Sartaj was sure that this was right, and true, that Kamala Pandey and Mr Mahesh Pandey were happy husband and wife, when they were not hitting each other. In marriage, as elsewhere, nothing was simple. Maybe Kamala needed the pilot, as her husband needed her, as she needed her husband. Somewhere within this tangle of need and loss and lies, there was the truth of love. ‘Madam,’ he said to Kamala Pandey, looking straight into her eyes, ‘I understand.’
‘I won’t do it again, though. Not anything like this again, with some other man. It’s not worth it.’ She was troubled still, of course, guilty and unsure of herself and the future. She touched her hair, smoothed it behind a ear. ‘How I must look. Are the bathrooms here clean?’
‘Only medium-clean,’ Sartaj said. ‘And sometimes there is no running water.’
‘I’ll wait till I get home. I’ll go home.’ She began to gather up her purse and keys.
‘Madam, we will get the pilot and talk sense into him. But please, don’t you do anything. Don’t talk to him, don’t confront him. If he tries to get in touch with you, you refuse any calls or anything like that. And let us know.’
‘I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t ever want to see him again.’
‘Good. If there was an FIR and a case, we could have thrown him into jail. But we’ll teach him. We will get any tapes and information he has, don’t worry. And we will try and recover your money from him.’
She shuddered. ‘I don’t want anything from him. Just keep him away from me.’
‘We will, madam.’
Then there was nothing else to say. She slid out of the booth, and tottered a little in her high heels. She was still shaky, but she would be all right. She would make it home. Women were strong, stronger than they looked. Even fancy women like Kamala Pandey.
‘Oh, your money.’ She rummaged in her purse, handed him a brown envelope.
‘Thank you, madam.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. She straightened up. He saw her pull herself together and take command of her surfaces, put them together bit by bit, and now she was almost the Kamala he had known before. She turned sharply and walked away, very decisive and crisp.
Sartaj watched her go, her pert, gym-conditioned bottom and her confident walk, and thought that if she was very lucky he would never see her again, or hear from her. If, that is, she managed to hang on to the regret and fear that she had suffered for the past few weeks, and to all the anger against the pilot that would come in a day or two. But it was her confidence and self-possession that would lead her down ambiguous alleys, sooner or later. She would forget the hard lessons she had just learnt. She would believe that nothing like this would happen to her again. She would need to live with her husband, and to live a little apart from him. Life was long, and marriage was hard. She would maybe make mistakes again, because she loved her husband. Love, Sartaj mused, was an iron trap. Caught in its teeth, we thrash about, we save each other and we destroy each other.
Anyway, the case was closed. It was none of his business now, unless she called him again. He put his money in his pocket, and went back to the station.
Parulkar had just finished watching a demonstration of a new laptop when Sartaj knocked at his cabin door. ‘Come in, come in,’ he called. He acknowledged Sartaj’s salute with a wave, and pointed him at a chair near the desk. Then he folded his hands over his belly and watched benignly over the young salesman, who was wrapping cords and cables and tucking them away into a carrying case.
‘I will wait for your call, sir,’ the salesman said.
‘I will not call, someone from the technology committee will call,’ Parulkar said. ‘But be positive. You have very good technology.’ He waited until the salesman was out of the room with his various briefcases, and then grinned at Sartaj. ‘They have good machines, but very expensive. And they are not willing to compromise on price, to contribute to the strengthening of the police department and the country. So they will suffer.’
He probably meant that the company was not willing to contribute nearly enough to the strengthening of Parulkar’s own financial development, but Sartaj didn’t want to know about any of that. So he told Parulkar about Kamala Pandey’s suffering and its resolution, and the punishment that was to be meted out to the pilot.
‘Interesting case,’ Parulkar said. ‘Well done. What is the payoff from the pilot?’
‘We don’t quite know yet, sir. Kamble and I are going to talk to him tonight. But it should be at least a few lakhs, in cash and kind. The bastard has a lot of money.’
