Let Bhutto Eat Grass 2

by Shaunak Agarkhedkar

  Amit Kumar’s network had infiltrated the Netherlands Vehicle Authority. It took him three days after receiving car registration numbers and descriptions to identify the owners. Once he had names and addresses, he involved another asset to perform a background check on the suspects. Petrus had been far less prolific, and the only information he provided pertained to the suspect that he had followed on the tram. Kumar’s asset took the name and address of the suspect and visited the building. There he noted down the names and addresses of four random residents. Then he walked to the nearest post office and enquired about the postman responsible for those addresses. When he found the postman walking his route, Kumar’s asset flashed an official-looking identity card, quickly established authority, retrieved a small notebook and pen, and began asking the postman details about all the names and addresses he had noted. The postman hesitated. Another flash of the identity card cured him of his reluctance.

  By Friday Kumar had found gold. While at The Hague, Abdul Qadeer Khan had met two suspects who were of obvious interest to the Wing.

  The address that Petrus had trailed one suspect to was an apartment building. One of the apartments there belonged to a sales manager who worked for the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory, an organisation better known by its Dutch initials: FDO. The FDO was a subcontractor for URENCO.

  The Mercedes Benz used by the briefcase-carrying businessman spotted by Maria belonged to a rental car company. It had been hired that Saturday by a West German citizen named Gotthard Lerch. While hiring the car, Lerch had provided a copy of his passport as proof of identity. Kumar’s asset had made enquiries with associates in Hanau, where Lerch lived. Lerch was the sales manager at Leybold Heraeus, a West German engineering firm. Further enquiries revealed that Leybold Heraeus supplied vacuum pumps, gas purification systems and valves to a wide variety of companies and government facilities in western Europe. One name stood out in the list of Leybold Heraeus’s customers: URENCO.

  FOUR

  Almeida’s invitation had caught Mishra off guard. The two of them had known each other for years, and yet this was the first time they would socialise together. He had tried to decline but the old man would not take no for an answer. Seeing Sablok and Arora waiting for him at the old man’s apartment had bewildered him even more.

  ‘This is an ambush,’ he remarked when Almeida introduced him to Arora.

  Almeida made to speak but Arora was swifter off the blocks. ‘I might as well say it before the Chief does: the only thing I could credibly ambush, sir, is a seekh kabab,’ he said, drawing a sharp laugh from his boss.

  Much to Sablok’s delight, Almeida opened an eighteen-year-old single malt for the occasion.

  ‘I’d like plain water, if you don’t mind,’ Mishra said, declining the drink. ‘Alcohol causes my arthritis to flare up,’ he explained, a pained expression on his face.

  ‘Whatever you say, Mishraji,’ Almeida said, pouring water into his glass.

  Mishra declined the ice cubes as well.

  When all the glasses were full, Almeida toasted Malathi.

  ‘She was our Resident at The Hague,’ he said to Mishra, sipping and then setting his glass on the table.

  Mishra looked at him, his eyebrows raised. The use of past tense seemed odd.

  ‘She was murdered while tracking Abdul Qadeer Khan in Amsterdam, sir,’ Sablok filled him in. ‘She was the one who enabled us to identify Khan. She managed the surveillance operation on his house and uncovered his handler, then recruited a Dutch colleague of Khan’s and built up a strong case for eliminating Khan himself.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear of her death. There aren’t too many women in our profession, not spymasters anyway. She must have been exceptional,’ Mishra said with feeling.

  Almeida nodded. ‘She was.’ Then, after a moment’s pause, he continued, ‘I am afraid that everything she did—including the ultimate sacrifice she made—will have been in vain unless we take this affair to its logical conclusion.’

  ‘Ah! Hence the invitation,’ Mishra said.

  ‘Yes, sir. We wanted to brief you on our efforts and results. With your kind permission, sirs,’ Arora said. Seeing both Section Chiefs nod assent, he began by recalling the dossier prepared by Malathi. Touching upon the evidence it included, he segued into his meeting at the Dutch ministry.

