The Shadow Mission

by Shamim Sarif

  Hala and I step back behind a stall selling kulfi ice cream, keeping out of Hassan’s eyeline. Behind us, a group of men play cards for thin stacks of rupee notes. Meanwhile, our mark pockets his sunglasses and lights up a cigarette, leaning against the wall to enjoy his smoke.

  “Where are we going to talk to him?” Hala asks.

  “Right there. He won’t want a drama in front of his kid. Anyway, what else are we going to do? Ask him to dinner?”

  “What if he runs?” she asks.

  “Two of us, one of him,” I reply.

  “Weapon?” she asks.

  “Not seeing anything on him, are you?”

  She peers at Hassan one more time and agrees.

  “I’ll go talk to him, you run backup,” I tell her.

  Hala stays where she is while I start walking toward Hassan. He has a strong face, all jawbone and angles, with a broad forehead that juts out like a cliff face, leaving his eyes in shadow.

  “Hassan Shah?” I say.

  He throws down his cigarette and a tendril of acrid smoke curls up from where it lies, still burning, on the ground. I raise the heel of my boot and grind down the butt with my foot.

  “I need to talk to you about the school attack that happened this morning.”

  “What attack?” he says, his eyes holding mine, aggressive. Well, either I just found the only man in Mumbai who hasn’t heard about the bombing, or he’s already lying.

  “Your photo ID is on record, visiting the school. If you don’t want to end up taking the blame for this, we need to talk.”

  He hesitates, probably trying to figure out who on earth I am.

  “Who are you? British police? What are you doing here?”

  His upper lip starts to sweat. He glances back into the garage, at his son’s legs, sticking out from under the car.

  “Your son doesn’t need to know.”

  He nods, his breathing shallow.

  “Just relax. Why don’t we step around the back and talk . . . ?”

  He nods again. And then he takes off. He just runs, propelling himself across the road, between idling traffic and into a tiny side street. He moves faster than I would have imagined. Pounding after him, I calculate that he has a hundred feet on me already. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Hala running like mad, coming up on my right side.

  “I told you he’d run,” she complains.

  I pick up speed, intent on catching him quickly, but Hassan turns fast and is smart enough to go straight for the heart of a looming slum area ahead. It looks like a warren of tiny lanes and ramshackle tin houses. He probably knows it inside out too, making it the worst possible place for us to keep track of him.

  I glance at Hala. She gestures upward, and as we veer to the right to follow Hassan’s trail, she clambers up a single-story home and gets onto the roof. From there, she stays high, running across the roofs of dwellings that are built tightly together, bounding across gaps like a mountain goat, following him from above. But I’ve lost Hassan completely.

  “Turn left,” Hala directs me in my ear, from her bird’s-eye view. “Then first right.”

  Following her directions, I slide into another tiny street, my feet skidding into something wet that I think it’s better I ignore—and now I glimpse his banana-print shirt up ahead. He hurtles along, veering left suddenly. I follow him directly into someone’s house—he’s upturned a cooking pot, people are gasping, and then yelling at us. Up ahead of me, my target runs out of the back door, ripping his way through a bright blue sari that’s hanging out to dry. The soft, winding cloth billows up, settling gently right in my path, entangling me for a moment.

  “Where are you?” Hala pants in my ear. “Turn left, he’s in the tunnel.”

  Pushing aside the sari, I sprint to try to make up time, and find myself hurtling into a dark concrete tunnel that runs under a bridge. Pounding through, I can see the dark silhouette of the guy as he exits the other side of it.

  “Can’t you jump him?” I ask Hala.

  As I run, the walls echo my pounding steps off all sides, drowning Hala’s reply. I emerge back into the beating sunshine and turn right, tearing after a glimpse of Hassan’s shirt and into a road that stretches around between tightly packed street vendors. Chaos descends on me like fog. There are so many people, suddenly, jostling between stalls that sprawl out all over the narrow lanes. I keep running with smells, sounds, images blurring around me. Pots and pans hanging off hooks clatter as I pass, long ropes of chilies dry in the sun, some kind of street food sizzles in hot oil, hawkers shout, piles of vegetables loom up before me, a cart pulled by a cow crosses my path. Surprised shouts from people in the street follow me as they watch me barrel through. Up ahead, a painfully thin dog is snapping at the heels of someone who’s just disappeared. I follow, avoiding the dog, who is standing still now, barking like mad, but I can’t see Hassan. This side street is quieter and it winds uphill, long and thin; there’s no way he could have gotten to the end of it already.

