The Bard of Blood (19 page)

There was a quick rattle at the door. A guard stuck his head in.

‘Sir, they are about to land.’

Joshi got up gracefully and put on his coat. He walked out of the door and towards the runway. Through the glass wall he saw the plane landing smoothly. He walked outside into the chilly night, watching the door of the plane open. Isha was the first to step out, followed by Nihar. They walked down the short metal staircase and turned around to wait for Veer and Kabir. Veer, who was limping a little himself, helped Kabir out of the aircraft by letting him rest his arm on his shoulder.

Joshi looked at all of them, allowing himself a small smile.
It’s just been a few days, but they look much older than their usual selves. He looked at Veer in particular. The man had become a shadow of himself—if one looks at the file pictures we have of him on record.

Veer looked back at Joshi and nodded. He breathed in deeply and looked up at the sky.
Looks just the same as it did there. Then why does everything feel so . . . different?
He shut his eyes.
Let it sink in . . . You’re back where you belong.
He opened his eyes and they fell on the Indian tricolour fluttering wildly from the side of a parapet.

Joshi strode up to them and shook hands with Isha and Nihar. His gaze moved on to Veer and Kabir. He noticed that Veer’s homecoming had moistened the corners of his eyes.

‘It’s good to have you back, Veer.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Joshi looked at Kabir’s gaunt face.

‘Before we exchange pleasantries,’ Kabir said, ‘the prisoners are still in the plane, too drained to move. Send in the medics to get them out.’

‘Good job, Kabir.’

Kabir glanced sideways at his team.

‘It would’ve been impossible without them.’

Joshi patted Kabir on the back. ‘I have something important to discuss. We will have a debriefing session soon.’

Kabir groaned.

‘Trust me, it cannot wait.’

‘We can do it next week.’ Kabir sighed. ‘I need some rest. I’m an old man now.’

‘The day after tomorrow, then,’ Joshi said with finality. ‘I have a lot on my plate. There is unrest in Ladakh. Chinese troops have breached the Line of Actual Control. There is a major face-off between us and them in Chumar. The Chinese President is coming down to Ahmedabad soon to meet our prime minister and sort out certain issues.’

‘If you insist,’ Kabir said resignedly.

‘Sir,’ Nihar said, ‘we have managed to lay our hands on something extremely useful. Kabir got hold of Shehzad’s phone, and I managed to get—what I think may be—Omar’s laptop. It’s damaged, but I may be able to recover some data.’

‘That’s great. Get on it ASAP.’

‘I’m going back to my wife and son, sir. First things first. If I stay away any longer, she’ll be a threat to national security.’

Everyone laughed as they entered the air-conditioned airport building. Isha turned to Kabir. He looked back at her, his gaze softening.

‘I wonder if you saw the obvious reference to Shakespeare today?’

‘No.’ Kabir shrugged.

‘It took us twelve days in Balochistan. And we’re back home on the twelfth night.
The twelfth night
, get it?’ she said playfully.

Kabir smiled, letting the lame joke pass.

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility

But when the blast of war blows in our ears

Then imitate the action of the tiger . . .

14 September 2014

RAW HQ, New Delhi

‘Bro, there’s a lady outside waiting to talk to you.’

Ivan had broken Nihar’s concentration. It was eight in the evening. Nihar had been fixed to his chair in the dim control-room since the past few hours. He had made many attempts to recover every bit of data he could from the damaged laptop. He had failed initially, but had managed to find a way through by extracting solely the hard disk, opening it up and examining it further. He decided not to do it in a hurry, lest he lose something vital. He had utilized all the software at his disposal, but the procedure was painstakingly long. He had searched thoroughly for any viruses, just to be doubly sure. Once he realized that he hadn’t found any threatening malware, he decided to initiate the recovery program. The process had taken up a chunk of his time and wasn’t even halfway towards completion.

‘Lady?’ he asked, sounding disoriented.

‘Her name’s Isha. She’s quite . . .’

‘Pretty? I know,’ said Nihar, completing Ivan’s sentence. ‘Call her in.’

‘I was going to say “impatient”, but you decided to fill in the blank. Good to know, I wonder what your wife will think though!’ Ivan sniggered.

‘Send her in and get back to cracking the phone I gave you,’ Nihar said with an embarrassed smile.

Ivan laughed and called Isha in. She was elegantly dressed in a black shirt and black trousers. She pulled up a chair and sat down beside Nihar. Ivan tried hard to catch Nihar’s attention, to pull a face or make an inappropriate gesture. Nihar saw this from the corner of his eye and ignored him.
Gosh, how I’ve missed my little control room and its little eccentricities.

‘Any progress?’

‘Just a few documents here and there,’ Nihar said. ‘I’m afraid of opening them now, in case it interferes with the backup.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘I’ve been at it since morning,’ Nihar said. ‘Might take a couple of hours. Maybe more.’

‘What about Shehzad’s phone?’

