by R. SREERAM
And they didn’t need too many people to know every aspect of the operation. A few trusted ones to co-ordinate everything, probably from within a HQ that was connected to every limb of the operation; officers high enough to put together the mission at the convention centre – and perhaps cover the centres of power in NCR if needed – would be at levels that were rarefied enough to begin with, but would have the discipline, experience and networks that would have accompanied their progress to their current ranks.
Not everyone would have needed to know that the heart of Kalyug was the suspension of democracy. Most – and certainly the foot soldiers – would have been satisfied with explanations of drills and exercises. Written orders, necessary for some, would have been couched in anonymity and obfuscation. The right people would have been ensured at the right place at the right time, but never knowing the right reasons.
Which made it all the more important for me to keep fighting the reality of the coup, to pretend to be as incredulous as I’d been since the beginning. By the time the smoke cleared, in a few days’ time, most people who were part of the inner circles – deliberately or otherwise – would be so firmly enmeshed in today’s events that they would not dare stand up against the coup that they had, even unwittingly, propped up.
As far as I could see, I had the least to lose. Whatever I had was lost in the aftermath of my book’s release; every allegation that could have been made against me had been made then, and nothing deeper or darker could stick to me now. But by continuing to question, by weakening the inevitability or the invincibility of Kalyug, I could still have a small victory of my own if more people joined me. I may have written a book about it, but that didn’t mean I’d stopped believing in the importance of democracy to India, in the right to choose between villains even if villains were all we had to choose from.
We sat in companionable silence, caught in our own ruminations. After a while, Richa tapped the post-mortem report and looked at me questioningly. I nodded, giving her permission. I had already browsed through it on the way back. Nothing had jumped out at me, as expected – my knowledge of medicine borders on the negligible, and the report was full of lengthy descriptions of unfamiliar organs and their states at the time of the examination. ‘Be warned, though. The pictures are quite gory.’
It took Richa a little over half an hour to finish reading it, at the end of which she put it down. I raised an eyebrow, asking if she wanted to talk about it, and she shook her head.
It was a little while later that she let out a sigh. Her eyes were misting over as she finally said, ‘It’s pretty conclusive, isn’t it?’
17th September, 2012. New Delhi.
Tick.
Llong could not remember when the first tick had replaced the clicks that kept playing inside his head, and he wasn’t too sure that the change was much better. Every second, the clock on the wall on the other side of the corridor ticked over, marking the slow passage of time.
Tick.
‘Irritating, isn’t it?’ said the woman. She was in the cell opposite his, just as evidently imprisoned as he was but more cheerful and upbeat about the situation. Over the past few hours, he had heard her whistle different tunes; he did not know what he found more irritating, the clock’s ticking or her cheer. Dressed in a business suit that should have been treated better, she now stood near the door to her cell, smiling at him through two sets of bars that locked them in off the corridor between them.
Tick.
‘I think they’ve deliberately amplified the clock’s ticks to drive people like us crazy.’
Llong did not respond. He continued to stare impassively at her, not ready to believe that she was not a plant. It was one of the most basic lessons from his CIA training – expect the cops to put you in with a jailhouse snitch.
Tick.
‘Oooh . . . the strong, silent type. What’s your name? Bond? James Bond?’ she let out a giggle.
It could be bravado too, Llong thought, recognizing a strain of nervousness in her eyes. She was trying to be upbeat because that was the only way she thought she would survive this.
Tick.
‘Did you piss off INSAF, or are you here for something else, Mr Bond?’ she asked him again.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
‘Oh, come on. Say something. It’s just the two of us here. I’m sure there’s a bunch of wankers sitting off somewhere listening to everything I say, but I doubt they’ll join in.’
Tick.
‘And you know what I want to tell them?’
Tick.
She held up both middle fingers before pushing her hands through the bar and wiggling them. ‘That’s what I want to tell them.’
In spite of himself, Llong laughed.
17th September, 2012. Washington, D.C.
The press conference had been a disaster. And President Timothy Jackson was furious.
‘Who leaked the story about Jack?’ he thundered as soon as he was back in the Oval Office. The DNI, summoned by the chief-of-staff, cowered in his seat, caught between wanting to stand up as his president entered and an equally powerful desire to slink out and stay out until tempers were cooler again.
‘We don’t know,’ he answered, truthfully enough. Like the president, he had been sandbagged by the question from CNN’s White House correspondent. The Emergency in India was not as significant to the American public as news of an American citizen – a spy, one of the good guys – missing in action. As long as the exchange rates made it more profitable to outsource their backend operations to India, America Inc. didn’t really care too much.
‘Well, find out!’ snarled the president. ‘I’ll have either that, or your resignation, on my table in the next twelve hours. Are we clear on that, Mr McSmith?’
‘Yes, Mr President.’
‘You can leave.’
That was harsh, Winston thought. One look at his chief’s face, however, stopped the chief-of-staff from airing his thoughts. He didn’t want to be the next one called to task.
Craig McSmith opened the door and stopped in surprise at seeing Andrea Simps just outside. ‘Hello, Craig,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It seems your office is leaking like a sieve, as usual.’
