KALYUG (26 page)

Tick.

‘Oooh . . . the strong, silent type. What’s your name? Bond? James Bond?’ she let out a giggle.

It could be bravado too, Llong thought, recognizing a strain of nervousness in her eyes. She was trying to be upbeat because that was the only way she thought she would survive this.

Tick.

‘Did you piss off INSAF, or are you here for something else, Mr Bond?’ she asked him again.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

‘Oh, come on. Say something. It’s just the two of us here. I’m sure there’s a bunch of wankers sitting off somewhere listening to everything I say, but I doubt they’ll join in.’

Tick.

‘And you know what I want to tell them?’

Tick.

She held up both middle fingers before pushing her hands
through the bar and wiggling them. ‘
That’s
what I want to tell them.’

In spite of himself, Llong laughed.

17th September, 2012. Washington, D.C.

The press conference had been a disaster. And President Timothy Jackson was furious.

‘Who leaked the story about Jack?’ he thundered as soon as he was back in the Oval Office. The DNI, summoned by the chief-of-staff, cowered in his seat, caught between wanting to stand up as his president entered and an equally powerful desire to slink out and stay out until tempers were cooler again.

‘We don’t know,’ he answered, truthfully enough. Like the president, he had been sandbagged by the question from CNN’s White House correspondent. The Emergency in India was not as significant to the American public as news of an American citizen – a spy, one of the good guys – missing in action. As long as the exchange rates made it more profitable to outsource their backend operations to India, America Inc. didn’t really care too much.

‘Well, find out!’ snarled the president. ‘I’ll have either that, or your resignation, on my table in the next twelve hours. Are we clear on that, Mr McSmith?’

‘Yes, Mr President.’

‘You can leave.’

That was harsh, Winston thought. One look at his chief’s face, however, stopped the chief-of-staff from airing his thoughts. He didn’t want to be the next one called to task.

Craig McSmith opened the door and stopped in surprise at seeing Andrea Simps just outside. ‘Hello, Craig,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It seems your office is leaking like a sieve, as usual.’

As the director’s face reddened, she casually stepped around him and into the office. McSmith stormed out, slamming the door behind him, while she walked to the desk and took a chair in front of a visibly irate president.

‘Did you watch the press conference?’ asked Winston, trying to warn her.

She waved a hand carelessly at him. ‘Dahling,’ she said, affecting a tone that was unabashedly fake and making no bones about it, ‘I stopped watching those when George Bush Senior was the president.’

Turning back to Jackson, the frivolity dropped off her face abruptly, like a mask peeled off. ‘I think we’ve found our man.’

17th September, 2012. New Delhi.

Sleep had just begun to drown out the hum of the city when his partner nudged him awake and pointed to the truck that was slowly braking to a stop outside the gate. The security guard fumbled with his weapon for a moment before getting a firmer hold of it and stood up as a scruffy young boy climbed out of the cab and walked over.

‘Saab,’ he said, his voice high and shrill, the teeth dirty and brown, a creature so common in trucks and lorries that the guards relaxed. As the truck idled behind him, the boy reached their cabin and held out a dirty piece of paper. The drowsy guard tried to read the scribble without success.

He opened the bulletproof glass to take the paper.

He was slow to register that the boy was reaching behind him even as he was dropping the piece of paper in his hand. The latter pulled out a cylinder from the small of his back and jammed it through the opening. Before either man could react, the bottom of the cylinder popped out and smoke began to fill the cabin. The knockout gas was rapid and had
the guards out of action before either of them could raise the alarm.

The boy turned and waved at the truck. At the signal, twenty armed men streamed out of its ends and rushed the gate. With the precision of well-trained men, half of them helped the other half over the gate with a boost. Out of the ten inside, eight covered the two men going to work on the locks; seconds later, leaving just two men behind to guard the gate, eighteen men stormed the INSAF safe-house.

For Llong, the popping sounds – getting closer by the second – reminded him of his time at the range at the McLean training compound in Virginia. Silenced, rapid-fire weapons.