  ‘Why did you take this evidence to the Dutch instead of acting on it yourselves?’ Mishra asked, interrupting Arora.

  ‘Our request for authorising action against Khan was turned down,’ Almeida said.

  ‘I’m surprised you sought permission, Chief,’ Mishra said.

  Almeida looked at his colleague for a few moments, wondering if there was genuine surprise behind those words or if they were a taunt of some sort.

  ‘For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been,’ Almeida finally replied. ‘The decision was made with the best of intentions, one of which was concern for protecting Malathi.’ Then his voice seemed to waver. ‘In hindsight it was not particularly clever of me to do what I did, and that shall be my cross to bear for whatever time is left.’

  The emotive reply made Mishra uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...well, why did they decline authorisation?’

  ‘The request was pending with the powers that be when State of Uttar Pradesh versus Raj Narain happened and the Emergency was imposed last year.’

  Almeida waited to see Mishra’s reaction. The Chief of the Pakistan section appeared sympathetic. Seizing the opportunity, Almeida turned to Arora and nodded, indicating for him to continue.

  ‘The Dutch did nothing. Well, it would still have been okay if they did precisely nothing. Instead, they took Khan from the planning department, where he had access to all classified documents, and placed him in another, lesser unit. A department of little consequence. Khan’s handler read the situation and extracted him late last year.’

  ‘That was when I approached you with that request for placing Khan under surveillance in Karachi,’ Almeida added.

  ‘Look, Bhutto’s grip is weakening. And with the Sheikh’s assassination last year, my section is overtasked and underfunded. Every day there is a new request from our lords and masters. Believe me, we tried. I personally ordered the deployment of five agents to keep tabs on Khan’s house and the houses of his closest relatives, and even ordered one of our highest placed agents to poke around in different ministries: nobody would say a word. They’re meticulous to the extreme in screening him. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bhutto keeps him locked up in the same cupboard where he keeps Ayub Khan’s balls,’ Mishra protested. Although his face did not show it, there was no mistaking the annoyance of professional failure.

  Almeida held up his hands in conciliation.

  ‘Forgive me, I did not mean it as criticism, Mishra sahab. It was only to provide Laurel and Hardy here with some context which they might not have had earlier,’ he said, then asked Arora to continue.

  ‘Even with detailed designs for centrifuges, Pakistan cannot build them by themselves. They lack the engineering skills and industrial backbone required for it. Their only option, really, is to import all the components, then assemble them in Pakistan. That is exactly what they have been doing for the past year. While our attention was focused on Khan, their Resident in Brussels got caught trying to buy a restricted component that was being watched by the Dutch government. He was expelled by the Belgians, of course. But since then the Pakistanis have changed their modus operandi. We believe they have scaled back the involvement of their Residents, and are instead using members of the Pakistani diaspora to purchase those components and ship them to Pakistan.’

  ‘What are your sources?’ Mishra asked.

  ‘Our own analysis, sir,’ Arora said, trying to parry the question.

  ‘Analysis is always based on data, Mr Arora. From where did you get the dat
a that led to that conclusion?’

  Arora looked to Almeida for instruction. Almeida nodded.

  ‘Come on, Captain,’ Arora said to Sablok, ‘We both need a cigarette.’

  When they had exited the apartment, Almeida turned to his guest.

  ‘Malathi was murdered by Tahir Hussain, their Paris Resident. Our information about their current modus operandi comes from him,’ he said without much fanfare.

  Mishra’s eyes widened. Then he smiled, a half-hearted drawing of lips on a hard, ascetic face.

  ‘They wouldn’t authorise action against Khan, a civilian, but they let you move against a Resident?’ he asked, doing a decent job of masking the fact that he already knew the answer, or at least suspected it. Almeida shook his head in a slow, catlike fashion. Mishra laughed.

  ‘Where is he now?’ he asked, salivating at the thought of interrogating an ISI spymaster.

  ‘Somewhere in France. I did not care to find out the exact location of the corpse.’