  “Where is he?” I pant to Hala.

  A noise of frustration in my earpiece tells me that she has no idea either. Glancing up, I see Hala appear on a roof opposite, still moving, still scanning around for any sight of him. Then I see it, crumpled in the gutter ahead of me. The banana-print shirt.

  “He’s taken off his shirt,” I tell her. Smart move, considering how conspicuous it is.

  Looking for a bare chest helps her. “Got him!” she mutters.

  She leaps across to another roof, then bounces like a strip of lightning along a thin wall, a hundred feet ahead of me. In a busy jumble of people up ahead, I catch sight of our shirtless man moving quickly, but now he’s trying not to run and draw attention to himself. I scramble to follow. He slides into a tiny street barbershop and plucks something from the counter, then whips back out and runs left. Hala is far ahead of him, so I veer left to try to head him off. My feet pound through a narrow lane where a naked toddler chases a chicken. A mechanical sound and a waft of oily fumes drift over to me, but I hardly notice as I hurdle over the flapping bird and the kid and keep going, skittering out of the alleyway in the hope that our target will run right into me.

  But that sound and those fumes belong to a train. Thick iron tracks rear up right before me, right next to the densely packed buildings we’ve been running through. A freight train has just rumbled through. Car after car of containers move inexorably, slowly, up a route that winds off into the distance, where the sun is just beginning to lower into the late-afternoon sky. And our shirtless target is far ahead of me, running alongside the final car. With a magnificent leap, he grabs hold of the metal railing on the end of it and hauls himself up. He’s too distant for me to catch now; I can see him panting as he turns and gives me a long look. From back here I can’t really tell if he’s smiling, but it feels like he might be.

  8

  I WATCH HASSAN AS HE moves away from me, clinging to the side of the train—but now it’s my turn to smile. Because I can see something that he can’t. Hala is on the roof of that train, walking toward the very carriage that he’s hanging off. Her gait is careful but relaxed. Now that I’ve caught my breath, I start running again. I can’t catch up, but I can keep the train and our target, not to mention Hala, within range.

  “I think he has scissors or a razor—from the barbershop,” I tell her over the comms. I watch him struggle to open the freight car door. He can’t manage it, so he starts climbing the metal rungs that lead up onto the train roof.

  “He’s right below you, climbing up now,” I say.

  I watch him climb, estimating the moment that his head will pop into Hala’s view.

  “Four, three, two, ONE,” I call.

  On my count, Hala thrusts out a leg that jabs him in the face before he can even register what’s happened. She follows it with another sharp kick, and I watch her in awe. She never comes close to losing her balance. Hassan tumbles off the train and rolls away down a gentle slope that ends in a trash heap. I veer o
ff and run toward him. Hala clambers lightly down the side of the train and hops off, jogging up to join me.

  He’s up and eager to escape again, but he’s hobbling on an ankle that seems to be twisted. I draw close enough to fling myself at his legs, bringing him down with a tackle that hammers the wind out of both of us. But I surface fast, going for his arms, his hands. I grab his wrist just as I feel the whoosh of a straight razor slicing past my face, missing me by millimeters. Hala arrives and helps me to twist the blade out of his hand. I press it lightly against Hassan’s abdomen as we hoist him up.

  “Walk with us, no sudden moves.”

  Keeping close on either side of him, we guide him into a small shack that sits near the tracks, tired and lopsided. The walls are corrugated iron and inside are a couple of kids, playing. I pull out a few hundred rupees and hand them to the children, indicating they should get lost. They leave fast, slamming the door behind them. It’s dank and dark inside, but with enough light to make out a layer of putrefying sediment on the floor, as well as a street cat with ginger, matted fur. The cat turns and regards us coolly over its shoulder while we push Hassan down into a chair. I remove the razor from his side and place it gently against his windpipe while Hala finds his wallet and snaps pictures of the contents, sending them straight through to Amber.