‘Shh . . . Leela. Leela!’ he said, trying to wake up his newest friend. ‘Something’s up.’

Somewhere, someone managed to trigger an alarm. Bells started to ring; the lights flickered, then went dark.

The darkness didn’t bother Llong. When he was brought in, he had been blindfolded – and so, in the absence of visual cues, he had committed to memory the route he was taken through. Through the day, he had recreated the sequence in an attempt to figure out how he could leave the building, if he ever got the chance.

‘Ha!’ Leela said, clearly excited. He could almost see her grin, despite the darkness that enveloped them. ‘What did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you that they would come for me? We look after our own.’

After what seemed to be an eternity – and was, in reality, just a few minutes – they saw flashlights scything through the darkness. Judging by the number of beams that criss-crossed the corridor, Llong was sure there were at least four men, possibly a fifth as well bringing up the rear and looking back the way they had come.

The gunmen stopped in front of their cells, the light shining onto their faces. As soon as the lead gunman caught sight of Leela, he fired a burst into the lock, shattering it. His partner, his gun trained on Llong who had instinctively raised his hands, leaned closer to whisper to the lead gunman who nodded when he was finished.

The second gunman aimed at Llong’s lock and fired. Llong flinched as he felt metal fly past him. Knowing it was pointless to resist, he surrendered to his new captors. It was, he thought laconically, getting to be quite a familiar state of existence for him.

Within seconds, the gunmen were herding Leela and Llong through the corridor and up a flight of stairs that Llong remembered coming down the previous day. On the way, the lead gunman casually fired into the third – and only other – prisoner inside the safe-house, a man who had eagerly come up to the bars anticipating freedom and meeting his Maker instead. Without breaking stride, the gunman said, ‘He betrayed Powerhouse.’

Llong was surprised by the look of hate that flashed across Leela’s face as she cast one last glance at the dead prisoner. Her contempt could not have been more evident if she had spat on him.

It was when they turned right – instead of the left he had assumed would take them outside – that he had the first inkling that something was wrong. They moved in silence through more unlit corridors until they finally reached an interrogation room with a single table in the centre.

Llong struggled as he felt his hands being grabbed and held to his side, the wild lights briefly illuminating a similarly-struggling Leela being pulled to the chair next to the table. For the first time, Llong noticed the chains that were hooked into the table at its edges, the cuffs at the ends leaving no one in any doubt about their purpose. It didn’t matter what country you were in or whose side you fought on, there were still times when questioning needed . . . more coercive approaches.

The men were too strong to be put off by Leela’s attempts and had her wrists through the cuffs without too much difficulty. Then they stepped back, away from the table and back to where Llong was held. Only Leela was on the other side of the table, pulling wildly against the cuffs that chained her to the table.

One of the gunmen pulled a camera out of his pocket and snapped a burst of pictures, the flash powerful and blinding off the walls of the small room. With each flash, Llong saw understanding emerge on Leela’s face. The look of terror on her face as the last flash illuminated her wide eyes and open mouth was enough for Llong to realize that their saviours had a different agenda.

He made one last attempt to jump to her rescue but one of his captors slammed the butt of his rifle into his neck, causing his knees to collapse. The ones holding his hands refused to let go, however, and he was held, kneeling, head exploding inside into a thousand white stars, as the lead gunman levelled his weapon.

The muzzle flashed thrice. Three bullets from the Heckler and Koch SD-5 spat out and slammed into Leela just below her neck. Llong’s vision swam as he tried to focus on Leela, but beyond a blurry image of her coughing up blood, everything else was dark.

When he heard the click of the camera, Llong finally forced himself to look up, to focus. The impact of the bullets had thrown her against the back of the chair, upright instead of slumped over. Her head was tilted upwards and resting on the back of her chair, posing her grotesquely for the camera. A thick stream of blood ran down one corner of her chin and dribbled on her white, starched shirt.

With each strobe of the flash, the truth became starker.