‘Very good.’ Parulkar was pleased. Sartaj would pay Majid Khan, who would kick something upstairs to the ACP, who would pass something on to Parulkar. By the time the money got to Parulkar, the amount would be small. But he collected many small amounts, which added up to big amounts.
‘You look very healthy, sir,’ Sartaj said. It was true. Parulkar’s hair was swept back from his forehead into a Brylcreemed wave. He had lost a little weight, and he looked young.
‘The secret is a strict diet, and good exercise, Sartaj. You must maintain yourself. Without health nothing is of any use. I have stopped eating any non-veg at all, and my cholesterol is down. There may be all these temptations in life, but one must plan for the long run.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sartaj knew how much Parulkar loved his chicken pandhara rassa, very tikhat, and soonti, and mountains of biryani. If he was willing to give up all those, he must be planning for a very long life, and a career almost as long. It was good to see him back in the game, all confident and crafty. Sartaj smiled, and lobbed him the obvious question, ‘So what are you eating nowadays, sir?’
Parulkar sat up, called for chai and told Sartaj all about bajra rotis, and high-fibre fruits, and the dangers of refined sugar. ‘Sartaj,’ he said, ‘one must balance the body for the soul to thrive.’ Then he had to leave for a meeting at police headquarters. Sartaj walked him out to his car, and watched the little convoy leave. Parulkar’s white Ambassador was escorted by two Gypsy-loads of armed policemen and an unmarked car carrying yet more policemen in mufti. He was well protected.
Sartaj walked around the zonal headquarters and back into the station. He had paperwork to do, cases to work. It would be another late night, another inevitable dose of the bad restaurant food that he lived on. Eating well, eating for a long life, was not so easy. You needed time, you needed money, you needed a certain position, maybe you even needed bodyguards. Anyway, Sartaj thought, I am not so old, my body is still working. I will worry about it next year. He cleared a desk, and sat down to work.
Sartaj and Kamble had planned to confront Umesh later that night, but at six-thirty Sartaj received a call from Anjali Mathur. ‘I will be arriving at the domestic airport at eight o’clock sharp. Meet me there.’
She came out of the airport building surrounded by a knot of men. There was another group waiting at the end of the walkway for them, and from this hectic confluence of safari suits, she emerged to raise a hand at Sartaj. She was wearing her usual efficient shoes and a dark green salwar-kameez, and she looked very tired.
‘This is my boss, Mr Kulkarni. Please come in the car with us.’
Sartaj followed them to a white Ambassador in the parking area. The boss, who was a studious-looking bureaucrat with thick glasses, pointed Sartaj at the front seat. He and Anjali slid into the back. The air-conditioning inside the car was on, and the driver was standing by outside, but apparently they were not going anywhere. Kulkarni folded his arms over his chest and said, ‘Go ahead, Anjali.’
The briefing was thorough and precise. Anjali had followed up on Sartaj’s tip about Gaitonde and the guru. This guru himself – one Shridhar Shukla – had disappeared the previous year, or ‘gone into retreat’, according to his people, who were unable to provide current contact information. The organization itself had fallen into disarray after the Guru’s disappearance, with furious infighting and struggles and even murders, all of which had been widely reported in the national press. The first
of these unpleasant episodes, a double murder, had taken place in the ashram outside Chandigarh, and the police had been summoned. One of the officers who had responded, an IPS probationer on his first operation, had found some money in the room where the murders had taken place, a sum of ninety thousand rupees exactly. He had turned it in at the station, where the senior inspector had spotted the notes as counterfeit. The ashram authorities, when interrogated, had said that the money had probably come in as part of an anonymous cash donation, and they were unable to provide further information. And there the matter had rested, with a couple of notations in a couple of forgotten files, and a stack of counterfeit notes in an evidence room.