  ‘You had one of their Residents murdered? Chief Almeida, the consequences—should this get out—would be terrible! What if they decide to retaliate by murdering one of our Residents?’

  ‘Then we will murder two of theirs. And so on and so forth. Remember, Mishraji, we did not draw blood first. They killed Malathi,’ Almeida shot back.

  Mishra took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m sure you considered the consequences very carefully,’ he said finally, receiving a nod in confirmation. ‘Was he interrogated?’

  ‘In situ.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Long enough.’

  Mishra raised an eyebrow, so Almeida added, ‘We used chemicals to draw the answers out.’

  Seeing Mishra’s eyes light up at the mention of chemicals, Almeida offered to introduce him to a helpful psychiatrist right there in Delhi who would provide injectable cocktails, no questions asked.

  ‘Did Hussain confirm that Residents have been pulled back from the operation?’

  ‘He was the source,’ Almeida answered.

  ‘Then there is no corroboration,’ Mishra remarked.

  ‘Surveillance corroborates it,’ Almeida countered, ‘and that will have to do. I don’t see myself ordering another such interrogation merely for corroboration.’

  Mishra lapsed into silence for a while, his mind consumed by the bizarre turn of events. The recklessness of the action at once appealed to and worried him. Audacity on the part of case officers usually got agents killed, or worse. He had once almost suffered a grim fate on the outskirts of Lahore, en route to Hafizabad, because of an absurdly ambitious order from his Section Chief. And yet now he found it easy to understand the desire for revenge and could sympathise with how it could drive a man to risk a life’s worth of effort on a righteous act.

  ‘I would like a transcript of the interrogation,’ he finally said, quickly adding, ‘assuming you need something from me, of course.’

  ‘When the Captain came to us with that cable, we were able to find Khan by combing through university records and following it up with clever field work. It took us months, but we got there because we were dealing with a few hundred suspects—physicists or engineers educated in The Netherlands. Now that they have, in a way, democratised the operation, we are well and truly buggered. The scale is much larger now: their recruits could be any Pakistani in UK, France, Spain, West Germany, Austria; anywhere in Western Europe, in fact. We do not have any leads at all, so we must approach this from the root; the leaves are too numerous.’

  ‘The transcript,’ Mishra reminded him.

  ‘There is none. We have prepared an exhaustive verbal brief for you, though.’

  He wasn’t about to give away the crown jewels.

  When Mishra showed interest, Almeida walked over to the balcony and called Arora and Sablok back upstairs.

  For an hour and a half they briefed Mishra on the interrogation of Tahir Hussain, taking care to leave out operational details like time and location. Most of all, on strict instructions from Almeida, they avoided indicating who had abducted, interrogated, and murdered him. The act was attributed, instead, to “our agents”. Mishra was intrigued by the use of anaesthetics to abduct someone and had many questions about the efficacy of the approach. Sablok and Arora had agreed that Arora would answer questions about the operation in order to avoid any chance of Sablok accidentally using the first person in narrating how Hussain had been subdued.

  After all of Mishra’s questions had been answered, Almeida once again asked him for his help and mentioned that Sablok and Arora had thought of an alternate method that could help break through the screen around Khan.

  ‘We would like to focus your agents’ efforts on identifying the location of their centrifuge facility, sir,’ Arora said.

  ‘Their Atomic Commission has many offices in Karachi. We’ll look into their buildings,’ Mishra replied.

  ‘The facility won’t be in Karachi, sir. Certainly not in one of their offices,’ Sablok said. ‘The plant in the Netherlands, which they’re copying at a larger scale, is spread across fifty acres. Since Pakistan plans to enrich uranium for weapons production, which entails additional effort, we estimate that they would need at least a hundred acres, and that’s assuming that they match the Dutch in efficiency of the process. They’ll also keep it out of their cities and any areas frequented by foreign nationals.’

  Mishra let out a shrill, barking laugh.

  ‘Is that all, Captain? Find a few hundred acres of rural land in Pakistan! Their army owns half the land in that country already. They could set it up anywhere,’ he said.