Leela Sharma, niece of Gyandeep Sharma and heir to the kingdom of Powerhouse in India, was dead.

18

17th September, 2012. INSAF HQ.

‘What about Gyandeep?’

Jagannath smiled at the major. ‘Gyandeep,’ he said, holding up a glass that held a finger of Scotch, ‘is in a box. We have round-the-clock surveillance on him. His home and offices are bugged; so is his vehicle. And we have at least three vehicles trailing him at all times. He can’t even fart without us knowing it.’ He extended the glass to the other man.

Nawaz Qureshi hesitated before taking it. The events of the last two days were taking their toll on him and he could not wait to get back to his quarters in the Army camp just outside the city. The Scotch went down easily, drowned in one gulp, wetting his insides, cooling him down even as it warmed him up.

‘The viewing is tomorrow afternoon, isn’t it?’

Nawaz nodded. ‘At Shahid Ghat. He would have wanted to be buried there, with the other fallen soldiers.’

It was Jagannath’s turn to nod this time, as if it made perfect sense. ‘If there is anything I can do?’

Nawaz waved his offer away as he placed the glass on a coaster. ‘Everything’s been taken care of by the Department of Defence. Least they could do, considering his long
service
.’ Only his wife would have detected the closely-held bitterness that was behind his remark.

Jagannath was about to speak when the instrument in front of him began ringing insistently. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, picking up the receiver.

The major watched his host’s face go from healthy to pale in the space of a few seconds. When Jagannath ended the call with a terse, ‘Hold on. I’ll send a team over,’ and looked at Nawaz, the soldier knew it was something serious, very serious. Jagannath did not place his receiver down to disconnect; instead, he pressed his finger on the engage button and turned to the major.

‘There’s been an attack on the safe-house here,’ he said. ‘If I give you a couple of men, can you contain the situation until I can round up a bigger force?’

Nawaz nodded, all trace of fatigue gone. ‘Go down to the exit,’ said Jagannath. ‘By the time you check out your weapons, I’ll have the men and a vehicle waiting for you outside.’

17th September, 2012. Washington, D.C.

‘Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, huh?’ President Timothy Jackson remarked, turning the file photo of Mr Karamchand Patil over in his hand. ‘And always with good reason, isn’t it?’

‘He’s a hawk, there is no denying that,’ Andrea Simps replied. ‘But he’s the lesser of the other evils out there. Most of the others with even a semblance of national appeal are even farther to the right or the left.’

‘Will he listen to us?’

Simps shrugged. ‘He’s got reason to. Rumour is that he won’t be leading the Opposition in the next election, and he is pretty miffed about it. The good thing is that the opposition within his own party is so fragmented that if he can pull in a couple more leaders, the rest will fall in line. Other than his hawkishness, though, he is generally held to be honest and strong-willed.’

‘So . . . in other words, you’re not sure we can turn him.’

‘My psychologists are working on this,’ she said, eliciting a smirk from the president. Irked, she continued, ‘He might not agree if we back him openly – he’s big on self-rule and no-interference and all that crap – but if he is approached by a front, say a coalition that’s opposed to both Razdan and GK, he might agree.’

‘What if he ends up being worse than GK?’ the president countered. ‘At least we’ve dealt with GK enough times to know his stand on most things. What if Patil – and you yourself admit that he’s a hawk – what if he is even more radical?’

Before she could answer, he pressed on. ‘GK’s already shut down the internet inside India. I’ve got calls from three senators and seven congressmen, not to mention the representatives of about twenty different industries, telling me how badly work has been affected because of the situation there and asking if I can bring a bill for tax breaks if they want to relocate their back-end operations.’

President Timothy Jackson tapped the photo in front of him. ‘So I ask you once again, Simps.
How sure are you of
this
guy?’

17th September, 2012. New Delhi.

‘
Isko kya karoon
?’

‘
Le aao.
No witnesses.’

