Eleventh Hour Page 15

  ‘First, go find Abdul Jabbar Hakimi’s body in the Kalwa creek,’ Munafiq said and hung up.

  43

  Wednesday late morning, cruise liner.

  ‘Try not to be too harsh on yourself, son,’ Munafiq said to Daniel, who was staring at him with pure, unadulterated hatred. ‘Better minds than yours have been taken in.’

  ‘It was all planned, wasn’t it?’ Daniel asked through gritted teeth. ‘The whole episode between Vaishali and the henchman?’

  ‘Yes, my dear boy. Yes. I was supposed to assume charge of the hostages and keep them in line, to ensure no one did anything to throw a spanner in the works. But people prefer your type – you know, tall, dark and handsome with a brooding persona and a military background – as opposed to some boring old man. So I asked Marco to cause a little stir. The mercenary was acting on his instructions.’

  ‘So he’s not dead like we’d assumed?’

  Munafiq shook his head.

  ‘We sent him off the cruise liner in a dinghy the same night. Made some calls and arranged for him to be picked up at sea.’

  ‘How were you passing orders to Marco after the hijack?’ Vikrant asked, curious despite himself.

  Munafiq pulled up one of the legs of his trousers to reveal a small basic-model cellphone taped to his calf using a Velcro strap.

  ‘All I had to do was visit the loo and send out text messages.’

  ‘All that…’ Vaishali now managed to speak. ‘All those things you said … about your childhood…’

  ‘About losing my parents?’ Munafiq said. ‘Well, I did lose them. They were both tortured to death by RAW agents because they wouldn’t give up information about the Pakistani ordnance factory where they worked.’

  Vaishali looked from Daniel to Vikrant, shocked.

  ‘He’s lying,’ she said.

  Neither Daniel nor Vikrant responded. Daniel had spent half his career working on covert operations that the Indian government would never acknowledge. Vikrant had seen enough during his stint with the IB to know that espionage was a dirty game. He actually had an idea about the RAW operation that Munafiq mentioned, having heard about something similar from a RAW veteran he had briefly worked with.

  ‘They won’t deny it,’ Munafiq said. ‘They can’t.’

  ‘Where does this stop?’ Vaishali said in a weak voice.

  ‘It stops with the obliteration of every enemy of Islam,’ Munafiq said, a glint of steel entering his eyes. ‘It stops at a point where no one shall touch a Muslim again, because no one will dare to.’

  Munafiq walked away, head held high, towards Marwan and Marco. Marco’s men moved closer to the edge of the deck to keep an eye on Vikrant, Daniel and Vaishali. The IM Five stood in a corner, talking among themselves.

  ‘I’m going to kill the old fuck if it’s the last thing I do,’ Daniel said venomously.

  ‘Cool it, Dan,’ Vikrant said. ‘I need you to be calm. I can’t do this alone.’

  ‘Do what the fuck alone?’ Daniel asked savagely.

  ‘Dan…’ Vaishali said, sounding scared. She had never seen him like this. ‘Please.’

  Daniel turned to her and his gaze softened. Vaishali calmed him down and soon, Vikrant could see him looking at her tenderly. He deliberately cleared his throat.

  ‘What?’ both Daniel and Vaishali asked self-consciously.

  ‘End of the world as we know it and you two still get to have a moment.’

  They both looked away, Vaishali blushing.

  ‘You got someone?’ Daniel asked. ‘You know, waiting for you?’

  Vikrant sighed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, thinking of the way Shaina had looked at him when he’d left the aircraft carrier. She hadn’t said anything, but Vikrant had a feeling that she had wanted to. He knew what it probably was. The problem was that he had no idea what his response would have been.

  ‘It’s complicated, huh?’ Vaishali asked with a slight smile.

  ‘That’s putting it mildly,’ Vikrant replied.

  ‘Can you swim, Toothpick?’ Daniel asked, glancing at Marco’s men to make sure they were out of earshot.

  ‘What’re you thinking?’ Vikrant asked.

  ‘If we can get free of these ropes,’ Daniel said, ‘all we have to do is jump overboard. We’re the last hostages left and with us gone, they lose leverage.’

  Vikrant sighed again.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Vaishali asked.

  ‘There’s this little problem called the ’93 Cache…’

  Half an hour later, Daniel and Vaishali were looking at him with a mixture of shock and terror.

  ‘Is that what Hakimi … is that what he meant when he said he would start a fire that would burn down all of Mumbai?’

  Vikrant nodded morosely. ‘And his name is Munafiq. I mean, that’s what we call him.’

  ‘Munafiq?’ Vaishali asked.

  ‘The Urdu word for two-faced.’

  ‘Apt,’ Daniel said. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about this cache earlier?’

  Vikrant shrugged. ‘There were too many scared people around us when I came aboard. I didn’t want to add to the panic. Plus, I didn’t know whom I could trust. I mean, I’ve worked with you before, Dan, but I didn’t know anyone else.’

  ‘And now?’ Vaishali asked.

  ‘Now,’ Vikrant said looking first at her and then at Daniel, ‘I guess it’s the three of us for each other.’