‘It’s password-protected. Plus it has additional software which the ISI seems to have installed on the Android device, which could wipe out the data on the phone if you get the password wrong more than five times. Ivan’s working on it. There’s a special software to jailbreak such phones.’

Ivan swivelled around in his chair and held the phone up. It was attached to a cable that led to a device, which in turn was connected to a laptop.

‘So far, I’ve managed to back up a little bit of the data from the phone,’ Ivan said. He clicked on a document that had links to four websites. ‘Looks like your spymaster Shehzad was fond of Bollywood films. His browsing history shows that he was looking for illegal torrent links.’

‘He had these on the phone?’

‘Yeah,’ Ivan said, clicking away on his computer. ‘Let’s open them up with the browser.’

There were five links in all, and all of them opened on separate pages.

‘Ha! So he wants to watch
Life in a Metro
,’ Ivan said, looking at the poster of the film. He clicked on another link. This time the poster of the film
Murder
popped up, and with it was a huge sequence of numbers in a document. Once he clicked on the document, under a random sequence of numbers, there was another link to download a document.

‘That looks like another file,’ Isha said, rolling her chair towards the computer. ‘Click on it.’

‘It could be a virus,’ Ivan warned her. ‘But what the hell . . . I have a backup of the data.’

The file downloaded. Another random sequence of numbers opened up. Nihar squinted at the screen.
ND28617720.

‘Open the other links,’ Nihar said. ‘We’re on to something. This is a smart way to share information. Since most people around the world are busy downloading movies or music from torrent sites, you can slip in a document totally unnoticed along with a film.’

Another link opened up. It had an image from the Michael Jackson album
Bad,
released back in 1989.

‘Well, I’d never imagine a Paki spy moonwalking,’ Isha said. ‘Scroll down . . .’

Ivan downloaded the file. Within minutes, the entire music album was on the computer. He skimmed through each song to see if it was another audio file disguised as music. It wasn’t.

‘Well, at least he had good taste in music. There’s another image here, probably of the cover of the album.’

He clicked on it and up cropped an image of a line going straight and taking a right. There was a red dot on the line before it turned to the right. They looked at each other and shrugged.

‘That has to be something,’ Nihar said. ‘Download all the films. Maybe there’s some encoded data on the video. Maybe those numbers above are the durations at which the message will be revealed. Or maybe there’s something that tells us what this line is.’

‘Well, maybe this is just Shehzad’s torrent wish-list. We are barking up the wrong tree.’

‘Do as I say, Ivan. Enough of your fucking around.’

Isha raised an eyebrow at Nihar. Ivan didn’t seem too perturbed.

‘Well, it’ll take ten–fifteen minutes to download the films,’ he said, lighting up a cigarette.

Nihar walked back and slid into his chair. Isha followed suit. ‘You done with your debriefing?’

‘I was the first to go,’ Nihar replied. ‘What about you?’

‘Joshi’s busy right now,’ Isha said.

‘Oh yeah,’ Nihar said. ‘He’s expecting Kabir here. They’ll be discussing something really important, apparently. Maybe it’s something on Sadiq’s killer.’

Isha nodded thoughtfully. Nihar asked her if she’d like some coffee. She said she would, and they walked down to the end of the corridor and got themselves a cup each. Nihar got one for Ivan as well. They walked back into the control room and Nihar placed Ivan’s cup in front of him.

‘Thanks, man.’ Ivan smiled. ‘The movies have downloaded. There are five in all. And each one of them has an attachment with a random line.’

He opened the photos and scratched his shaven pate. Isha leaned forward and looked at them. Then he dragged the cursor to the video itself and clicked.

‘Play them,’ Isha said. ‘Note down any text you see that has been added externally.’

The cult film
Enter the Dragon
began to play. The first thing to pop up in the movie, right under the credits, was this sentence:

Torrent uploaded and seeded by AngeliqueX123

‘That’s French for “Angelica”,’ Ivan said quickly. He added, ‘Let me check the other video.’

The Hindi movie
Murder
played, and in very tiny font they noted the words on the top-right corner of the screen:

hooray

‘That term is synonymous with “yahoo”,’ said Ivan instantly. ‘They’re probably using a Yahoo email address! AngeliqueX123 must be their username! We need the password!’

Nihar and Isha frowned at each other. Ivan held his breath as he opened all the images they had obtained. They were beginning to enjoy the puzzle, but feared, slightly, what they’d end up finding. Ivan jumped up hurriedly and pulled out three loose A4 sheets from his printer. He kept one for himself and handed one each to Nihar and Isha. He printed the random lines and separated them out.

‘Write down all the words we just saw,’ he said. ‘And everything they could possibly mean. Clearly, there’s some code. And these lines definitely have something to do with it.’

‘Maybe we’ll get a better idea if there’s a connection between the data from the laptop and this,’ Nihar said. ‘Let’s just wait it out.’

Ivan ignored him and started scribbling things on his sheet of paper. Isha chewed the end of her pen thoughtfully. Nihar sipped his coffee, trying to join the dots in his head.

