Mishra stared at him in silence. Almeida couldn’t quite decide if Mishra was making up his mind about what to say next or if he was just pausing for effect.
‘If we cannot trust each other then we have no hope of succeeding,’ Mishra said, finally.
Almeida nodded, then chuckled. ‘Have you ever heard of spymasters trusting each other unconditionally?’ he asked.
That brought a smile to Mishra’s face. This time it looked more like a grimace.
‘And yet we must. Perhaps if we agreed to avoid any...precipitate action, as you said earlier, without consulting each other...’
Almeida nodded. ‘We can begin with that,’ he said.
***
Four weeks had elapsed since Arora’s cable ordering the infiltration of the FDO had emerged from Amit Kumar’s Teletext. In that time Kumar had oriented an entire network to finding a vulnerability at the FDO that could be exploited. Unfortunately all he had to show for the thousands of dollars spent and the risks taken was a half-hearted ‘yes’ by a security officer who manned the gate to one of their facilities. The prospect had seemed promising at first, and Kumar had agreed to spend a few thousand dollars more. But further enquiries by his network revealed that the security officer in question guarded only an ancillary facility which housed nothing of consequence. Time was running out for Kumar and he knew it. Every few days a new cable would arrive, evidence of New Delhi’s growing impatience. The last few verbalised Arora’s frustration at the lack of progress in no uncertain terms.
‘Your predecessor infiltrated intelligence agencies. If you cannot infiltrate a scientific laboratory then perhaps we should consider if a replacement will have better luck,’ the last cable began. ‘New Delhi may be a more suitable arena for you to deploy your skills,’ Arora had continued. Subtlety, apparently, was not one of his strong points.
‘Bastard! Who does he think he is to threaten me like this? Almeida ordered me to avoid unnecessary risks when he posted me here,’ Kumar murmured. He thought about writing a reply clearly stating that the Section Chief had instructed him to avoid gambling with the lives of his assets. But just as quickly as the notion formed in his mind, he was struck by the realisation that Arora would only say something like this if he had Almeida’s support.
‘Why would Almeida allow him to make these demands knowing fully well that he himself ordered me to maintain a low profile?’ Kumar said to himself. ‘What is he driving at? What is his game? Does he want to deny all knowledge in case something goes wrong? Is that why he is getting Arora to give these orders?’
He was seated in his office. It was late evening on a Thursday—one of many that had flown by ever since Abdul Qadeer Khan had made an appearance at The Hague. There was nobody else there.
In the silence that followed, he answered himself, ‘Or is Arora gunning for my job? He’s old, so it’s obviously not for himself. But weren’t there rumours about him mentoring someone? Perhaps Arora wants me out of The Hague so that he can replace me with his protégé.’
The fact remained that disappointing the Section Chief tended to have a debilitating effect on foreign postings. The stink of being recalled would be hard to wash off. At the same time he had to be wary of Arora’s orders. They were contrary to what Almeida had told him in person. And while ambiguity was something Kumar could cope with, this contradiction of intent boggled his mind. Perhaps that had been Arora’s intent all along: a logical trap where Kumar was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.
In desperation he wrote Almeida a long cable arguing, in language that was carefully non-confrontational, that what Arora was demanding Kumar do was a fool’s errand.
‘Infiltrating the FDO and recruiting an asset who is appropriately located in the organisation to report on surplus equipment sales would require many pieces to fall into place, primarily by luck. My network would have to take risks that I feel are not justified given the very low probability of success,’ he wrote in conclusion.
Moments after he transmitted it, he was overcome by regret and spent the next twenty-four hours in fearful anticipation of an electronic tongue-lashing. Instead, New Delhi went silent.
***
‘What the hell does he mean it’s a fool’s errand?’ Arora spluttered.
He was standing across the table in Chief Almeida’s office, the cable from The Hague in one hand and its decoded equivalent in the other. Having browbeaten Almeida’s secretary into letting him in on urgent business, he had barely contained himself till the door slammed shut behind him. Almeida was in the middle of reading a memo. He raised a hand without bothering to look, and silenced Arora. Then he pointed to the bottle of gin that stood in a corner of the small mahogany table to Arora’s left before lowering his hand to turn a page. Arora swallowed hard and began pouring gin into one of Almeida’s expensive-looking crystal tumblers.
‘Thank you. Pour one for yourself too,’ Almeida said.
Arora glanced at the bearded creature sitting back, his eyes on the file in front of him. Suddenly feeling old and weary, Arora slumped into one of the chairs before him and drank.
‘Now,’ said Almeida looking up a few moments later and taking the glass Arora offered, ‘about that errand.’
Arora tried to work himself into the same sense of outrage that had propelled him into the Chief’s office. He leaned forward on the desk and passed the cable and its decoded counterpart to Almeida.
‘I believe he means that the task has no hope of succeeding. That is the accepted meaning of fool’s errand,’ Almeida finally said, a tired smile on his face.
Arora thought the beard looked scraggy today and didn’t do as good a job of hiding the bony face underneath as it usually did.
‘I know what it means—’
‘Calm down, Jugs. If you let yourself get aggravated this way you will not last another decade.’
