on. The opposition to the coup was not as widespread as I had expected it to be, and their principal argument was the protection of civil rights and liberties, not the idea of a suspension of democracy per se.

  It was a sobering thought that, as a country, we were either so fed up, or so apathetic, that the immediate reaction had been mildly receptive instead of outright condemnation. Even granting that INSAF had managed to influence those who might have opposed the coup, could they have influenced so many voices in a nation of a billion that there was so little opposition? Or was it a wait-and-watch response from a nation that had little faith in its current leadership?

  I opened the door to retrieve my newspapers and just missed getting knocked on my forehead. Richa froze in mid-motion, her right knuckle just a few inches from me, evidently a little startled. She held the newspapers in her left hand, a handbag hanging off her shoulder. It was patently unfair that she could look so attractive this early in the morning, especially when I hadn’t even brushed my teeth.

  ‘Room service?’ I asked, because I did not have a stock comment for a beautiful girl calling on me at seven in the morning.

  She grinned, making up for the start that she had given me. ‘Sorry, but I just assumed that you Madrasis wake up with the sun. I half expected you to be holding a cup of filter coffee as you answered the door.’

  ‘That’s racist,’ I said, moving aside and letting her into the room, accepting the newspapers. ‘I should be offended.’

  A flicker of doubt passed across her face – she must have wondered if I really was serious about taking offense. I smiled to let her know that I was joking.

  ‘So to what do I owe the honour of such an early visit?’ I asked as she settled down on one of the chairs. Absently I flicked open the newspaper roll and quickly scanned the front page of the Times to see if they had repeated the thirty-seven-year-old obit of D.E.M. O’Cracy. Nope, they hadn’t.

  Instead, there was a picture of me – a grab from the jacket of my book, no doubt, almost two years old – under the caption, ‘Who is Balamurali Selvam?’ This piece itself was in a box, surrounded by a bigger article on the life of Major-General Qureshi and the conspiracies that raged around his death. The blurb on me was little more than a summary of my infamy so far, but the tone was a lot milder than it had been in those days.

  ‘There is something you should know,’ she replied.

  16th September, 2012. Washington, D.C.

  It was close to midnight and the strain of having been up for almost an entire day was showing on the faces of those present. The president of the United States was closeted in his office with Andrea Simps and the DNI, Craig McSmith, and was wondering, not for the first time, if the most powerful person in the whole world should not have more choice in the matter of his subordinates. McSmith was proving to be as inept as he had the potential for, while – despite all her pretentions to the contrary – Andrea Simps seemed to be playing a deeper game than any of them realized.

  ‘It’s an outrage that they summon our ambassador to warn us not to interfere,’ fumed the president. ‘And we had nothing – not a single bloody thing – to salvage some pride. By this time tomorrow, you can bet your bottom dollar every commentator worth his salt is going to ask us what we are going to do.’

  ‘We will do what we’ve always done, Mr President,’ Andrea Simps said, as calm as ever. ‘We’ll say we are exploring all options for a peaceful restoration of democracy, that we will never interfere in the affairs of a sovereign nation, that India is far too important to us to treat the way we would North Korea or Iran – and thus score a point with our hardliners and the anchors – and that we do not wish to see India go the way of Pakistan.’

  ‘And in the meantime, on the ground?’ he asked, not for the first time.

  ‘We will keep our options open. There are plenty of fringe groups – including the so-called Maoists – who would welcome our support and our dollars to help them bring the government down, and the best thing is they don’t really care who’s heading the government. In any case, you can bet your bottom dollar China’s already making the moves to strengthen their insurgency ops within India.’

  ‘I’ve thought about this, Andrea,’ interrupted the president, with a sideways glance at the DNI to ensure that he was paying attention. ‘The one thing I absolutely forbid is the removal of Gopi Kishan until we have a viable alternative. We should not leave a vacuum into which someone worse walks into and takes over.’

  ‘Give me a few more days, Mr President. The thing with power is, the moment you’ve grabbed it, everyone else will start thinking that they are just as deserving. Someone down the chain will be ambitious enough and we’ll be there to help him along. That’s a guarantee.’

