‘What if they just decide to deploy diesel generators?’
‘The electricity requirements are too large to be serviced by generators, sir.’
Almeida yawned, then looked painfully embarrassed.
‘Apologies, Jugs. It has been a long week,’ he murmured. ‘So you go after the electricity companies. How will you begin?’
‘We will begin by trying to identify all substations that have been built recently...in the past two years—’
‘And will you target both the electricity companies in Pakistan? Karachi Electric and whatsitsname?’
‘WAPDA, sir. We are inclined to begin with Karachi first. That’s where Migule travelled, and Kumar’s asset in Brinker has also suggested Karachi.’
‘Humbug. Karachi is the only port they have, Jugs. Brinker cannot exactly ship it to Hyderabad or Peshawar, can they? Not if they abide by the definition of “ship” as a verb. And besides, just because Mishra’s people lost track of Migule somewhere in Karachi does not mean that Migule remained in Karachi. They could have flown him to Islamabad or any other part of Pakistan after making sure they had shaken his tail.’
‘Abdul Qadeer Khan travelled to Schiphol from Karachi, sir, and then he travelled back. We ought to begin with Karachi, sir.’ Arora ploughed on, before Almeida could raise further objections, ‘Karachi Electric serves the city of Karachi and its surrounding areas. WAPDA serves every other part of Pakistan. We think combing through Karachi’s information will take far less time—’
‘Does it matter how much or how little time you spend if you do the wrong thing, Arora?’
‘No, sir. But we have to begin somewhere.’
Almeida slumped back into his chair.
‘Fine. Begin with the bloody hellhole if Mishra will let you,’ he said. ‘On your way out tell my secretary I do not wish to be disturbed till evening.’
‘It’s a little after 8 p.m., sir,’ Arora said, hesitating.
‘Then she will not be there outside my office, will she?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Capital news, Arora! You are freed from the burden of conveying that message. Go stuff yourself full of those seekh kababs you so love. Good night.’
***
Johnnie Walker and US Dollars—currencies accepted across the world—opened up the offices of Karachi Electric for the Wing’s networks in short order. A copy of every document requested found its way through an intricate web of cut-outs to the Resident at the consulate in Karachi less than three weeks after Mishra had ordered Karachi Electric’s infiltration. Dollars and bottles flowed in the opposite direction, with each of the cut-outs deducting a small percentage for his efforts. When the files reached New Delhi in an unusually large diplomatic pouch, it needed two people to carry them down to the basement of South Block where they were carefully placed in the trunk of a Hindustan Ambassador to be driven to Main and delivered to the chief of the Pakistan section. When Mishra was informed of the volume of documents headed his way, he had them delivered directly to Arora and Sablok’s cabin. As far as he was concerned, this was still Almeida’s operation. He wasn’t about to take it over.
‘Of course he sent them here. Who better to do the boring work of reading each word written on thousands of pages by a few half-literate fools in Karachi than Arora and Sablok,’ Arora remarked when the files reached their cabin. ‘Why did I even expect anything else?’
‘Because you’re getting soft and sentimental as you age?’ Sablok quipped, grinning. ‘Let’s find the bastards,’ he added a moment later.
Not all the documents were in English. Arora and Sablok managed to decipher those in Urdu themselves, but a significant portion were in Sindhi written in Nasta’liq script. For these they needed a translator from the Wing’s training centre south of Delhi. It took Arora and Sablok a fortnight to work their way through each and every page twice, searching for any clue that would tell them where the Pakistani centrifuges were being deployed. In the end it fell upon Arora to brief Almeida. He trudged to the section chief’s office.
‘We couldn’t find anything in the Karachi papers, chief,’ he said.
‘Pardon me, Case Officer Arora, I do not believe that I heard you correctly. Would you mind repeating yourself? A little louder this time, please,’ Almeida replied.
The gin bottle stood empty on the desk before him.
‘We couldn’t find anything in the Karachi papers, sir,’ Arora repeated.
‘I see. Pity. What do you propose we do now?’
Arora cleared his throat. He felt parched.
‘May I have something to drink, boss?’
‘Pour yourself some water—that jug over there should have some.’
Arora shot his boss a look. Almeida glared back.
‘I ask again: what do you propose we do now?’
‘We infiltrate WAPDA, sir,’ Arora replied.
‘We?’
‘We request Chief Mishra to infiltrate WAPDA for us, sir,’ Arora corrected himself.
‘That is an excellent proposal, Jugs. Brilliant work. Utterly brilliant. Is it not, however, a tad late? We should have done this weeks ago, right around the time when we asked him to infiltrate Karachi Electric for us. I wonder, though, if he will entertain our request. After all, if he came to me asking for one thing after another I would not be inclined to jump at his every command. Would you?’
Arora averted his gaze and looked down at his feet. Almeida noticed the folds of his chin bunch up.
‘You have become fat, Jugs. Forgive me, fatter. Transforming into a complete and utter slob, are we?’ Almeida remarked. Then he waited for Arora’s response.
The Case Officer kept his eyes fixed on his own toes. The boss was in one of his moods. Speaking would just prolong the agonising tirade. A minute passed. Then two. Finally Almeida lost patience.