Six weeks later, an armed party of the Jullunder police raided a flat in a residential building, after a tip-off from a disgruntled dhobi. The dhobi had delivered ironed shirts for the three male inhabitants of the flat, had got into an argument with one of them over a damaged shirt and had been paid less than his due. The dhobi had then tipped off the local beat constable, alleging that the three men – one of whom was a blond foreigner – were engaging in drug dealing out of the flat, that suspicious characters were going in and out all the time. The raid by a special operations group followed. No drugs were found. No arrests were made, although a bowl of rice was still boiling in the kitchen when the police entered the flat. The three men who had rented the flat had apparently fled through a concealed rear staircase, which the raid party had failed to discover and secure. In the flat, the police found three suitcases and assorted clothing, a few books, a laptop and ten thousand rupees in cash. On closer examination, the money was found to be counterfeit. The ThinkPad laptop was examined and found to be password-protected. The hard drive was then removed from the laptop, and connected to another computer and scanned. All the data files were found to be stored on a logical drive encrypted with a 256-bit cipher, using a commercially available program named DeepCrypt. The local computer consultant tasked by the police tried extended dictionary attacks, but failed to break the encryption. Although it was curious that the men had fled, the Jullunder police had no special reason to pursue the case, and no means of doing so. So the case was filed and forgotten. Forgotten, that is, until a mention of the counterfeit money had bubbled up through the channels and multiple layers into a database containing all mentions of such counterfeiting, which had been tapped by Anjali Mathur in Delhi. And she had noticed, in her careful and slow and relentless querying through the lists of counterfeiting cases, that this Jullunder file contained a mention of Guru Shridhar Shukla. The browser on the confiscated laptop had stored its cache on an unencrypted portion of the hard disk, and only three sites had been visited in the three weeks recorded in these history files. One was Hotmail, the other was a pornography site called www.hotdesibabes.com and the third was this Guru’s website.
Anjali Mathur had taken this admittedly vague connection to Mr Kulkarni, told him that there was in both cases counterfeit money of the same type, on the same paper, from the same plates, and also both times the Guru was involved. Mr Kulkarni, in his wisdom, had allowed her to requisition the organization’s computer department, to attempt to crack the encryption on the Jullunder laptop. But this laptop had by now disappeared from the police station concerned. The station officer apologized profusely, and promised that in future the evidence room would be guarded more securely, and that he would institute an enquiry, and punish all the policemen responsible for the loss. This halted all enquiries, until Anjali remembered that the hard disk had been removed from the laptop by the consultant, and called the SHO back. The hard disk was finally found at two a.m. on Tuesday night, in a brown envelope secured by a rubber band, on the top shelf of a bookcase in the consultant’s office. At which point it was couriered to Delhi, to Anjali Mathur. And, in two days and seven hours, the encrypted logical drive was unencrypted, unlocked and made available.
‘We have capabilities in the area of encryption,’ Anjali Mathur said, with a certain pride, ‘that are even ahead of the western countries. And that DeepCrypt encryption program they used was not very good.’
‘That’s good luck for us,’ Sartaj said.
‘Very good luck,’ Kulkarni said. ‘As it turns out.’
Anjali nodded. ‘What we found on the encrypted drive were blueprints, technical documents and progress reports. From analysis of all this, we are convinced that there is indeed a device, that this device has been made with materials brought into the country and that it is technically sound. They bought spent nuclear fuel on the international black market and brought it into the country. They then used converted mass spectrometers to separate and extract enriched weapons-grade material from this spent fuel. Mass spectrometers are machines that are routinely used in academic institutions and laboratories. They can be legally bought on the open market. A mass spectrometer converted to work as a calutron will only produce tiny amounts of enriched weapons-grade material over weeks and months, but if you are patient enough you will ultimately have enough for a device. And we know they were using a number of calutrons, maybe as many as a dozen, fifteen. So they had the material and they had the knowledge and expertise. We know they made a device. And we know that the device has already been brought into this city. This is clear from e-mails and documents that we found on the hard disk.’
