The diplomat eyed him for a moment.
‘How did you know his name was Hussain?’ he asked.
‘You told me a few minutes ago. Should I repeat your words? No, no trouble at all, really. You said, and I quote: “When he dug deeper, the Counsellor found that around the time this Hussain chap disappeared—or was last seen by his colleagues—our staff was busy with an event at our own embassy.” Now I may be getting on in years but that does not mean my memory has betrayed me. Not yet, anyway.’
‘So your acolytes had nothing to do with this?’
‘We are not the Mossad to pull such capers off with impunity,’ Almeida replied.
‘Don’t sell yourself short,’ the diplomat needled him.
Almeida smiled, and just like that he was the friendly old man on the brink of retirement warmed by the firewater in his belly.
‘Never seemed a prison fair, nor a mistress foul,’ he said. Then, calling the waiter over, he added, ‘Sahab has very kindly offered to pay for my drinks and dinner. I will have the usual, thank you. And do refresh my drink.’
THREE
September 1976, The Hague (the Netherlands)
About to head home for the weekend, Amit Kumar stopped to answer the ringing telephone.
‘Hello, I am calling about the appointment Mrs Singh made at our clinic,’ the lady at the other end of the line said in Dutch.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kumar replied, running his right hand through thinning hair, ‘what clinic did you say you were calling from?’
She mentioned the name, then clarified that it was a gynaecologist’s clinic.
It took a few moments for Kumar to recall the procedures mentioned in Malathi’s Black Book. The doctor’s clinic used to serve as a clearinghouse for all communication from one particular network of her assets. That entire network had gone silent with her death, and the clearinghouse had become a faded memory. This was the first indication in nearly a year that the network had survived.
‘Yes, of course. Mrs Singh was eager to confirm her appointment before starting from here. But she is not here at the moment. May I take a message for her?’ he said, repeating the phrases that had been written in the book verbatim.
Kumar jotted down the exact message, promised to deliver it to Mrs. Singh, and ran to the safe. The Black Book had no information about the asset beyond a pseudonym, but it did help him decrypt the message directing him to a dead drop in Amsterdam, a bench near a cycle path in Vondelpark.
It was 4:57 p.m. If he took the train he could be in Amsterdam by six, he thought. But he wasn’t given to taking rash decisions. The asset was unfamiliar to him. In fact he didn’t even know if the asset was a man or a woman. And the message had come through a network that had long been presumed dead. His instincts told him it could be a trap. Sure, he had diplomatic immunity. But diplomatic immunity hadn’t saved his predecessor. He forced himself to sit down and think. The dead drop could wait.
‘The Pakistanis are unlikely to have rolled up Malathi’s network,’ he said to himself. ‘They don’t have the manpower here in the Netherlands to mount such a counterintelligence action. That leaves the BVD and their allies.’
He grabbed an apple from a desk drawer and bit into it. Some people preferred alcohol, others swore by tobacco. Amit Kumar liked apples. Chewing one helped him slow down and think.
‘Did the BVD know Malathi worked for the Wing? Even if they didn’t know it while she was alive, the manner of her death would certainly have raised their suspicions. That means they might suspect that her replacement is the Resident.’
In the silence he could hear the clock on the wall behind him ticking away, urging him to action. He resisted it.
‘But I wasn’t sent here alone. The Chief held off on sending me until three more diplomats were ready to be posted here. So as far as the BVD knows, any one of those four may be the Indian Resident here. Then this could be their way of luring me out. Make the call, wait to see who rushes out of the building, follow him, see if he heads to the dead drop and they have their man.’
He opened the Black Book again and turned to the page about this asset. The pages after it were empty. The pseudonym was hilarious and useless: she had called the asset “Ghatotkacha”. He read further. Ghatotkacha was a government servant, the book said. But it did not say which ministry or department. He read the page again and again. Nothing. Then he flipped to the previous page and read about a foreign asset. He knew from the briefing Almeida had given him before he left Delhi that Malathi had mounted a surveillance operation that involved an asset brought in from abroad. This was him. Which meant that Ghatotkacha had also been recruited in connection with that operation. So he either worked in the BVD itself or in its parent ministry, the Ministry of the Interior.