‘How am I supposed to calm down, boss? This person refuses to do his job!’
Almeida stared at Arora, his eyebrows raised in question.
‘We’ve asked him to infiltrate the FDO. He is refusing to do that,’ Arora offered.
‘Is he refusing or is he unable? Or is he merely offering a realistic assessment by stating that the task is unlikely to succeed? We have spent a lifetime working in the narrow grey band that lies between shadow and light, Arora. Let us not expect our subordinates to demonstrate the sort of blind obedience that arises from the tyranny of black or white. Pour yourself another drink.’
‘No, thank you sir.’
‘Ah! In a touchy mood, are we?’
Arora didn’t reply.
‘Well, what would you like to do?’ Almeida asked. ‘Sack him? Threaten him? Recall him to New Delhi?’
‘Replacing him at this stage in the operation would be foolish, sir.’
‘Indeed.’
‘But you could lean on him to get this done.’
‘I do not lean on Residents, Jugs. I order them to do things. There is a difference. Perhaps I have made that distinction far too subtle with my behaviour over the recent past, and for the good of my section I must consider correcting myself,’ Almeida snapped.
Arora noticed the change in Almeida’s tone and sat straighter in his chair.
‘Yes, I meant you could order him to infiltrate the FDO, sir.’
‘And what will that accomplish? His assessment is that he cannot do it without taking unacceptable risks. Do we have better intelligence sitting thousands of miles away here in New Delhi than he does sitting in an office a few miles from that facility?’
‘He is being too cautious, sir,’ Arora pleaded.
‘Perhaps he is, but that is his nature. How many adults do you know, Arora, who have been able to change their own fundamental nature?’
‘For god’s sake, Chief, Malathi infiltrated the Ministry of the Interior! This fool won’t even try to infiltrate
a second-rate research organisation.’
‘The argument could be made—and it has been made by those who should know better—that Malathi accepted risks a more cautious Resident would not have. And these arguments have been carried forward to the conclusion—and I am paraphrasing here—that perhaps it was this lack of caution that ultimately led to her demise. You see, Arora, if the Resident took unnecessary risks then her death cannot be pinned on a leadership that sat on what should have been a simple yes-or-no decision. And the leadership is never to blame, nor is the nickel-plated steel frame of India, my boy. Never forget that. The moment you feel the urge to apportion blame to the nickel-plated steel frame of India, take a deep breath and reconsider the very foundation of your beliefs. Then forget you ever entertained such a foolish idea. The blame falls upon the Resident who took risks when the nickel-plated steel frame of India says she should not have, never mind the fact that this profession of ours exists to take calculated risks.’
Arora bristled. ‘She died because our bloody leaders couldn’t stop worrying about their own political careers for five minutes and take a decision in the national interest!’
Almeida sighed, and suddenly it seemed to Arora that his mentor was deflating before his very eyes.
‘If the inquiry determines that the Resident was killed because of the reckless manner in which the operation was run, and if the powers that be find fault with the Resident’s own actions, and if they pin the blame for her death on your leadership, and if they insist that things must change, and if they are baying for blood, would you nominate a successor who readily takes risks or would you nominate someone who avoids risks like the plague, Jagjit?’
Arora couldn’t remember the last time Almeida had called him by his first name. There was a wistful look in the old man’s rheumy eyes, and Arora noticed deep lines and dark patches where there hadn’t been any.
‘Then what do we do, boss?’ Arora finally asked, the tone of his voice softening with every syllable.
‘We do what reasonable people do when told that something is not feasible. We ask him to suggest what is.’
***
The silence from New Delhi proved unnerving. By the time Amit Kumar’s Teletext came to life next, he had convinced himself that New Delhi was toying with him. But decoding the cable brought a little relief.
‘Suggest alternate plan of action,’ it said.
Kumar forced himself to wait five minutes before he keyed in the answer: ‘Infiltrating logistics companies with whom the FDO does business.’
‘Approved in principle,’ came the reply. ‘Send detailed plan of action. Do not initiate steps before further communication.’
It was about two days after New Delhi had approved his plan that Amit Kumar realised how, to use a term upon which his fauji brother-in-law often relied, he had “rogered” himself by inviting the task of zeroing in on a logistics company whose name he didn’t know. It would have been easy back in India.
‘Amit Kumar heads to the airport or seaport and bribes the Customs official in charge,’ he muttered to himself. ‘That gets him access to shipment manifests for the past few months. All Amit Kumar would then have to do is focus on the type of equipment he is interested in and identify the firms shipping it. There couldn’t be more than a handful of those. Easy.’
Then he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand a few times, making a series of splats not unlike that made by wet cloth that is being washed at a dhobi ghat.
‘And that would have been fine in India, you bloody idiot. But this isn’t a country that has a few badly underutilised ports. It is a whole lot of bloody ports that have a country of their own. Amsterdam! Groningen! Zeeland! And then there’s that monster of a port at Rotterdam. Every other family is engaged in trade and logistics...next time you’re struck by the urge to suggest something to the Jesuit, write it down on a piece of paper, encode it with one of these bloody pads, and burn the whole thing when you’re—’
Suddenly he realised he was alone in a closed room and shouting at himself. He felt like laughing, but the moment passed. There was nothing to be done except to find a way out of the mess he had landed himself in. The only other option was to prepare for an ignominious return to New Delhi.