One hour later

The atmosphere in Arun Joshi’s cabin was tense. Joshi examined Kabir. The last time they had met in his office, before Kabir embarked on the mission, he had looked rather different. But today, even though he was less scruffy, Kabir looked exhausted. He had shaved off his beard to expose his pale sunken cheeks, and had chopped off his hair to match the side that Baradar’s machete had clipped off. He smelled heavily of muscle-relaxing balm. He had suffered a muscle tear in his lower back, a severe sprain in his right shoulder, and inflammation in his right elbow and biceps, which had forced him to put his arm in a sling. There were several bandages covering the cuts. With his free hand he lifted his cup of black coffee and sipped it, thoughtfully chewing on what Arun Joshi had just told him.

‘So where is he now?’

Joshi told him.

‘How did he get there?’

‘We know for a fact that the ISI has played a role in getting him out of the country.’

‘Ridiculous!’ spat Kabir. ‘You guys didn’t do anything about it?’

Joshi smiled. He clasped his hands together, leaned forward and spoke. ‘I let him go, Kabir. He has always been under constant surveillance. I could’ve picked him up any time I wanted.’

‘So you let him live . . . for me?’ Kabir raised his arched eyebrows.

Joshi shrugged and nodded. ‘I’d like to think you’ve earned it.’

‘Thank you. I’m sure you may have had the urge to pick him up and adhere to the law, which would’ve taken an eternity to take its course.’

‘Can’t say it didn’t cross my mind,’ Joshi said. ‘So will you go?’

‘It has to be done,’ Kabir said firmly. ‘And I have to do it. For Sadiq. And for myself.’

He remembered his favourite line from
Hamlet. Revenge should have no bounds.

‘Good,’ Joshi said with an air of finality. ‘I’ll have it fixed, then.’

Kabir shifted in his chair uneasily and stood up slowly. Joshi could tell he was having some trouble moving.

‘You want to wait before I organize your trip?’

‘No,’ Kabir replied. ‘I don’t want that bastard to live any longer, now that it’s under my control.’

He walked sluggishly towards the toilet next to Joshi’s cabin. He went inside and closed the door behind him.
Nobody would’ve dared to enter that loo without asking me first.

Kabir locked the door and switched on the light. He looked at his haggard reflection in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, and open only because of the caffeine. He looked at his hairline and noticed it was greyer than when he had left for Balochistan. His jaw was locked in a cruel grimace, and his lips were thin and cold. He shut his eyes and tried to remember what he had looked like twenty years ago. His hand slipped into his pocket. He pulled out a container with three vials and some cotton. From the other pocket, he pulled out an injection.
Another dose won’t hurt. You need it more than anyone else in the world.

He quickly rubbed some solution over the veins near his elbow. He pulled the liquid out of the vial and into the syringe. He pushed the liquid into his bloodstream through the needle. He closed his eyes, leaned against the wall and breathed in deeply. His mind blanked out momentarily. Then he heard a knock outside. He realized it wasn’t coming from the bathroom door.
Someone had come to see Joshi . . .

He opened his eyes swiftly, leaned into the washbasin and splashed water wildly on to his face. He ran a hand through his scruffy hair and shot one final look at himself. He pulled the flush on the commode, so that Joshi would think he had used it. And then he stepped out.

It was Isha and Nihar. Both looked at him as if they didn’t know him. It took them a while to place him. Without the long hair and the beard, Kabir was unrecognizable. On seeing them a genuine smile appeared on his face. They smiled back. He looked at Isha.

‘How are you?’

‘Not too bad,’ she said, noticing him. ‘Better than you anyway.’

Kabir smiled, shook hands with Nihar and took his seat. Joshi was looking at Nihar’s iPad thoughtfully. Isha examined Kabir’s soulless eyes above his well-defined cheekbones, trying to replace the image she had of him in her mind.
There’s something dangerously alluring about him. He looks like a man who needs company. But then again, he is a man who is better off alone. Nothing gets in his way. And he wants nothing to get in his way.

‘This is serious.’

Joshi slid the iPad towards Kabir. Kabir looked at the various words. Nihar went on to explain how Isha, Ivan and him had managed to procure the data that had led to this deduction.

‘We found various coloured lines from the different links,’ Nihar explained. ‘There were five in all. We superimposed them all, and this is what we got. It’s a map!’

Nihar continued, ‘The coordinates in New Delhi make the password for the email address
[email protected]
. This is the single email address used by the mujahideen to communicate amongst themselves. So what they do is they set up one ID and share the password. And then they save a message as a “draft”. After everyone has read it and replied to it in the “draft” itself, the message is deleted. This is an easy way to avoid detection. One of the mails we found, and it was saved earlier today, had just one word: “Tomorrow”.’

Kabir swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He shot quick glances at Isha, Nihar and Joshi. He was beginning to go numb.
Is it the injection or is it the apprehension?