This presented Kumar with a fresh problem. If Ghatotkacha worked for either of those organisations, the intelligence he produced would be of a high grade. The Resident couldn’t ignore it or put it off for long. He consulted the book again, flipping to the pages that described protocol for the clearinghouse to communicate with the embassy. He noticed that if the clearinghouse suspected that any part of the network was being rolled up, or if it was the subject of a counterintelligence operation itself, the message was to include certain keywords. He carefully read the message he had jotted down during the phone call. It was missing the warning signs detailed in the book.
Kumar glanced at his wristwatch, a gold-coloured HMT his father had gifted him when he had qualified for the Foreign Service. It was nearly 6 p.m.
He had worked hard to be posted to The Hague. He had spent years as a lowly analyst reading dull cables and filing them away in the archives to be forgotten by everyone, followed by half a decade as a Desk Officer nannying field agents and Residents in Europe from balmy New Delhi. It was only after all this that the Wing had seen it fit to send him to the field. All that hard work hung in the balance, as did the prestige this posting had finally afforded him. An ambitious man on all fronts, Kumar had married up the social ladder, and for the longest time he had had to suffer the disdain of his in-laws. His cover was that he worked in the Foreign Service and, like all Foreign Service spouses, his wife had come to expect a long stint abroad. When no such stint had materialised, his in-laws had begun to grow suspicious and his brother-in-law, a fauji rumoured to be a rising star destined to make General some day, had even made discrete enquiries with friends in New Delhi. After all, what Foreign Service officer spent most of his first decade in service in dusty New Delhi? The norm was for young officers to spend at least three postings, possibly longer in an embassy or consulate abroad. Kumar’s cover had held, but only just, and it had done nothing for his reputation in his wife’s family. The orders to head to The Hague had arrived in the nick of time after a considerable bit of internal politicking, and he had no intention of cocking it up.
He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and rose to his feet. There was no choice: the dead drop had to be serviced. And urgently. He took the message and the Black Book and returned them to the safe. Before locking it, he retrieved a switchblade knife. It had a leather strap. He rolled down the sock on his left foot and tied the knife to his leg, rolling the sock back into place above it. The sock stank from the sweat of a long day. He thought of rushing home to wash his feet and change his socks. Then he changed his mind. If he went home now, his wife would have a hundred questions when he tried to leave again. Instead, he put on a coat and stepped outside.
He had heard about the park from fellow diplomats, especially those who had children. But this was his first time there. The bells on a clock tower were chiming a gentle, if confused, melody somewhere in the distance when he chanced upon a group of women walking towards the exit and asked them for directions to the statue of Joost van den Vondel. One of them told him to keep walking along the path he was on.
He turned around to face the direction he had come from and aske
d in unadorned Dutch, ‘This way?’
A couple of the women chuckled at the tourist. The woman who had spoken to him earlier grabbed him by the elbow and turned him around.
‘No, this way,’ she said, pointing towards a clump of trees in the distance. ‘Keep looking towards your right,’ she added, gesturing with her hand.
The park itself was long and narrow, a strip of land covered with green grass, a bunch of trees, and ponds of dark brown water. He knew exactly where the statue was, having studied a map of Amsterdam on the train. But acting lost and asking them for directions had allowed him to turn around and observe his surroundings. The sun had set a few minutes earlier, but it was still bright enough to tell one face from another. There were three behind him. He memorised each one.
Once he reached the statue, he walked around it a few times, admiring the caped figure of the Dutch poet. Then he pretended to turn his attention to the seraph-like figures seated at the four corners of the base while keeping a sly eye out for the three faces he had seen earlier. Only one of them—a middle-aged man—appeared to have followed him to the statue. Kumar waited. The man came nearer, glanced at the statue, then continued down the path. Kumar waited a little longer until the man was out of sight, then started walking briskly in the same direction. It no longer seemed like he was enjoying a stroll in the park. Instead, onlookers—had there been any—would have thought he was rushing to catch up with someone important.
