The Dalliance of Leopards
Page 6
“I felt it was better that I brief you in person,” he said. “Even the most secure forms of communication have a way of springing leaks.”
Shinde winced and pulled at a loose thread on the hem of his sleeve. They hadn’t spoken again since Qasim’s death, but both of them knew it had occurred because security was compromised inside the High Commissioner’s office in Islamabad.
Afridi paused to look out the window. He could see the dome of Rashtrapati Bhawan and the sprawling gardens of the Presidential estate. Taking a deep breath, he continued.
“As I wrote to you, we have an unexpected opportunity that may or may not play out in our favor,” he said. “But it seems quite genuine.”
“You mentioned a woman,” said the defense secretary, impatiently.
“Yes, Daphne Shaw. She used to be an actress in Bombay. By now, she would be in her sixties”
“She called you?” Manav prompted.
“Yes, from America, on a line she claimed was secure.” Afridi strummed the spokes on his wheelchair, a habit he had when his thoughts were outpacing his words. “She has offered to cooperate with us in exchange for her protection. She’s afraid the Americans, or someone else, are going to kill her. She wants asylum.”
“Is she a US citizen?”
“Naturalized, but she was born in India.”
“Why should we antagonize the Americans?” The defense secretary leaned back in his chair. “What’s in it for us?”
“Because she’s willing to lead us to a very important man.”
“And who is that?” the secretary asked, impatiently.
“Guldaar,” Afridi said, pronouncing the name as if it left a bitter taste on his tongue.
Twelve
“Logistics,” said the Bosnian, running a finger across his dented chin where a day’s stubble darkened an already shadowy complexion.
“I’ve never completely understood what that means,” Jehangir Daruwalla replied, watching the drops of condensation roll down his glass, forming a damp ring on the cardboard coaster.
“Getting things from here to there.” The Bosnian looked at him as if he were a fool, then drained his whiskey. “Like a courier service.”
“Ahh … you mean shipping and handling. That’s what we used to call it,” said Jehangir. He wasn’t a man who was easily cowed by the derision of others. After all, being a member of one of the smallest minorities on earth thickened your skin, even if it played hell with your genes. Earlier, the Bosnian had asked him if he was Muslim, and what his name meant.
“No. Parsi. Zoroastrian,” he had answered, “and Jehangir means ruler of the world.”
He could see a sneer of amusement forming on the man’s face.
“Repeat?” the waiter asked, glancing down at their empty glasses.
Jehangir was about to put his hand over the mouth of his tumbler in a gesture of refusal, when the Bosnian nodded. “Double. Large,” he demanded.
The waiter looked confused.
“Do you mean a double large or just a large drink?” said Jehangir.
“Isn’t it the same?” his companion said, with an aggressive shrug of his shoulders.
“A large measure is sixty milliliters. A double large would be a hundred and twenty,” Jehangir explained, holding up his glass to demonstrate.
“Sixty,” the Bosnian conceded, giving the waiter a hostile look.
“And I’ll have another chota,” Jehangir added.
He hadn’t stayed at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club for at least twenty years. When his cousin Nicky offered to book him a room here, Jehangir thought he’d give it a try for old time’s sake. Usually, when he came in from London, he stayed at the Taj, which was next door, also facing the harbor, but that was where comparisons ended. His room in the Yacht Club had a better view than even the best suite in the Taj, looking straight across at the Gateway of India. The club had a shabby gentility, deteriorating slowly into noble decay. His room was big enough to accommodate a badminton court, with high ceilings and furniture that looked as if it had been upholstered before independence. Nevertheless, the Yacht Club was quaintly discreet, and the drinks in the bar cost a tenth of what he would have paid at the Taj. Besides, on this trip Jehangir was obliged to keep a low profile—“under the radar,” as Nicky put it.
The Bosnian seemed to have no appreciation for the history or ambience of the club. He eyed the other members with surly indifference: an elderly assortment of Colaba regulars and a noisy table of Sindhis. The top three buttons on his shirt were open, exposing a matted pelt of dark hair on his chest.
