The Prisoner

by Omar Shahid Hamid

  “Is he into money?”

  “A little bit here and there. Nothing like Maqsood Mahr.”

  “Sounds like an interesting fellow. I’ll have to meet him. But first, tell me about the area.”

  “In one word, it’s a tinderbox waiting to explode. The Pathans live on Pirabad Hill, the Bengalis and the Biharis live at the base of the hill. The communities have been at each other’s throats for years. On top of that the UF goondas moved in, and now they run the place like a feudal fiefdom.”

  “So where do I find these feudal lords?”

  “Their ward office is in an abandoned school halfway up the hill. They call it the Hajji Camp.”

  “What sort of a name is that?”

  “Because they say that going there is almost as good as going for Hajj. If you survive what they put you through, then God will surely absolve you of all your sins.”

  “Heh. Witty bastards, aren’t they? How’s the money in this thana?”

  “It used to be very good. There were a number of gambling and prostitution dens running in the area, but now they all pay the ward instead of the thana because they recognize that the real power lies there. The officers before you were afraid of offending the ward boss, so they never challenged that claim. They resorted to doing all the things that our mentor Chaudhry Latif used to warn us against, when we were probationary ASIs in Preedy.”

  “You mean they were taking drug money?”

  “Not just that. They also took money from cop killers to look the other way. And whatever other crumbs the ward boss chose to give to them.”

  “Madarchods. Heh. Old Chaudhry Latif was a wise man. He had his own moral code and never compromised on it through a lifetime of cleaning up the shit in this city.”

  “Yes, he was a good man.”

  “So, since all our problems stem from the ward office, let’s raid it.”

  “Akbar, are you serious? It’s virtually a fortress. They have a massive arms dump there, living quarters for their men and torture chambers in the basement. No SHO has ever raided the Hajji Camp.”

  “Good. All the better if we can recover some weapons from them.” Akbar saw the look of awe and horror on Constantine’s face and smiled. “Look Consendine, I didn’t come here to sit in this shitty little room for three months and be scared of my own fucking shadow. Either I’m going to stay in this area or these madarchods will. Now make me plans for the raid. I want to do it tonight. We’ll catch the bastards off-guard.”

  By nightfall the rain had finally let up, but the sky was pitch-black. Constantine had spent the time since his meeting with Akbar making preparations for the raid. The staff at the station, not accustomed to doing their jobs, were responding with a mixture of shock and awe as Constantine supervised them. They stared at him with wide-eyed bewilderment even when he gave the simplest of orders. A few hours and many curses later, Constantine was confident that he had restored a semblance of discipline to the station.

  He hadn’t seen Akbar since morning, but as there was a steady stream of visitors of varying backgrounds to and from his office, he assumed that Akbar had been inside all day long, getting some feedback on the area. It was approaching midnight, and he walked to the SHO’s room to apprise Akbar of the station’s state of near readiness. As he entered the room, he saw a figure dressed in tattered clothes with his back turned towards the door, taking off a filthy head cloth and placing it on the table. Constantine shook his head. It was shocking that a street beggar could walk into the SHO’s office like this without being challenged.

  He grabbed the man by the back of his neck. “Oye saale, where do you think you are? Is this your bloody bedroom that you feel you can comfortably undress here?”

  A smiling Akbar Khan turned around to face him. His normally immaculate moustache was smeared with mud and boot polish. “Well, maybe not my bedroom, but certainly my office.”

  “Akbar! I thought you were in your office the whole day! What have you been up to?”

  “I thought I’d go for a stroll in the area to get a feel of it. I called in one of my old trusted informants from the Cell, and he took me around. He gave me this costume as well. Like it?”

  “If you were walking around Orangi all day long and the wardias didn’t fill your body with holes, I’d say it’s a pretty good disguise. I came in to tell you that I’ve got the staff in some kind of order. I had actually called one of my informers to get the layout of the Hajji Camp. You can meet him if you want.”

  “No need. I’ve been right up to the gate. The guards even gave me ten rupees to get some bread. Don’t call your man. The fewer people who know, the better it is. By the way, I saw your efforts with the men: very impressive. I didn’t think this lot could be kicked into shape. So, if you’re ready, let’s load them up in the jeeps. You haven’t told them anything, right?”

  “No, of course not. We still don’t know how many of them are the UF’s people. They just know that they’re preparing for a raid, they don’t know where it’s going to be. But Akbar, that’s the point I wanted to make to you: let’s delay this for a couple of days until we have a chance to weed out the informers from our ranks. We’ll have a better understanding of the area and more confidence in the men. If we go in blindly like this, they are likely to ambush us. Also, let’s not go at this time. Look, all these wardia bastards are ayaash. They are all up drinking, gambling, and whoring late into the night. If we go now, they’ll be alert. If we delay the raid till just before dawn, there’s a chance we’ll catch most of them sleeping.”

  “I’ll grant you the point about the timing of the raid. But I’m not going to delay. We will go today. These wardia bastards must see that there’s a new SHO in here, and they should get to know that I’m not afraid to go after them. Otherwise we’ll never get rid of them.”