He paused ten minutes later, breathing heavily, beads of sweat on his brow. His right hand pushed into his abdomen just above the waist, and he leaned forward, bent over from exhaustion. Spying a bench nearby, he ambled to it and sat heavily, trying not to imagine what his socks would smell like by the time he returned home. The bottle of water in his bag was half empty. He drank thirstily and then sprinkled the remaining few drops on his head. Then he leaned over, his forearms resting on his knees. Five minutes later, having caught his breath, Kumar straightened himself. He took a minute to stretch his hands and take a few deep breaths, relishing the crisp, fresh air. Then he slipped his bottle back into the bag and with it the tightly folded brown envelope that he had found stuck under the bench. Nobody saw him.
He arrived at the Hague a little after 1 a.m., having spent a good amount of time drinking beer at a brown cafe in Amsterdam, and made his way home twenty minutes later. Once inside, the first thing he did was take his socks off and drown them in a bucket of soapy water. Luckily his wife was fast asleep. He made himself a cup of coffee. Sitting at the study table, he pulled the envelope out of the bag and carefully opened it. Inside he found two Photostat copies and a typewritten page. The first was a copy of a flight manifest, a list of First-Class passengers on a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Karachi that landed at Schiphol on Wednesday. The second was of a Pakistan International Airlines ticket—again First Class—from Schiphol to Karachi, scheduled to depart on Sunday. Kumar ate his way through two large apples as he read and re-read the three pages till 4 a.m. Then he made himself another cup of coffee, showered, shaved, and got dressed. He scribbled a note for his wife and left it on the kitchen counter before heading for the embassy, the Photostats and typed page safely stowed in his briefcase. Saturday promised to be a long slog.
***
In all his years working under Almeida, Arora had never seen the latter’s desk uncluttered. Almeida sat behind it reading a cable, his right hand nursing a drink. As always, he wore a white shirt with navy blue braces. Arora looked at the bemused smile on his face, then at the glass in his hand. Gin and tonic. It was 11 a.m.
‘Good morning, Jugs,’ Almeida replied to Arora’s greeting. ‘Our man at The Hague—Malathi’s successor—sent this fifteen minutes ago. Read it,’ he added with a chuckle, tossing the decoded cable onto a heap of files on the desk.
‘Amit Kumar?’ Arora asked, reading his name.
‘Resourceful fellow, if a bit too cautious,’ Almeida replied. ‘I chose him myself for the post.’
Kumar had begun the cable by reporting that one of Malathi’s agents had initiated contact the day before. He mentioned that this was the first contact he had made since her death. After that the cable became absurdly apologetic. Arora looked up at the Chief, eyebrows raised in question.
‘Read the highlighted part aloud, will you?’ Almeida said from behind his glass. He was having trouble hiding his smile.
‘I cannot state with any degree of certainty the identity of this agent,’ Arora read the cable out loud. ‘There is no mention within my predecessor’s Black Book of this asset’s name or designation. But the procedure followed by this person matches precisely with what she wrote in one of the final entries.’
His own glass now empty, Almeida lowered it to the desk and smiled. He poured a gin and tonic for Arora, then poured another one for himself.
‘Have a drink,’ he said.
Arora took a sip of the bitter drink and shuddered with disgust. Too much tonic. Almeida let out a sharp laugh at Arora’s expression, then continued, ‘The intelligence comes from the asset that Malathi had cultivated in the Ministry of the Interior. Her last. It has to be him. Every other asset of hers was well-documented in her notes. Read what is written next.’
Arora did. ‘The asset claims that a certain person that my predecessor had shown considerable interest in has returned to the Netherlands recently. This person arrived at Schiphol four days earlier on a PIA flight from Karachi, and was met at the airport by two members of the diplomatic staff from the Pakistan embassy. The asset states—and the Photostats provided by him of the flight manifest and the airline ticket bear him out—that the person of interest—a Mr. Abdul Qadeer Khan—’
Arora stopped and looked up.