  “What do you want?” he asks. Thin trails of sweat wind down from his temples onto his neck.

  “Who do you work for?” I ask him.

  There’s a tense silence. I press the razor a little harder against his throat.

  “I don’t know names,” he says. “I just do the job.”

  “The job? Killing children is a job?” I hiss.

  “I knew nothing about that,” he pleads. “I was told to go to the school and open up the drains. For access.”

  “Access to plant explosives?”

  He squeezes his eyes shut, fearful.

  “Who told you to do this? Who hired you?”

  His eyes stay shut and his mouth stays closed.

  Angrily, Hala thrusts a hand into Hassan’s trouser pocket. On instinct, he grabs her fingers and is rewarded with a sprained wrist. Hala ignores his moan of pain and pulls out his phone. It’s a nice model. She turns it over in her hands.

  “How’s the camera on this?” she asks, conversationally.

  He swallows. “Good,” he croaks.

  “Don’t make me use it to send footage of you to your wife. And your son. And your daughter.”

  Hassan whimpers and clamps his eyes shut, fearful. Hala moves closer to him.

  “Look at me,” she says. He opens his eyes and finds her gaze drilling into him as her voice drops, close to a whisper: “Kids have a really hard time recovering from seeing their parents die violently.”

  I look down, uncomfortable. What she just described is pretty much what she went through in Syria, when her village, mostly full of Palestinian refugees like Hala’s family, was attacked by ISIS. The horror of it is right there on her face and in the weight of her quiet words—just for a moment. But it’s long enough for Hassan to sense the deep truth that underlies her tone. It terrifies him, and tears spill out of the corners of his eyes, mingling with the sweat to form a rivulet of stress that drips onto the floor right by our feet.

  Hala still stares him down. Hassan squeezes his eyes shut again as if not wanting to watch himself betray anyone.

  “The company is called AAB Enterprises,” he says.

  Of course it is. Why do criminals always pick such boring names for their shell companies?

  “We need more,” I say.

  “AAB Enterprises,” he repeats, desperate. “Check the wire transfer app on my phone. . . .”

  We do, and sure enough, that is the name of the company that just sent him a hefty chunk of change. There are a few texts that look related too, but they are from unknown numbers, most likely disposable burner phones. Hala pulls out Hassan’s SIM card and drops it into her pocket, just in case. Then Amber comes in over our comms. She dictates Hassan’s home address here in Mumbai and we let him know that we have discovered where his children live. And that our associates are on their way to visit his family. His face crumples in fear. Impatient with his whimpering, I bang the side of the tin wall, making him jump.

  “Please,” he pleads. “I speak to one guy, only by phone. And I don’t have his name.”

  “Is his number in here?” Hala brandishes the phone. Hassan shakes his head.

  “We only got handsets we could throw away.”

  Annoyed with the lack of progress, Hala fishes in the pockets of her combat pants and produces a bunch of plastic cable ties. Efficiently, coldly, without looking at him any further, she binds Hassan’s hands together. Then she does the same to his feet. Once that’s done, she takes out a knife and makes a big show of testing the sharpness of the blade. Sweating, Hassan starts to pant and beg, fearing that he’s about to be executed.

  “I have an address,” he bleats at last. “That’s all. They sent me there to collect my uniform and ID, and the location of the school.”

  “So, give me that address,” Hala commands.

  Hassan dictates it to Hala. She looks it up on her satellite map, and only when she’s cross-referenced streets nearby with Hassan’s description and recollection does she accept it as correct.

  “Who did you meet there?” I ask. “Who gave you the ID and uniform and stuff?”

  “Nobody. The place was empty. Everything was ready and waiting, in a plain bag, right outside the entrance. I picked it up and left.”

  Hala steps away, frowning, and I nod. We both feel like we’ve gotten all we can from Hassan. He relaxes slightly.