‘The request to Chief Mishra will be in my name, of course. I am, after all, ultimately responsible for everything you do. But I will not go and make a fool of myself. That honour belongs to you. Go convince him to expend resources. He will have questions about why we did not ask him to infiltrate WAPDA earlier. That much is certain. Answer them. Be persuasive. Be charming. Be polite. God save you from my wrath if he refuses.’
Arora rushed out of Almeida’s office and went straight to Mishra’s. The latter’s secretary made him wait outside for half an hour before announcing his arrival. He was shown in ten minutes later.
‘How goes the hunt for the centrifuges?’ Mishra asked, glancing up from a particularly thick file.
‘Quite well, sir. We have managed to eliminate Karachi and its surrounding areas from our list of probable locations,’ Arora replied.
That drew a polite laugh from the section chief that did not reflect in the expression in his eyes.
‘I suppose you’re here now to ask me to get you similar documents from WAPDA,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir,’ Arora said, gulping audibly.
‘How confident are you this time?’
‘Pardon me, sir?’
‘How confident are you, Mr Arora, that this intelligence from WAPDA will answer our questions? As confident as you were about Karachi?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then why did you first ask me to infiltrate just Karachi Electric? Surely you knew the odds back then. What changed?’
‘We asked for Karachi Electric first, sir, because three incidents in Europe all pointed to Karachi being the location. First, Khan flew to Schiphol from Karachi and flew back to it. Second, Albrecht Migule flew down to Karachi to meet the Pakistanis—your team had him under surveillance for a brief part of his stay there. The third and final confirmation was that the supplier Khan met at The Hague shipped equipment to Karachi.’
‘That shipment disappeared from the port before we could place it under surveillance,’ Mishra replied. ‘It appea
rs the ship had docked two days before word got out and they began unloading it officially.’
‘Yes, sir. I understand. Water under the bridge. But given all these incidents happened in Karachi, it was my opinion that Karachi was more likely to be the location, sir. Which is why I requested you to infiltrate Karachi Electric.’
Mishra smiled in a way that conveyed, quite precisely, that he was not amused.
‘Did Chief Almeida agree with your assessment about Karachi back then?’
‘No, sir. He did not.’
Mishra’s expression softened.
‘And yet he let you make that request. Curious. Anyway, I will order the infiltration of WAPDA. Work is worship, after all.’
As Arora was leaving, Mishra called out to him.
‘For your sake, Mr Arora, I hope you find at WAPDA what you’re looking for. I don’t think Chief Almeida will be pleased if you don’t.’
But WAPDA proved a tough nut to crack. Headquartered in Lahore, it served the rest of Pakistan—every city and town outside of Karachi and a few surrounding areas. On paper it was another government department. Like others it too had vulnerabilities that could be targeted. The Resident at Lahore deployed one of his networks to infiltrate it the day after Mishra’s orders came through. But two weeks later his network had failed to even identify a potential source. The offices on the third floor of the building on Charing Cross in Lahore remained immune to greenbacks and Scotch.
‘If you cannot recruit someone in an electrician’s office,’ an incensed Mishra cabled Lahore, ‘then perhaps it is time for you to find a more suitable vocation.’
Stung and terrified, the Resident dipped into his contingency fund and tried again, this time with a larger carrot. But his network was simply unable to gain a foothold. There was nothing special about WAPDA, and infiltration should have been trivial. He deployed two veterans of espionage and two assets he had recently recruited. None of them were able to get their hands on a single sheet of paper. The Resident didn’t fancy being posted to a malarial outpost in Africa, so instead of conveying bad news again to Mishra he pivoted to WAPDA’s parent ministry. In the absence of the intelligence requested, the least he could do, the Resident reasoned, was deliver a means of procuring it. With its broader structure, redundant staffing, and endemic corruption, the ministry yielded rather swiftly to his network’s ministrations. The Resident was able, within a week, to send personnel files of senior WAPDA officials—past and present—to New Delhi. This time Mishra kept the files to himself. Instead of involving Arora and Sablok, he ordered analysts from his own section to perform a vulnerability assessment on the personnel listed in those files.
Two former officials stood out: a retired engineer and a serving Brigadier. Mishra directed the Resident at Islamabad to turn the engineer with blackmail and money. But just as the Resident began his approach, the engineer died in a gruesome traffic accident. Frustrated, Mishra went to see Almeida in his office.
‘We have identified a potential source into WAPDA,’ he began. ‘He is a serving Brigadier.’
‘Does the Pakistan Army staff utilities?’ Almeida asked, incredulous.
‘Not exactly. They are known to accommodate officers in such positions when it is inconvenient to post them elsewhere. I don’t have all the details about his career—we only have his WAPDA file, not the one from their army’s MS branch. So I cannot speculate.’
‘I see. Why are you telling me this? This is not a status report, I am sure of that.’
‘The Brigadier lives in Risalpur, but his vulnerability lives in London.’
‘A son?’
‘Daughter,’ Mishra said, handing over a brief he had personally prepared. It contained all the details Almeida would need to track down the Brigadier’s daughter in London, and not a single sentence more.