Amit Kumar opened the safe in his office and retrieved his predecessor’s notes from the Abdul Qadeer Khan operation. Arora had provided them to him when he had popped into New Delhi to be properly read into that operation. He remembered reading a paragraph she wrote early on in the investigation just after she had identified Khan. Within it she had expressed doubts about which entity was Khan’s direct employer. Her argument was that the FDO was a subcontractor for URENCO, and many FDO employees worked at URENCO facilities. She had also reasoned that for a person of foreign origin, such as Khan, gaining employment at an entity like the FDO would be easier.
‘Security at the FDO is lax,’ she had written.
Amit Kumar smiled wistfully when he read those words. He read further. She wrote about the FDO being an ideal attack surface for any intelligence operative looking to infiltrate URENCO.
‘Had we stumbled upon Khan without knowing of the Pakistani scientists who flew to Schiphol to evaluate him, we would have believed that Khan had been infiltrated deliberately by the ISI. Conditions are perfect for such an operation here. The BVD appears to be napping, or perhaps it is just pretending to be asleep. Are there others?’
Amit Kumar read the last sentences over and over again, his attention drawn each time to the last word. It took a while but he finally felt like he had found a way.
‘If Khan worked for the FDO, then perhaps his colleague—that fellow who became Malathi’s asset, what’s his bloody name—worked for the FDO too,’ he said to himself.
Later that evening, after he had read every word she had written about the operation and thought the whole thing through, Kumar wrote a cable to Arora.
‘I think reactivating one of my predecessor’s assets, Frits Veerman, would yield us the information needed to identify exactly which logistics company the FDO uses,’ it began.
The next morning Arora briefed Almeida about Kumar’s plan.
‘I recommend we approve it,’ he added.
The old spymaster was furious.
‘Have you lost your mind?’ he shouted. ‘Veerman was a person of interest for the BVD at the time of Malathi’s death. The dossier we gave the Dutch government mentioned him by name, for heaven’s sake! Do you think the Dutch have forgotten about it already? Do you think that your Section Chief has become a doddering old fool and you can, consequently, recommend whatever you bloody well please? I may be old but I am not senile!’
Arora opened his mouth to speak, but Almeida cut him off.
‘Those questions were rhetorical. Keep your arguments to yourself. You will listen and you will do exactly as I say,’ Almeida said, flecks of spit flying into the air. ‘It baffles my mind that someone as experienced as you would be so cavalier as to recommend reactivating an asset that is known to a rival intelligence agency. These are not decisions to be taken lightly. And even if we find ourselves blessed with good fortune on this—which would be very unusual indeed—there still remain questions about the asset himself.’
He was breathing heavily now. He poured himself a glass of water and gulped greedily before beginning to excoriate Arora again.
‘Have you forgotten how Malathi broke him in order to get him to cooperate? She recorded audio, Jugs. We listened to those tapes,’ he lamented, his voice softer now. ‘Does he strike you as someone who could reasonably function as an asset while being scrutinised by the BVD? Frits Veerman was psychologically fragile when Malathi recruited him, and there is no reason to assume that he is no longer fragile today. Frankly, I am very disappointed that you would advise me to authorise this hare-brained idea. We will not—repeat—not approach Veerman under any circumstances. Is that clear?�
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Arora nodded.
‘Good. Convey this order verbatim to Kumar.’
‘I will, boss. But what do we do about the FDO? Kumar cannot infiltrate it, and after all this time the best approach he can think of is to reactivate Veerman. We cannot replace the man at this point, and you won’t authorise the Veerman approach. So what do we do?’
Almeida leaned back in his chair and, closing his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose as if relieving a headache. Arora waited, patient. At length, Almeida opened his eyes and looked at Arora.
‘This FDO is a scientific organisation, is it not?’ he asked.
‘It’s unclear, boss. One of Malathi’s cables referred to it as an engineering company, but another one said it was a research organisation,’ Arora replied.
‘I see. Well, in either case, they are more likely than not to have good connections with the world of academia. Which should make them more receptive to, and less suspicious of, a request from an academic of some sort.’
‘That would depend on the kind of request being made, boss,’ Arora said. ‘If I were the director of such an organisation and some academic sent me a letter with questions about what I do with surplus equipment—’
‘No, of course not. But what if an academic wrote to you asking questions not about your core business, not about those centrifuges you manufacture or whatever it is that FDO actually does, but about something ancillary to your business?’
‘Like logistics!’ Arora exclaimed.
‘Indeed. What if an economist wrote to you stating that they were researching certain aspects of the Dutch economy and were wondering if you’d answer a few questions about the logistics industry in general and your logistics partners in particular? Nothing about your business at all. Just about the organisations you hire to ship your product. And imagine if it were written in the form of a survey that, presumably, the economist was administering to many other organisations as well? Would you be inclined to answer it?’
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