Llong was pulled to his feet quite roughly and marched back, sandwiched between the attackers. Now that they knew he knew what was in store for him, the gunman walking right behind him paid him a lot more attention than earlier. Llong wondered where he was being taken and what would become of him, for it was clear this was not the CIA breaking him out, but a group that had come with the sole intention of murdering Leela.

He was a witness, and it didn’t require a Mensa membership to realize what happened to witnesses. That one word – snatched from the rest of the conversation – left him in no doubt as to his eventual fate.

This time, as they crossed the stairwell, they continued on to the corridor on the left, towards what he assumed was the outside. On the way, he saw the bodies of a few guards, some still writhing in pain. So it hadn’t been a massacre, he thought. There was some humanity in his captors.

As soon as they were outside, the gunmen were joined by quite a few others – a quick count showed Llong that their number had swelled from four to fourteen. The commander of his contingent held a hurried conference with his counterpart from some other group before turning back to his team and making a circle above his head with his right hand. Llong felt himself being pulled back as the entire force retreated.

When they were almost level with the gate, the commander removed a remote from his pocket and pressed a button. There was a dull whoop from the interiors of the building and a cylinder of dust seemed to rise from the centre of its ceiling. Even as Llong watched, the building shook once again and then started to cave in on itself, burying the dead and the dying inside.

He heard a couple of muted bursts and turned to his right just in time to see the bodies of the security guards jerk with the impact of the bullets. He was close enough to hear the death rattle as life finally left them.

17th September, 2012. Washington, D.C.

Andrea Simps relived her conversation with the Texan less than an hour earlier. The organization he represented had been emphatic about the suitability of Mr Patil and she wondered, not for the first time since she had heard of the man, how it was that he had come under the influence of Powerhouse. Simps, with her inherited wealth and sense of entitlement, found it difficult to believe that there were those who worked for Powerhouse unwillingly. She had been overjoyed when she had been invited.

The questions the president had raised were valid to the point of being disruptive. Patil was a risk, true, but for her, since GK was unacceptable, any risk was, therefore, conversely acceptable. The dossier that her State Department had compiled on her candidate showed that he could be the right choice, provided he was handled in the right way. She trusted her hand-picked analysts a lot.

And she trusted Powerhouse a lot more. So when both groups agreed that Karamchand Patil was a good replacement for GK, she had no hesitation in accepting their collective wisdom.

‘Mr President,’ she said evenly, meeting his gaze, holding it, refusing to back down. ‘I’d stake everything I have on this man.’

The president straightened up and pushed the picture back at her. ‘You just did, Simps. You just did.’

17th September, 2012. New Delhi.

It wasn’t until more than an hour after Richa had left that it occurred to me that I should have asked for her number – as well as Jagannath’s and Raghav’s. It seemed pretty certain that she would have at least one of their numbers, if not both, and I started having panic attacks about having to settle the Leela’s café bill on my own.

It’s pretty stupid when you stop to think about it. I mean, what guarantee did I have that neither of them would wash their hands off me, leaving me to foot the bills for food and accommodation at one of the priciest, trendiest hotels in the country? If I couldn’t check out without clearing the bill or at least pointing them in the direction in which they could be paid up, I was certain to add one more crime to my chequered past. Not a thought that induces a nice afternoon siesta.

So the afternoon found me idly switching from channel to channel, catching up on my daily dose of soap operas and news – affairs and affairs, as it were – alternately. It was around three in the afternoon that I found the first mention of any sort of a protest against the Emergency, a small demonstration by a few celebrities at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi.

Towards the evening, however, the public seemed to have regained its voice – at least, in pockets. The regional channels did a better job of covering the agitations than the national ones, especially in the south and in West Bengal. It was a bit strange to see the line, ‘Breaking News: Protesters clash with . . .’, at seven in the evening, while the visuals showed the events happening under bright sunshine, and I could only assume that the channels were airing the news after a deliberate delay – but at whose insistence?