As the director’s face reddened, she casually stepped around him and into the office. McSmith stormed out, slamming the door behind him, while she walked to the desk and took a chair in front of a visibly irate president.
‘Did you watch the press conference?’ asked Winston, trying to warn her.
She waved a hand carelessly at him. ‘Dahling,’ she said, affecting a tone that was unabashedly fake and making no bones about it, ‘I stopped watching those when George Bush Senior was the president.’
Turning back to Jackson, the frivolity dropped off her face abruptly, like a mask peeled off. ‘I think we’ve found our man.’
17th September, 2012. New Delhi.
Sleep had just begun to drown out the hum of the city when his partner nudged him awake and pointed to the truck that was slowly braking to a stop outside the gate. The security guard fumbled with his weapon for a moment before getting a firmer hold of it and stood up as a scruffy young boy climbed out of the cab and walked over.
‘Saab,’ he said, his voice high and shrill, the teeth dirty and brown, a creature so common in trucks and lorries that the guards relaxed. As the truck idled behind him, the boy reached their cabin and held out a dirty piece of paper. The drowsy guard tried to read the scribble without success.
He opened the bulletproof glass to take the paper.
He was slow to register that the boy was reaching behind him even as he was dropping the piece of paper in his hand. The latter pulled out a cylinder from the small of his back and jammed it through the opening. Before either man could react, the bottom of the cylinder popped out and smoke began to fill the cabin. The knockout gas was rapid and had the guards out of action before either of them could raise the alarm.
The boy turned and
waved at the truck. At the signal, twenty armed men streamed out of its ends and rushed the gate. With the precision of well-trained men, half of them helped the other half over the gate with a boost. Out of the ten inside, eight covered the two men going to work on the locks; seconds later, leaving just two men behind to guard the gate, eighteen men stormed the INSAF safe-house.
For Llong, the popping sounds – getting closer by the second – reminded him of his time at the range at the McLean training compound in Virginia. Silenced, rapid-fire weapons.
‘Shh . . . Leela. Leela!’ he said, trying to wake up his newest friend. ‘Something’s up.’
Somewhere, someone managed to trigger an alarm. Bells started to ring; the lights flickered, then went dark.
The darkness didn’t bother Llong. When he was brought in, he had been blindfolded – and so, in the absence of visual cues, he had committed to memory the route he was taken through. Through the day, he had recreated the sequence in an attempt to figure out how he could leave the building, if he ever got the chance.
‘Ha!’ Leela said, clearly excited. He could almost see her grin, despite the darkness that enveloped them. ‘What did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you that they would come for me? We look after our own.’
After what seemed to be an eternity – and was, in reality, just a few minutes – they saw flashlights scything through the darkness. Judging by the number of beams that criss-crossed the corridor, Llong was sure there were at least four men, possibly a fifth as well bringing up the rear and looking back the way they had come.
The gunmen stopped in front of their cells, the light shining onto their faces. As soon as the lead gunman caught sight of Leela, he fired a burst into the lock, shattering it. His partner, his gun trained on Llong who had instinctively raised his hands, leaned closer to whisper to the lead gunman who nodded when he was finished.
The second gunman aimed at Llong’s lock and fired. Llong flinched as he felt metal fly past him. Knowing it was pointless to resist, he surrendered to his new captors. It was, he thought laconically, getting to be quite a familiar state of existence for him.
Within seconds, the gunmen were herding Leela and Llong through the corridor and up a flight of stairs that Llong remembered coming down the previous day. On the way, the lead gunman casually fired into the third – and only other – prisoner inside the safe-house, a man who had eagerly come up to the bars anticipating freedom and meeting his Maker instead. Without breaking stride, the gunman said, ‘He betrayed Powerhouse.’
Llong was surprised by the look of hate that flashed across Leela’s face as she cast one last glance at the dead prisoner. Her contempt could not have been more evident if she had spat on him.
It was when they turned right – instead of the left he had assumed would take them outside – that he had the first inkling that something was wrong. They moved in silence through more unlit corridors until they finally reached an interrogation room with a single table in the centre.
Llong struggled as he felt his hands being grabbed and held to his side, the wild lights briefly illuminating a similarly-struggling Leela being pulled to the chair next to the table. For the first time, Llong noticed the chains that were hooked into the table at its edges, the cuffs at the ends leaving no one in any doubt about their purpose. It didn’t matter what country you were in or whose side you fought on, there were still times when questioning needed . . . more coercive approaches.
The men were too strong to be put off by Leela’s attempts and had her wrists through the cuffs without too much difficulty. Then they stepped back, away from the table and back to where Llong was held. Only Leela was on the other side of the table, pulling wildly against the cuffs that chained her to the table.
One of the gunmen pulled a camera out of his pocket and snapped a burst of pictures, the flash powerful and blinding off the walls of the small room. With each flash, Llong saw understanding emerge on Leela’s face. The look of terror on her face as the last flash illuminated her wide eyes and open mouth was enough for Llong to realize that their saviours had a different agenda.