  A few hours later, the rickety old police pickup climbed up the single dirt path that led up to Pirabad Hill. The monsoon clouds still hadn’t lifted, so the night was moonless and dark. With the racket that the old engine was making, it wouldn’t be surprising if people a mile away heard them coming.

  But that was exactly the plan. From where he was, climbing up on foot from the other side of the hill, Constantine could see the mobile with its solitary flashing police light. He and Akbar were at the head of the bulk of their force, some twenty to thirty men, making their way to the Hajji Camp. The mobile was meant to be a decoy, and was under instructions to turn tail and run the minute the first shot was heard from the camp. In his reconnaissance, Akbar had found out that the rear side of the camp bordered an old, abandoned graveyard. That was going to be their entry point. The ward boys didn’t bother to post sentries at the back because they had assumed that it was virtually inaccessible. The path led through thick, thorny kikar bushes and all the garbage the locality generated was strewn about the broken graves, throwing up an awful stench. The graveyard was believed to be haunted, so locals kept away from it. The police too had never ventured so far, and Constantine smiled to himself as he turned around and saw his men struggling under the weight of their heavy Kalashnikov rifles, cursing under their breath. They must have thought that the new SHO and his deputy were a pair of madmen to make them march through the graveyard.

  The ward boys had cleared the last fifty meters of brush from their wall to have a clear line of sight, and it was this exposed patch of land that the police party now approached. Akbar turned around and gave a signal for the group to spread out, as he took the safety latch off his automatic rifle. He and Constantine started edging closer to the wall of the compound.

  It was then that all hell broke loose.

  To Constantine, the sky seemed lit up with bright red tracer bullets, and the sound was deafening as multiple gun positions opened fire at the same time. Before anyone could figure out what was happening, Constantine realized that he and Akbar were the only ones left exposed in the no-man’s land between the wall and the bushes. The rest of the force hadn’t bothered to advance with them. Con
stantine hugged the ground and turned towards the wall, trying to pinpoint a position at which he could fire back. Just then he felt a sensation in his leg and shoulder, as if someone had thrust a white-hot knife into him. After that instant, Constantine felt no more immediate pain, but everything seemed to slow down. He could see, in slow motion, another couple of bullets hit the dirt inches from his face. He saw Akbar, who had scrambled to cover under the wall, screaming at him and gesturing frantically, but his voice seemed to come from a million miles away. He could hear, in the background, the incessant tuk-tuk of the machine guns. Then he felt the dampness on his trousers and was surprised to see the dark crimson patch spreading on his leg. The shock kicked in at the sight of blood, but just before he passed out one of the last things he heard was a bloodcurdling scream. And then the tuk-tuk of the guns stopped.

  5

  Day 1, 11:26 a.m.

  Maqsood Mahr was getting impatient. After trying unsuccessfully for the past hour to read the file in front of him, he finally pushed his chair back and took off his thick reading glasses. His thinning hair, jet-black from coloring and shiny from being oiled, was slicked back. His lips were dark blue from his non-stop smoking and almost matched the pallor of his skin. Unlike other police officers, he never bothered to wear his uniform, which hung on a rack behind him. Instead, he wore an off-white safari suit, with a bright gold watch on his wrist. The entire get-up gave him the look of an insurance salesman from the 1970s.

  His work had suffered greatly over the past week. There were stacks of case files on his desk and on the floor. The American Jon Friedland seemed to be dominating all his waking hours and most of his sleeping hours too. He couldn’t remember the last time he had gotten a good night’s rest. The fate of Friedland was of more significance to him than to anyone else. For Maqsood Mahr was the deputy inspector general of investigations for the Karachi Police, and in that capacity, he was the man directly responsible for recovering the American.

  Maqsood Mahr was one of the most powerful men in the city. He was connected to everyone—the government, the opposition and all the Agencies. Some said his influence stretched all the way to the presidency in Islamabad. Others claimed he was in direct contact with the Don, the shadowy head of the United Front who lived in self-imposed exile in New York. Not all of these rumors were strictly true, but Maqsood Mahr subtly encouraged such talk. He had learned over the course of a very long career that the illusion of power was often more important than the reality.

  He had risen to his present exalted position from the lowliest of ranks, and the rise had been meteoric. Maqsood Mahr knew where a lot of bodies were buried. That was the secret of his success. That, and the fact that he knew how to make money—for himself, and for his patrons. To say that Maqsood Mahr was corrupt would be an understatement. He had turned extortion into an art, and his greed was insatiable.

  Of course, he didn’t see things that way. Coming from where he started, to get to where he had reached was an incredible achievement and would have been well nigh impossible had he followed a more orthodox or honest path. It was easy for the directly appointed police officers to call him corrupt. Maqsood called these officers the “competition wallahs” because they entered the police service after passing a competitive exam and went straight to cushy jobs as supervisory officers. They were all members of the elite, from good families and prosperous backgrounds. He had nothing but contempt for these men. They could never imagine what it was like to sleep hungry even for a night. What it was to have been born without any advantages, the son of a dirt-poor laborer in a village in the middle of nowhere, with no prospects of ever being able to get out of there. He had grabbed the one chance he got when the local landowner, on whose lands his father had worked all his life, nominated him to be recruited as a constable. The provincial Chief Minister had given the landowner a certain quota for recruitment, as political payback. And the landowner had selected Mahr because he considered him a simple fellow. Besides, the old wadero thought that it would be useful to have one of his personal retainers in the local police. Little did he realize how far that boy would travel!