‘Device,’ Sartaj said. ‘You mean a bomb.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where? Where is it?’
‘That is the problem,’ Anjali said. ‘We do not know.’
‘Nothing else? No clues?’ Sartaj felt detached from himself, as if it were somebody else having this bizarre discussion in the back of a car in front of Terminal Two, on a muggy night like any other, with travellers and their relatives hefting suitcases into dickies. He tried to focus, to bring his usual hunger for details to bear on the problem at hand. It was important to keep working, to be professional in the face of this bad fantasy made worse reality. ‘There must be something.’
‘No, there is not much. There is a reference to a house in Mumbai. The exact sentence is, “I hope Guru-ji is enjoying the terrace at the house,” and the implication is that this house is inside the city. That is all.’
‘Why are they doing this?’
Kulkarni took off his glasses and polished them. ‘We are not sure. On the hard disk,’ he said, ‘there are also files from a publishing program. These include the text and images and fonts for three pamphlets. The pamphlets are supposed to be the product of an extremist Islamic organization named Hizbuddeen.’ He put his glasses back on, with the air of an absent-minded professor. ‘We ourselves have collected printed copies of these pamphlets during raids on various banned organizations. Our impression was that Hizbuddeen was a fundamentalist organization with Pakistani links. We knew Hizbuddeen funded other such organizations, and was perhaps planning a big terrorist operation. Now, this new information would suggest that Hizbuddeen is actually a false front, a fake organization created by this Guru Shridhar Shukla and his people. Our theory now is that their plan is to set off this device and blame it on Islamic fundamentalism. So, the evidence we have so far collected on Hizbuddeen is a false trail, laid by this man Shukla and his organization. The idea being that, after a nuclear incident, Hizbuddeen would claim responsibility, and would be believed.’
‘But why? What do they hope to gain?’
The light fell flat on Kulkarni’s glasses, making little half-moons of them. He shrugged. ‘We are not sure of the intended consequences, or the motives. Perhaps they want heightening of tension, escalation, perhaps retaliation.’
Sartaj didn’t want to think about what retaliation might mean in this instance, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking about the first looming disaster. ‘If they set this, this device off,’ he said, ‘what will happen? How big is it?’
Kulkarni deferred to Anjali with a tilting of his glasses. Apparently she was the detail person on their team. ‘From what we can gather,’ she said, ‘it is not a small device. The constructio
n may actually have taken longer because they wanted to deliver a larger payload. And they don’t care about miniaturization at all. It was probably driven into the city in the back of a truck. If it goes off…’ She swallowed. ‘Probably much of the city.’
‘Everything?’
‘Almost. If they plan carefully and place it well.’
Sartaj had no doubt that they would place it extremely well. They had calculated the instrument, and their purpose, and they would make sure of the destruction. There was only one question left. ‘What do we do?’
Kulkarni had something like a plan. ‘We are setting up a working committee right now,’ he said, ‘at the Colaba police headquarters. We will issue an alert in the next two hours. But there will be no mention of the device. We will just say that there is a reliable tip on a big terrorist operation. Any mention of the device may cause widespread panic, people rushing to leave the city, that sort of thing. We don’t want that. It would be impossible to control.’
Sartaj could well imagine the rush, the highway clogged with cars and trucks, the desperate shoving to get on to trains, the screams of lost children. And he could also feel the need, in some other corridor of his mind, to warn Mary, to get Majid Khan’s children out of the city. But he nodded, and said, ‘Yes, yes.’
‘If information about the device leaked to the general public,’ Anjali said, ‘then the people in charge of the device might also learn about it. They may set it off then, to prevent discovery and prevention. The whole investigation has to proceed with that in mind. It has to be very tight.’
‘Fully tight,’ Sartaj said. ‘But what are they waiting for?’
‘We know nothing about their timetable,’ Anjali said. ‘We would like to continue what you have been doing for us. You have done very well. Use your resources to investigate.’