  “Can I go home?” he asks.

  “Sure, but you must be exhausted,” I tell him. “We’ll send someone to collect you.”

  Tapping quickly, I send Riya an explanatory text message that includes a location pin drop to where we are now. Within a minute, my phone rings.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Riya asks by way of greeting. “How did you find this guy?”

  “We can catch up later,” I say, ignoring her tone, which is not remotely happy. “Right now, I need to know how long it will be before you can get a police car over here to pick him up?”

  She disappears for a moment and I can hear sounds of conferring in the background, instructions called out in Hindi.

  “Ten minutes,” she says, and I hang up the call. Hala stares Hassan down.

  “If you say one word to the police about us, or this meeting—I will go after your son and daughter. Understand?”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “Good. I’m sorry,” she says.

  “For what?” he asks.

  She leans down and wrenches his twisted ankle so it’s properly sprained. He yells in pain.

  “For that. It’s only in case you get free of the ties.”

  With a final tug to test the plastic binding his limbs, Hala nods at me and we hurry out of the shack and into the streets beyond, where we disappear into the crowded lanes of the slums, just as the sounds of police sirens begin to approach.

  9

  OUR NEXT FOCUS IS TO get to the address that Hassan spilled. It’s in the south of the city, some distance from here, and it’s rush hour. But we need to move now. There’s a good chance that the police may interrogate that same address out of Hassan and then we’ll be stuck in a race with the cops to look for evidence.

  Hala takes the urgency seriously, pushing her motorbike deeper into the traffic, weaving her way past cars, rickshaws, and buses, and across one busy junction after another. On the back of the bike, I hang on tightly to Hala’s waist while I send Caitlin the address so she can meet us there.

  “Christ, this is not an actual chase. You don’t have to drive like that,” I squawk as Hala turns hard and low to the ground. We skim in front of a gaudily painted truck, so close that I can feel a whoosh of air touch my arms as we pass it. But I have a feeling my complaint is lost under the lon
g protest of another truck’s horn. The sound fades fast as Hala weaves ahead. I lean into curves with her, trying to keep the bike stable.

  The address Hassan provided takes us into an industrial area, an assortment of warehouses and storage facilities that is pretty quiet now that night is beginning to fall. Not that it seems as if much activity goes on here at any time. There are very few parked trucks or vans. Hardly any people. Streetlights are nonexistent.

  “Coming toward you now.” Caitlin’s voice comes in on the comms.

  I glance over my shoulder, where her headlight sweeps the street as it moves closer. Caitlin’s bike pulls up and rides alongside us. Just a few hundred feet ahead, I point to a squat blue warehouse that sits in a lot sealed off with chain-link fences. No company logos or names are visible. Security cameras sit on top of the fence posts. Big red signs warning of private security and alarms are posted everywhere. We ride around to the back and park up in a dark alleyway, out of sight of the road before we get off the motorcycles.

  “Okay, so the fence we can manage, but what about the cameras?” I ask.

  “You tell us,” Caitlin returns. “Are they hardwired?”

  I scan them with my zoom lens. “Wireless.”

  “So kill them,” Hala says.

  I’ve already pulled my tablet out of my backpack and started working. I use my usual software to perform a passive sweep of the wireless environment. There’s a signal coming from inside the blue warehouse, and using a bit of code, I can monitor the output of data. That tells me how many devices are linked to their wireless network. After another thirty seconds, I’ll get a full lock on all the devices inside the warehouse that are using the Wi-Fi.

  In the meantime, Caitlin hands out bottles of water and protein bars, which Hala accepts with a disconsolate scowl.

  “We never get to eat the local food when we go somewhere,” she moans.

  “Occupational hazard,” says Caitlin, sanguine as ever.

  “Even Thomas is having an Indian takeout tonight,” Hala complains. “And he’s in London.”

  Caitlin and I swap a glance and Hala shifts, realizing she may have said more than she wanted to. Caitlin shakes her head at me not to pursue it—but I can’t pass it up. Opportunities to tease Hala don’t come along every five minutes.