  Maqsood Mahr had never looked back after that. He had grabbed the chance with both hands and used every opportunity, every edge he got, to consolidate his position. He had taught himself how to read and write and got himself assigned as an assistant to the police-station clerk, voraciously learning everything about police procedure. From there he had steadily moved up the ladder, becoming an officer first, then in-charge of the police station, then head of the district police, eventually moving to the provincial capital, Karachi. Along every step of the way, he filled the pockets of his superiors and never said no to any order, legal or illegal. If he wasn’t the most professional investigator in the police, he was definitely the most pliable. He delivered the results that the people in power wanted. When those people wanted to punish their political opponents, Maqsood would forge false cases against them. And when those same victimized opponents came to power, he would provide the same services for them. He had never bothered to catch a jihadi before, but when catching them became a priority for the government, Maqsood miraculously ensured that everyone he arrested, whether they were simple pickpockets or bank robbers, would be classified as jihadis. He had moved from being a big fish in the rural backwaters of the province to the big city, and had very quickly adjusted himself to the new realities that confronted him. He always told those close to him that adapting to different circumstances wasn’t difficult. The nature of power, and of those who wielded it, did not change, whether it was a village or a cosmopolitan city like Karachi. Those who wielded power always wanted things done their way. It didn’t matter if it was an illiterate feudal wadero or a highly educated, seemingly sophisticated army general. Sure, everyone paid lip service to such concepts as rule of law, human rights, and public duty. But Maqsood Mahr’s thirty-five years in the circles of power had taught him that no one really gave a shit about what the people wanted.

  He not only catered to the professional wishes of his superiors but also satisfied their personal whims. He strove to provide them with whatever they desired. He tried to ensure that his was the first number they called if anything went wrong. Whether it was the inspector general, who wanted to hush things up after his spoilt son shot someone at a party, the city police chief who wanted him to pick up the bill for his wife’s shopping excursions to Dubai, or the industrialist who had been caught with an underage girl. All of these matters had been handled with discretion and, over the years, these services had made him indispensable to those in power. The measure of Maqsood Mahr’s success was that the incumbency board that hung behind his desk carried only one name on it. For the past twelve years, he had been the sole occupant of this office.

  His ability to provide these services depended upon his ability to have large sums of money continuously at his disposal. Maqsood Mahr had always been very honest about his dishonesty. He couldn’t abide by those competition wallahs who made a hue and cry about his corruption, while at the same time drinking from the same well themselves. In his eyes, that was the worst kind of hypocrisy. Many of them came from wealthy backgrounds and had no need for more money but took it anyway, out of sheer greed. He believed they singled him out because he wasn’t one of them. He hadn’t sat behind a desk and given orders all his life like they had. He had gotten his hands dirty. Who were they to call him greedy? He wasn’t just lining his own pockets. He also had to provide the money for various operational expenses, as well as maintaining his bosses in the luxurious lifestyle they had become accustomed to.

  But ever since this American had been kidnapped, Maqsood Mahr’s carefully crafted world had become endangered. All of a sudden his bosses, while still appreciative of his services, were no longer ignoring his professional shortcomings. The only thing that mattered to any of them now was the recovery of this American.

  The problem was that there was literally no trace of this accursed Jon Friedland. The earth se
emed to have swallowed him up. Maqsood had been spending cash like water from an open faucet on this case, throwing money at informers for even the most worthless scraps of information. But to no avail. And he could see, with each passing day that the American remained missing, his own aura of indispensability slipping away. He was desperate.

  This was why he had placed a call to Constantine’s office exactly thirty minutes after Major Rommel had left from there. One of Constantine’s wardens, who was on Mahr’s payroll, had promptly informed him of the major’s visit. Maqsood Mahr invested good money for information just like this. He hadn’t said much to Constantine on the phone, but then he seldom did because he always suspected that his phones might be tapped. He had simply ordered Constantine to come to his office. He knew Rommel was working on this case with Tarkeen. And his informant had also told him that Rommel and Constantine had gone to visit Akbar Khan. That was a matter of great concern for him. He had half expected them to do something along those lines, but he hadn’t expected them to get that desperate so soon. Mahr’s greatest fear was that the Agencies might decide to bring back his greatest rival, Akbar, to replace him.

  Maqsood Mahr was petrified of Akbar Khan. He knew that Akbar was better than him in every way—more resourceful, more courageous, and more professional. Maqsood freely acknowledged that. He had never overestimated his own abilities. He knew that his durability was the outcome of his ability to eliminate his rivals rather than professional efficiency. Once upon a time, he and Akbar had worked together, but then Akbar’s subsequent fall from grace had allowed Mahr to develop a monopoly on “delivering results” for the bosses, and he did not want them to have any alternative option other than himself in this area. Especially an alternative like Akbar.