“So, what do you suggest in terms of logistics?” Jehangir asked.
“There’s a company in Doha we’ve used before. They don’t ask questions,” said the Bosnian, whose name was unpronounceable. Jehangir had made a point of forgetting it immediately. In this business, it was best to keep things anonymous.
“Where will they deliver?”
“Karachi. F.O.B.”
“F.O.B.?” Jehangir raised an eyebrow.
“Freight On Board,” said the Bosnian, thinking Jehangir didn’t understand. “Customs clearance will be your problem once the ship arrives in port.”
“That wasn’t our understanding,” Jehangir replied. “I was told that everything would be taken care of from your end and we would pay cash on delivery.”
The Bosnian shrugged again as the waiter interrupted them with their drinks. He handed each man a fixed menu, saying the kitchen would be closing in half an hour.
“We’ll take our drinks to the table,” Jehangir said, leading the way to the dining room. His companion hauled himself out of the chair, a heavyset, unhealthy man, whose arms were disproportionately short, so that his wrists only reached to his waist. Jehangir noticed circles of perspiration under his sleeves, though the bar was air-conditioned.
The menu was embossed with the Royal Bombay Yacht Club’s crest, two anchors crossed behind a flotation ring, topped with a coat of arms and a crown. The Bosnian ordered Chicken Maryland and Okra Provençal, saying he’d eaten too much curry in the last three days. Jehangir decided to have a cucumber and dill salad with mutton cutlets. Only in the colonial clubs of India did recipes of the Raj linger on like the aftertaste of empire.
During the meal, Jehangir negotiated for the consignment to be cleared and delivered all the way to Muzaffarabad by truck. The Bosnian was no match for his bargaining skills, and the fact that he was willing to pay cash, in Euros, gave Jehangir the upper hand. By the time he finished his lemon soufflé, the Bosnian looked chastened, maybe even a little unnerved. He excused himself, saying he had a flight to catch at 3:00 a.m.
Jehangir watched him leave, a brutish man with a Mediterranean gait. There were so many others like him in this world—middlemen who worked the margins as best they could and never earned as much as they hoped. Jehangir disliked this kind of business but his cousin had insisted, and there was always the guilty pleasure of dealing with the dark side of a coin. That was his father’s expression. Cyrus Daruwalla would hold up a silver rupee with Victoria’s profile clearly visible and explain how it was like the moon. One side was bright and shiny, the other tarnished with shadows. Then he’d flip the coin in the air and catch it on the back of his hand, asking his son to choose, heads or tails.
After ordering a coffee, Jehangir changed his mind and asked for a brandy instead. It tasted like cough syrup mixed with kerosene, but the rough warmth cleared his throat as he swallowed it in a single gulp. Signing the bar chits and the bill for dinner, he left a generous tip, though he knew it was against club etiquette. A handful of members still lingered in the bar, reluctant to leave their exclusive sanctuary. Out on the verandah, Jehangir paused to examine a model sailing ship in a glass case and the brass bell of a schooner decommissioned a century ago. Patterned tiles on the floor were worn smooth in places, and the humid darkness was comforting after the cold crosscurrents in the bar and dining room. Though it was past eleven o’clock, animated sounds of the ci
ty drifted in, a car horn and voices off the street. He pressed the button for the elevator, debating whether he should walk up the two flights of stairs to his room. For thirty seconds nothing happened, as if the elevator had broken down. Just as Jehangir was about to give up and use the staircase, pulleys creaked and cables moved, with the sound of greased steel and a muttering of gears somewhere deep inside the shaft. The cage rose from the ground floor below, like a giant piston at the heart of an obsolete machine.
When it stopped, Jehangir slid aside the grill. A light was on but the elevator appeared empty. The door seemed to have jammed and he had to force it open. All at once, Jehangir let out a whispered curse. On the floor of the elevator, huddled in a fetal crouch, lay the Bosnian’s corpse. His throat had been slit from ear to ear, the fresh wound yawning like a second jaw, blood oozing into the tangled hairs on his chest.