Almeida read the brief carefully. As he reached the end, he smiled.
‘Precise and to the point. We will look into this,’ Almeida promised him.
Later that night when most of the rooms and corridors were dark and empty, Almeida retrieved a file labelled LONDON from his safe. The first section contained details of every asset in the Resident’s networks there. He skimmed through each entry. Unable to find exactly what he was looking for, he turned to the next section. The pages of this section held details of every asset recruited by the illegals in the UK. Most of them were middle-aged or older. The few that were of a suitable age tended to be in the wrong profession. He flicked ahead to the next page and then to the page after that, grimacing, beginning to lose patience. Nissa’s network was the smallest—just two pages worth of assets. The first page was unfruitful, but he stopped halfway through the second page and read one particular asset’s profile carefully. Then he composed a cable to London.
SEVEN
Born in Notting Hill to Pakistani parents, Omar Khan lost his father—an engineer—to a knifing incident a few days after the race riots of ‘58. It was a week after his fifth birthday. With her husband dead and a child to raise, Omar’s mother—who had been a housewife till then—was forced to move out of the expensive rental accommodation in Notting Hill. She found a small apartment for them in Southall, and employment with the neighbourhood grocer, an Englishman who affectionately referred to Omar as “the little Paki”. As he grew older and understood race, Omar began to hate the slur. But the fear of his mother losing her job kept him quiet about it. He lost the friends he had at Notting Hill and never made new ones in Southall. With his mother gone every afternoon and evening and his father dead, Omar turned inward, became less sociable and, like some orphans do, developed an unhealthy distrust of everyone except his mother. By the time he was eight he was completely friendless. He found solace in books, and was reading ahead of his grade by the time he was ten. At seventeen he was admitted to the godless college at Gower Street as a student of economics, a rare moment of happiness for the family. At twenty-one he was about to begin studying for a master’s degree when his maternal grandfather fell ill. His mother rushed to her father’s side, arriving in Lahore just as the anti-Ahmadiyya paroxysm of 1974 began in Pakistan. By the time it ended, it had consumed both Omar’s mother and grandfather. Bereft of the only family he had, Omar found himself adrift in the foreign land of his birth, and filled with an impotent fury. Neither his mother nor his grandfather had even been Ahmadiyya. Yet the mob had found them, the mob had decided they seemed different, and the mob hadn’t cared for details. Equally unable to relate to the society on whose fringes he had been brought up, he found support in the only other brown student in his department. A year senior to him, she was about to complete the master’s degree that he had just joined. As already strained finances tightened further and he was forced to let go of the apartment he had grown up in, she helped him out with a tidy sum of money.
‘It’s from my uncle,’ Nissa had said. ‘He’s a surgeon.’
Over the remainder of 1974 and much of 1975, with a dexterity that would have made her imaginary uncle proud, she had rearranged Omar’s beliefs. The hatred for the Pakistani state that his mother’s death had engendered had been subtly amplified, as had his distrust of everyone else.
In 1976 she had initiated him into her network by asking him to break into the rooms of a Pakistani diplomat, who had been seconded for a short-term course to their college, and take photographs of any documents he found. Omar had shown no hesitation.
It was early in 1977 when Nissa went to meet him.
‘How would you like to exact revenge on the Pakistani state?’ she asked him. When he raised no objection, she explained the plan of using Haniya—the Pakistani Brigadier’s daughter—to get information that would hurt the Pakistanis.
‘There’s fifty thousand pounds in it for you if you do this job,’ she added. Not that he needed much by way of encouragement; the prospect of hurting the very country that had let his mother be lynched was motivation enough.
<
br /> ‘Your toughest challenge will be the relationship,’ she warned him. ‘If you manage to get intimate with her, getting her father to give you the information we need will be easy.’
‘What kind of information?’
‘Mostly about electricity supply,’ she replied. ‘You can claim that you need it for your thesis. It’ll be easy. What sort of a man would refuse such a trifling request from the man his daughter wants to marry?’
He asked her for details about Haniya. She briefed him for an hour and half about her.
‘It shouldn’t take you more than a few weeks, if that,’ Nissa said. ‘Here’s ten thousand for expenses,’ she added, handing him a thick packet.
Weeks turned into months. With the brief Nissa had given him, and with her help, Omar managed to get into a relationship with Haniya. Acting love-struck, he even proposed marriage. She accepted, but her parents sounded less than thrilled when she told them over the phone. First they fought with her. Then they fought with each other. All the while Nissa kept slipping him money. He rented a flat in Camden, and a defiant Haniya moved in with him. However, what had begun as an elaborate act on his part began floundering, listing port-side and starboard as Omar grappled with inner conflict. He still hated the Pakistani state and wanted to see it suffer. But he no longer saw Haniya as a part of it. If anything, he reasoned, she was just as much a victim of its regressive ways as he was. The documents began receding from his thoughts.
In April he mentioned his doubts to Nissa, hoping to find a sympathetic listener. It had been an exhausting week. Haniya had spent most of it in tears, and her weariness had sapped him of strength.
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