By seven in the evening, India had recorded thirty-three protests, ranging in intensity and impact from one extreme to another. The quietest one, by far, was the agitation at Jantar Mantar; the most violent incident, unsurprisingly, was in Thiruvananthapuram, with a final toll of seven killed and fifty-plus injured when a mob turned on the police and was lathi-charged. Most of those killed were members of the ruling dispensation, the first time that had happened since the dismissal of the first-ever Left government in independent India.

Under normal circumstances, the aftermath of such a violent response would have seen the senior-most police officer lose his cap – at least temporarily – and the promise of many more such ‘uprisings’ until the ‘fascist, undemocratic and corrupt’ (their words, not mine) state regime of the day was dismissed. For the first time that I could remember, beyond an expression of regret for the damage to life and public property, there was no further reaction from the state or from the victims.

Was it the first of the many I feared, or would such a violent reaction act as an effective deterrent for all but the most passionate protesters?

Various pundits on channels continued to debate the constitutional validity of the Emergency, with one anchor repeatedly asking each of his guests, ‘India wants to know, Mr So-and-so . . . what are you going to do about this crisis?’ and then moving on to the next guest before the first one even had a chance to open his mouth.

Most of the channels kept repeating clips from GK’s address the previous evening as well as a press conference held on the lawn of the Rashtrapati Bhavan earlier in the day. Nothing new, nothing that I didn’t know already. GK repeated his promises, recycled his rhetoric and thundered his way out of every question that was even mildly uncomfortable. I was constantly reminded of an old friend of mine, a retired editor, bemoaning the sheep-like behaviour of reporters today – he was of the opinion that no self-respecting journalist from the days of Goenka would have ever allowed a press-conference to close without making the subject sweat bullets. From what I could see, GK barely broke a trickle.

I was just about to order my dinner from room service when there was a knock on my door. I checked through the peephole – one rarely had cause to regret caution – and was relieved to see Raghav Menon on the other side. He seemed to be alone.

I opened the door and welcomed him inside, thankful for
some company at last. I was desperate for someone to relieve me from the stupor-inducing debates on TV.

‘How would you like to get out for a while?’ he asked without much of a preamble.

‘Dinner?’ I asked, my stomach having given up on subtle hints was now becoming more insistent.

‘Dwarka Layout,’ he said. ‘The place where Major-General Qureshi shot himself.’

17th September, 2012. Singapore.

‘Primary objective completed,’ reported the protégé. ‘Extraction in progress. But there’s a minor complication.’

‘Minor?’

Before elaborating, the younger man slid a picture towards the chief. The snapshot was quite noisy but clearly showed a white male on his knees, eyes closed, his arms in the vice-like grips of the two gunmen of whom only the torsos could be seen. ‘We don’t know who he is. He was with Leela at the safe-house, along with the decoy. No problems with the latter, by the way – he was taken care of, so no one will ever suspect that he was a plant.’

‘What’s the commander’s call?’

‘Jacob wants to get rid of him at the first opportunity, but given that he’s obviously a foreign national, he wanted to run it by us first. He might prove to be useful, especially if he’s working for somebody we would be interested in. The fact that INSAF had him in their custody means he knows something that’s important to them.’

The chief raised an eyebrow. ‘So we have confirmation that it is Insaaf?’

‘They found some documents with the name on it – I. N. S. A. F. Probably Indian Security Agencies’ Federation or something similar. Nothing much, but enough to suggest that this is who we are dealing with.’

‘And we had no prior knowledge about such an organization?’ The chief’s eyes blazed. Powerhouse spent millions of dollars precisely to be informed of things like this. Such a powerful adversary was not created overnight, and for the first time, the chief found himself wondering if every piece of intel that had passed through Powerhouse had not been compromised in one way or another.

Not the time, he chided himself. The present and future were always more important than the past he could not alter.

‘They have been very . . . effective in staying under the radar,’ said the protégé cautiously. ‘Sharma had mentioned this once, but he was not very concerned about them. Small fry, he said. We left it to him to deal with it and because we heard nothing more, we assumed he had shut them down without any problem.’