Thirteen
After picking up a rental car, Luke checked out of his hotel. He had been expecting Fletcher or Holman to show up while he was having breakfast, but there was no sign of them. It seemed odd that they had left no contact numbers, no way for him to get in touch. When he asked for his bill, the receptionist checked the computer and told him it had been settled, including the charges for the minibar. There was no information about who had made the payment. In the brightness of a spring morning, Washington looked deceptively cheerful. The cherry blossoms were just coming out, and the white cenotaph of the Washington Memorial rose above the rooftops, like a giant exclamation mark, commemorating an American pharaoh.
Luke felt conspicuous driving through the city, as if he were being watched. The GPS guided him to Route 66, a strident female voice that sounded like Tracy Holman. Within half an hour, he was across the Beltway and out of the city, heading toward West Virginia. A couple of times he felt there might be a car on his tail. In the rearview mirror he caught sight of a gray sedan that kept a steady distance, but as soon as he slowed down, the car went past him.
Whitman was a three-hour drive, mostly along country roads. The forests were a dense, monochrome green, and the towns he passed through were small and derelict. He switched off the GPS and turned on the radio to try to distract himself, but between the ranting of talk show hosts and the twang of country western music, he couldn’t find anything that didn’t irritate him. Stopping for a cup of coffee at a gas station, he felt ill at ease, though the woman behind the counter didn’t pay him any attention. Luke found a few dollars among the Pakistani rupees in his wallet. Whenever he came to America, he experienced a peculiar sense of reverse alienation. Back in Rawalpindi, he was used to being the only white man on the street, even if his beard provided a disguise. Here, it was disconcerting to find himself blending in, almost invisible, though he felt completely foreign, like his face were a mask.
Luke had driven this route more than a dozen times over the past three years. As he spotted familiar landmarks—a communications tower shaped to look like a pine tree and a billboard that reminded him that JESUS IS THE WAY!—his mind kept going back to Fletcher’s questions.
For several years there had been rumors that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Agency, ISI, was using SEA as a cover for activities in Kashmir, sending insurgents across the Line of Actual Control to attack Indian troops and other targets. ISI was also mixed up in the drug trade, providing protection to heroin smugglers and augmenting its budget with a percentage of the profits. One of the SEA hospitals across the Afghan border in Nuristan was discovered to be a laboratory for processing raw opium into heroin, but the British journalist who stumbled upon it was immediately deported and his cameras and notes confiscated.
The ISI had hauled Luke up on more than one occasion, for asking too many questions. Two years ago, when he was doing a story about the Karakoram highway, he had been arrested and spent forty-eight hours in a Hunza jail where a young lieutenant questioned him all night about why he was interviewing student leaders advocating local self-rule. He had been worried that they might cancel his press credentials and ship him out of the country, but in the end the lieutenant let him go with a warning that he should stick to writing about “all of the good things the Pakistan government has done for these people.”
What Luke hadn’t told Fletcher, or anyone else, was that he had been able establish links between SEA and a network of companies that handled the transport of goods and materials between Karachi and Kabul. Since Afghanistan was a landlocked country, there were only two ways in which items could be imported: by air, which was expensive, and by road, which meant a long transit, through either Iran or Pakistan. Karachi was the primary port for shipments to Afghanistan. The arrangement between the two governments was relatively simple, though it was an open invitation to corruption.
Cargo from countries like Japan or Korea was delivered to bonded warehouses in Karachi. These were mostly manufactured items, including everything from refrigerators and kerosene stoves to motorcycles and cell phones. Shipping agents then loaded them onto trucks, which were sealed by Customs authorities and driven across the country until they reached Peshawar. From there the cargo continued over the Khyber Pass, going through Landi Kotal and finally ending up at the Torkham border crossing. At that point, one of two things happened. Either they were delivered to Kabul or they were driven back into Pakistan and offloaded outside Peshawar. Bara Market on the northwestern edge of Peshawar was a huge black market for electronics and other imported goods.