  17th September, 2012. London.

  President Timothy Jackson was not the only head of state closeted with his Intelligence chief at the end of the day – the British premier had also met with Sir Harold Holmes before retiring to bed.

  The SIS had been able to re-establish contact with its operatives across the country and the initial reports, while not disturbing, had been far from encouraging. The spies who had witnessed the events at the International Conference Centre were surprised that none of the delegates had come forward to rail against their temporary incarceration, despite having been freed late in the afternoon on Sunday.

  What had surprised the analysts even more was the lack of an immediate groundswell of anger against the dismissal of the government and the imposition of curfews across the country. Except for sporadic incidents, the entire country had spent the night peacefully and quietly and had woken up to find the internet shut down completely.

  The reason trotted out in an official memo to the major news networks was a splicing of the undersea cables that connected India’s internet to the world’s network, but none of the spooks at SIS had been able to confirm the same. The freighter that had reportedly cut the cable while dragging its anchor was fictitious, while deep-sea divers had been unable to locate the damaged section of the cable. The possibility that it was not a bluff could not be ruled out, though the organization preferred to act under the assumption that the Indian government had literally thrown the switch on their internet connectivity.

  For the first time since the early Nineties, the spooks of SIS – and every other invested intelligence service – were forced to rely on the voice networks, and therefore acted under the assumption that they were always eavesdropped on by somebody else. They were correct, for like Britain’s Cheltenham GCHQ and the NSA’s listening station at Utah, INSAF had also set up a powerful listening station on the outskirts of Nagpur. Every international call was tracked, recorded, analyzed and flagged. Because of its infancy, it was more of a deterrent than a detector – it was not as intuitive as the NSA’s PRISM, but the very fact of its carefully-leaked existence made people very cautious.

  Sir Harold Holmes had finally managed to convince his superior to allow him to travel to India in a few days’ time. ‘The call reports are sanitized to ensure that we do not reveal our operatives’ details, but then what’s left is so obscure we might as well not have received reports at all. My ability to make decisions is compromised.’

  ‘But India is not a threat,’ Alan Carter had argued. ‘At least, not to us. There are other nations we ca
nnot afford to lose focus on.’

  ‘But if India falls,’ countered the spymaster, ‘that part of Asia itself becomes a big threat to us. There will be no country in that area we can trust. Unless you are prepared to bring in the same draconian laws that the US did and clamp down on our non-native population, we are going to let in people like a sieve, and before you know it, you’ll have a mullah from Pakistan asking all our women to stay at home and wear a burqa.’

  ‘But if you leave, there’s no one to head SIS here.’

  ‘Drake is a good man. He’s ready to take over.’

  Alan Carter shook his head. ‘It’s risky sending you there. What about security for you? We can’t allow you to be taken. Your experience –’

  ‘My experience is wasted sitting behind a desk and wondering what the hell is going on over there. In case you’ve forgotten, I started my career in India. I was there in ’76. I know the country . . . I’ll be more useful there, than over here.’ Sir Harold Holmes held up his glass of whiskey to the light. ‘Give my job to Drake. Let me go to India.’

  ‘You just want to go out in a blaze of glory,’ said the British prime minister, resigned.

  The old man drained his glass and grinned. ‘Is there a better way?’

  17th September, 2012. New Delhi.

  ‘Not evidence that’s going to stand up in court, but things that will never come out – perhaps shouldn’t ever come out, in fact – but things you need to know before you look at whatever evidence they give you.’

  ‘You don’t trust the official investigation?’ I asked Richa.

  ‘Let’s just say that what I’ve seen in the last six months has made me lose faith in a lot of things. But tell me this, first. Do you believe Major-General Qureshi took his own life?’

  I shrugged. ‘What I knew of him, I’d read in the newspapers. And since you know my take on their kind . . . I haven’t made up my mind either way.’ I stopped just short of asking her what she thought. Didn’t seem right.