  ‘Well, if anyone can find a needle in a haystack, it is your people,’ Almeida interjected, getting wary of the tone Mishra used.

  Mishra shook his head.

  ‘The atomic bomb programme is directed by Bhutto’s own office. There are no intermediary departments. We have no sources in the PMO that could be tapped for these details. Your method is well and good, but unless I know which haystack to look into, and unless I think that I can manage to get someone close enough to try, I cannot sanction such an effort. Narrow the parameters, gentlemen,’ Mishra said to Sablok and Arora. ‘When we have a reasonably narrow area to search, I’ll see to it that all available resources are devoted to it.’

  Before his subordinates could speak, Almeida seized the opening offered. ‘That is only fair,’ he said. ‘You two are to find a way to identify the general area of the facility using indirect data of some kind. When we have that, we will seek Chief Mishra’s help once again. Penetrating the PMO is a fool’s errand. We cannot expect a positive outcome by asking the Pakistan section to perform miracles on command.’

  Then, turning to Mishra, he proposed meeting again at his apartment in a month’s time.

  ‘Presumably, we will have something concrete worked out by then for your people to pursue.’

  The purpose of the meeting had been to gauge Mishra’s reaction. Even though Almeida had observed conflicted feelings in Mishra’s response to the truth about Hussain, there had been nothing to indicate outright rejection or disapproval. His response to Sablok’s explanation of his approach had been harsher than anticipated, but the focus of his argument had been on the effectiveness of that approach, not the need for such an effort. That suggested to Almeida that Mishra had given it careful thought, even though the conversation had flowed swiftly. He felt optimistic that a better-calibrated plan of action would receive the support they needed from the Pakistan section. It remained to be seen if Mishra would use what he knew about Hussain to cut him down when they next fought for a budgetary increase. That particular sword would continue to dangle over Almeida for some time but he would cross that bridge when he came to it.

  ***

  Tremors tickled Sablok’s hand as groundnut-sized raindrops slammed onto the umbrella. He walked at a brisk clip from
the aircraft, an old Ilyushin that had ferried him and a gaggle of Air Force brass to Bombay, and made his way towards the terminal at Santacruz. It was approaching eight hours since Almeida had read Mishra in on what was delicately referred to as their “independent initiative”. Four hours spent in the cramped cockpit trying to stay out of the pilot’s and co-pilot’s way, two-and-a-half hours on the tarmac waiting for some two-star or three-star officer to arrive, and ninety minutes of flying. It was all rewarded when the plane broke through the clouds somewhere above northern Maharashtra to an orgy of orange, purple and blue as the sun rose. Between them the passengers and the pilots had spent a century flying, and yet Sablok wasn’t the only one to forget, for a moment, to exhale.

  The man he was there to meet was a physicist with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Sablok and Arora had consulted Dr Saha the previous year when Saha was deputed to the Prime Minister’s Office, and the soft-spoken physicist had been key to their understanding of how a metallurgist in the Netherlands could be crucial to Pakistan’s quest to acquire nuclear weapons. Phone calls made after Mishra’s departure the previous night had failed to reach Saha at the guest house, and follow up enquiries with the Department of Atomic Energy revealed that Saha had returned to BARC prematurely. Almeida had decided that vetting Saha’s successor at the PMO and then reading him in would waste valuable time. Besides, there was no reason to assume that he would know enough about gas centrifuges to be able to advise them. Dispatching Sablok to interview Saha was easier.

  He was received outside Arrivals at Santacruz by the BARC head of security who deposited him in a quiet little room in Trombay an hour later. Sablok found himself fighting a mild hangover in the presence of the Director of the Nuclear Fuels Group. The distinguished old man extended an assurance of complete cooperation in a tone that made his feelings about the intrusion unmistakably clear. After the Director had left, Saha entered the room rubbing the back of his slender neck, then stood facing Sablok, his arms crossed before him. Even so, he made an effort at cordiality that Sablok appreciated.