Most of this trade was controlled by a single cartel that included shipping agents in Karachi, warehouses at both ends of the delivery chain, and trucking companies in Sind, Punjab, and the Northwest Frontier Province. Luke had discovered that many of these smaller businesses were owned by a principal holding company known as the Khyber Transport Company, which operated out of Abu Dhabi and Dubai and had a virtual monopoly over billions of dollars in imports to Afghanistan, not to mention illegal profits from the black market on either side of the border. While researching a story on KTC, Luke had also discovered there was a subsidiary called Khyber Transport Ltd. with offices in New York and London. They secured major contracts for supplying American and NATO forces in Afghanistan with food and fuel, as well as other nonlethal military supplies. Though it was impossible to get accurate figures, conservative estimates placed Khyber Transport’s annual turnover at 10 billion dollars.
The illegal earnings of the company and its network of smaller agencies and contractors probably added up to twice that amount, which is where most of the Sikander-e-Azam Trust’s funding came from. One of Luke’s sources in Islamabad was a consultant for the World Health Organization. He had documents proving that payments for constructing SEA’s schools and hospitals were always settled in cash. An unregulated slush fund, adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars, supported the philanthropic work of the trust. It was also an efficient way of laundering money, because each of the companies that contracted with SEA for supplying cement and steel rebars was part of the same web of businesses controlled by Khyber Transport.
Of course, the real mystery was who owned KTC and its subsidiaries. More than likely it was the same promoter or partnership that controlled SEA. But they remained hidden behind multiple layers of financial façades, sham companies, and shuffled transactions. The only thing Luke knew for sure was that it was very, very big. So big, in fact, that it was impossible to measure the wealth and influence this person or persons exerted in the region, all of which was politically patronized and protected.
The link with Peregrine Corporation was something Luke hadn’t figured out. When Fletcher brought up the company last night, it had taken him by surprise. During his interview with Roger Fleischmann there was no mention of the Sikander-e-Azam Trust or Khyber Transport, but Luke had learned, after covering the war in Afghanistan for almost ten years, the more dots you connected, the more patterns they revealed.
By the time Luke reached Whitman, he had decided that Fletcher probably had a good idea who controlled KTC and SEA. He and Holma
n were just hoping to confirm their suspicions. Under the circumstances, Luke was beginning to feel more and more vulnerable, but if there was one place on earth where nobody would find him, it was Whitman, West Virginia. The town had only two streets and four stop signs. Luke braked at the crossing of Main and Jefferson, turning right at Alden’s Market. The house stood at the end of a winding drive, built on the slope of a hill with lawns that merged into hayfields. A pretentious Victorian, it was out of place among the smaller homes in the town.
He could hear the gnashing of gravel under his tires as he pulled in beside a pickup truck that didn’t look as if it had moved since his last visit, six months ago. Roscoe, the dog, got up slowly from his favorite spot on the porch, sniffed the air, and barked. A minute later, Luke’s sister, Ruth, opened the door, waving. Having just turned thirty, she was five years younger than he. They hugged each other before Ruth led her brother into the kitchen.
“Poonam!” she called out. “Luke’s here.”
He could see that Ruth had lunch ready on the table: pumpkin soup and a fresh loaf of bread, with an arugula salad on the counter. Just then, he heard footsteps coming downstairs and Poonam entered. She grinned at Luke and they embraced.
“You’re thin again!” he said.
She rolled her eyes and moved toward Ruth.
“Where is she?” Luke asked.
“Asleep,” Poonam said.
“Hey, what is this?” Ruth pretended to be hurt. “The only person you want to see is Nina, not us?”
“Come on upstairs,” Poonam said.
Luke went first and the two women followed. At the landing, he stopped, letting Poonam go ahead and open the door. The shades were drawn, but there was enough light coming into the room for him to see the crib. He hesitated, not sure if he should go any closer, but Ruth took his hand and led him forward. The baby was asleep, her face pinched into an innocent frown. For a few brief moments, Luke forgot everything that had happened over the past two days, the flight from Pakistan, the anonymous body in the casket, Carlton Fletcher coming back to life, and the inquisition last night.