He made one last attempt to jump to her rescue but one of his captors slammed the butt of his rifle into his neck, causing his knees to collapse. The ones holding his hands refused to let go, however, and he was held, kneeling, head exploding inside into a thousand white stars, as the lead gunman levelled his weapon.
The muzzle flashed thrice. Three bullets from the Heckler and Koch SD-5 spat out and slammed into Leela just below her neck. Llong’s vision swam as he tried to focus on Leela, but beyond a blurry image of her coughing up blood, everything else was dark.
When he heard the click of the camera, Llong finally forced himself to look up, to focus. The impact of the bullets had thrown her against the back of the chair, upright instead of slumped over. Her head was tilted upwards and resting on the back of her chair, posing her grotesquely for the camera. A thick stream of blood ran down one corner of her chin and dribbled on her white, starched shirt.
With each strobe of the flash, the truth became starker.
Leela Sharma, niece of Gyandeep Sharma and heir to the kingdom of Powerhouse in India, was dead.
18
17th September, 2012. INSAF HQ.
‘What about Gyandeep?’
Jagannath smiled at the major. ‘Gyandeep,’ he said, holding up a glass that held a finger of Scotch, ‘is in a box. We have round-the-clock surveillance on him. His home and offices are bugged; so is his vehicle. And we have at least three vehicles trailing him at all times. He can’t even fart without us knowing it.’ He extended the glass to the other man.
Nawaz Qureshi hesitated before taking it. The events of the last two days were taking their toll on him and he could not wait to get back to his quarters in the Army camp just outside the city. The Scotch went down easily, drowned in one gulp, wetting his insides, cooling him down even as it warmed him up.
‘The viewing is tomorrow afternoon, isn’t it?’
Nawaz nodded. ‘At Shahid Ghat. He would have wanted to be buried there, with the other fallen soldiers.’
It was Jagannath’s turn to nod this time, as if it made perfect sense. ‘If there is anything I can do?’
Nawaz waved his offer away as he placed the glass on a coaster. ‘Everything’s been taken care of by the Department of Defence. Least they could do, considering his long service.’ Only his wife would have detected the closely-held bitterness that was behind his remark.
Jagannath was about to speak when the instrument in front of him began ringing insistently. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, picking up the receiver.
The major watched his host’s face go from healthy to pale in the space of a few seconds. When Jagannath ended the call with a terse, ‘Hold on. I’ll send a team over,’ and looked at Nawaz, the soldier knew it was something serious, very serious. Jagannath did not place his receiver down to disconnect; instead, he pressed his finger on the engage button and turned to the major.
‘There’s been an attack on the safe-house here,’ he said. ‘If I give you a couple of men, can you contain the situation until I can round up a bigger force?’
Nawaz nodded, all trace of fatigue gone. ‘Go down to the exit,’ said Jagannath. ‘By the time you check out your weapons, I’ll have the men and a vehicle waiting for you outside.’
17th September, 2012. Washington, D.C.
‘Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, huh?’ President Timothy Jackson remarked, turning the file photo of Mr Karamchand Patil over in his hand. ‘And always with good reason, isn’t it?’
‘He’s a hawk, there is no denying that,’ Andrea Simps replied. ‘But he’s the lesser of the other evils out there. Most of the others with even a semblance of national appeal are even farther to the right or the left.’
‘Will he listen to us?’
Simps shrugged. ‘He’s got reason to. Rumour is that he won’t be leading the Opposition in the next election, and he is pretty miffed about it. The good thin
g is that the opposition within his own party is so fragmented that if he can pull in a couple more leaders, the rest will fall in line. Other than his hawkishness, though, he is generally held to be honest and strong-willed.’
‘So . . . in other words, you’re not sure we can turn him.’
‘My psychologists are working on this,’ she said, eliciting a smirk from the president. Irked, she continued, ‘He might not agree if we back him openly – he’s big on self-rule and no-interference and all that crap – but if he is approached by a front, say a coalition that’s opposed to both Razdan and GK, he might agree.’
‘What if he ends up being worse than GK?’ the president countered. ‘At least we’ve dealt with GK enough times to know his stand on most things. What if Patil – and you yourself admit that he’s a hawk – what if he is even more radical?’
Before she could answer, he pressed on. ‘GK’s already shut down the internet inside India. I’ve got calls from three senators and seven congressmen, not to mention the representatives of about twenty different industries, telling me how badly work has been affected because of the situation there and asking if I can bring a bill for tax breaks if they want to relocate their back-end operations.’
President Timothy Jackson tapped the photo in front of him. ‘So I ask you once again, Simps. How sure are you of this guy?’
17th September, 2012. New Delhi.
‘Isko kya karoon?’
‘Le aao. No witnesses.’
Llong was pulled to his feet quite roughly and marched back, sandwiched between the attackers. Now that they knew he knew what was in store for him, the gunman walking right behind him paid him a lot more attention than earlier. Llong wondered where he was being taken and what would become of him, for it was clear this was not the CIA breaking him out, but a group that had come with the sole intention of murdering Leela.
He was a witness, and it didn’t require a Mensa membership to realize what happened to witnesses. That one word – snatched from the rest of the conversation – left him in no doubt as to his eventual fate.