Almeida waved him on.
‘Mr. Abdul Qadeer Khan arrived at Schiphol on Wednesday. The asset included a typewritten note that claims Mr Khan is staying at the residence of the Second Secretary, Political Affairs. The flight ticket indicates that he is booked on a flight back to Karachi on 19th September.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Almeida added. ‘He returns to Karachi tomorrow.’
‘Chief, returning to the Netherlands would be an utterly stupid thing for Khan to do. Are we certain this is the same Abdul Qadeer Khan?’
‘How many Abdul Qadeer Khans do you know, Jugs?’
‘It could be a coincidence.’
‘The name could certainly be a coincidence. But the flight manifests and tickets have the person’s age on them. And Kumar may be a bit wet behind the ears but he is nobody’s fool. He would not have passed this intelligence to us if he had not confirmed the bare essentials. And what of the fact that this other Abdul Qadeer is also hosted by no less a personage than the Second Secretary, one of Jilani Khan’s senior non-resident thugs?’ Almeida said, referring to the Director-General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Then, after a pause, he continued, ‘Have you read Laughter in the Dark? Nabokov.’
Arora grimaced at the reference.
‘Novels about little girls written by dirty old men don’t interest me, sir,’ he asserted with a ferocity that Almeida assumed had to have arisen from reading the damn thing. ‘As for the Second Secretary hosting him, I find all this hard to believe. As I mentioned, Khan would have to be stupid to return to the Netherlands so soon after stealing their secrets. And everything we know about him contradicts that possibility. Khan is cunning and opportunistic, anything but stupid.’
‘Which is why I have asked Kumar to confirm the identity of the guest.’
Confused about Almeida’s intent, Arora stared at him, the expression on his fleshy face blank.
‘Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ,’ Almeida replied. ‘Fear not, that was Shakespeare not Nabokov.’
Arora nodded as if he understood the reference. It was half-hearted and achieved little more than jiggling his jowls. Years of assoc
iation with Almeida had made him comfortable with the fact that most of Almeida’s literary references would remain beyond his grasp. He gulped from the glass, grimacing once again at the bitterness, and waited for Almeida to proceed.
‘While we wait for The Hague to write to us,’ Almeida continued after a while, his left thumb hooking under the brace at the shoulder and straightening it a bit, ‘we might as well proceed with the assumption that it is indeed our old friend enjoying the hospitality of the Foreign Service of Pakistan at the moment. What could have motivated him to risk being imprisoned in a foreign country for treason?’
‘There has to be something he needs from the Netherlands to complete his work. Documents, perhaps. Notes.’
‘Not unlikely. But why did he wait for a year? Those documents could have been misplaced or lost during that time.’
‘That bothers me too, boss.’ Then Arora shook his head vigorously. ‘No, it can’t be documents. He would have had their Resident pick them up and deliver them to him in Karachi in diplomatic bag.’
Almeida smiled, willing Arora to make the connection.
‘Assuming that Khan enjoys Bhutto’s backing even today—which is borne out by his staying at the Second Secretary’s residence—he is either looking to recruit someone—’
‘Would Jilani Khan not prefer one of his own to do that?’
‘Yes, sir. The only other option I can think of is that he is there to meet a supplier. Which begs the question, sir: who is this supplier and what does he supply?’
‘Well done, Jugs—’
‘We should have him murdered,’ Arora blurted out, cutting Almeida off mid-sentence. ‘I’ll do it myself,’ he added, rising to his feet.
Almeida motioned for him to calm himself and sit.
‘They did not hesitate to kill our Resident, Mister Arora. What makes you think an illegal such as yourself would fare any better? No, I do not want an answer. The last time we contemplated having him killed, he was not being hosted by Jilani Khan’s children,’ Almeida said forcefully. ‘And we will not speak of Paris, but they will be wary after what happened there, even if they do not know the details of Mister Hussain’s ultimate fate.’
Let Bhutto Eat Grass 2 Page 6