  ‘Damn right,’ Daniel said. ‘And this changes the stakes. We can’t do anything without ensuring that they won’t trigger an attack in Mumbai. Fuck knows what they’ve planned.’

  The sudden noise of a jet engine distracted them, and they looked up to see a fighter jet descending onto the aircraft carrier.

  On the other side of the deck, Munafiq heard the noise too. He quickly raised his satellite phone and had a brief conversation. Daniel assumed that he was speaking to someone on the aircraft carrier to ask what was going on. The response seemed to satisfy him, as he smiled a little before hanging up.

  Vikrant, on the other hand, had been squinting intently at the aircraft carrier. As Daniel turned towards him, he saw Vikrant sporting a faint smile of his own.

  ‘What?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘I think I saw Mirza getting on that jet,’ Vikrant said.

  ‘And that makes you happy because?’

  ‘Mirza would never leave in the middle of a situation like this unless he had a really good reason.’

  44

  Wednesday afternoon, New Delhi.

  Prime Minister Parmeshwar Naidu stepped into the private bathroom in his office and went to the washbasin. He splashed cold water on his face again and again. Then he left the tap running while he stood, his hands clutching the sides of the basin, head bowed, water dripping from his face.

  For a wonderful minute, his mind went blank. Then the chaos of multiple thoughts started again. The hijack, the demand, the update that he had just received from Lakshadweep.

  The news media had hired private boats and were camping on the water as close to the cruise liner as the navy would allow. One boat had broken through the navy cordon and tried to get closer. It was immediately surrounded by naval boats, after which the journalists on board as well as the marine pilot were taken into custody.

  Still, the media boats had been close enough to capture Captain Sahani being shot in the head and plummeting into the water. At least two news channels were playing the scene on loop, and others were sure to follow.

  The law-and-order situation in Mumbai was getting worse, Maharashtra Chief Minister Yashwant Pradhan had informed him, with people now abandoning their vehicles on the roads so that they could leave the city on foot. The highways were lined with abandoned cars, which the police were struggling to move.

  The fanatics were having a field day, holding religious meetings and assuring anyone who would listen that their God would protect all those who embraced their faith immediately. Some o
f these fanatics were even on television news debates.

  The situation was getting worse in Lakshadweep as well. The administrator, Danish Khan, had called Naidu half an hour ago to tell him that his office was flooded with calls from people asking what the government intended to do about the hijackers’ demands. There was also talk of a massive protest being organized outside Khan’s office.

  ‘With all due respect, sir, if the government does decide to give in to the terrorists, I’d rather get shot on live television,’ Khan had said before hanging up.

  Naidu shook his head, turned off the tap and straightened up. Carefully, he dried his face and hands, discarded the towel carelessly on the floor and walked out to his office.

  He made it halfway to his desk before stopping in his tracks. It took a good two minutes of staring at the man leaning against his desk before Naidu could believe that he was not hallucinating.

  ‘What on earth, Mirza?’ Naidu asked.

  Mirza came forward.

  ‘I was kind of going to ask you the same thing, sir,’ he said grimly.

  ‘How did you even get in here?’

  ‘Does it really matter, sir?’

  Naidu was silent for a minute.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked, looking away from Mirza.

  ‘The real question,’ Mirza replied, ‘is what do they want?’

  He saw Naidu hang his head, and his heart sank. He was right.

  It was during a brainstorming session with the others on board the aircraft carrier, in which he’d found himself wishing that Vikrant were with him, that a thought had stuck Mirza. It was something that a naval officer had said.

  ‘How are they even going to keep the islands under their control?’ the officer had asked. ‘There are, what, ten of them now? Fifteen? We don’t know how many of their men were killed by Vikrant and Fernando. They must have some kind of plan.’

  ‘What about through INS Dweeprakshak?’ Akhilesh Mishra asked, but the naval commander immediately shook his head.

  ‘They can’t control it without access codes. Any attempt at hacking and the base will shut down.’

  ‘Still,’ Mishra said. ‘Let’s keep that option open. Maybe that is the next thing they’ll ask for after we surrender Lakshadweep to them.’

  ‘If we surrender it to them,’ Mirza snapped and Mishra’s face flushed. Mirza would have said more, but then the idea had struck him out of nowhere. He took the naval commander aside for a brief conversation, after which he went to the room that he, Goyal and Jaiswal were using. Going through the heap of documents on the desk, he quickly pulled out what he needed. Then he called his friends in the IB.

  Half an hour later, Mirza boarded the jet while the naval commander told Munafiq on the phone that the PM had called an emergency meeting, and Mirza, as the one who had been negotiating all along, had been ordered to attend it.

  ‘How did you know?’ Naidu asked Mirza, still looking away.

  ‘The naval commander told me that you’re one of the few people who has access codes to the naval mainframe. A mainframe that can be accessed from naval bases, like the INS Dweeprakshak. And I had to wonder why, when Daniel Fernando tried to include Vaishali Sharma among the hostages to be released, Marco himself intervened and insisted that she would stay. The other hostages I spoke to found it strange.’

  Naidu said nothing.

  ‘She hates you, doesn’t she? Even uses her mother’s maiden name.’

  Naidu turned around. His eyes were glistening with tears.

  ‘She’s the only family I have left, Mirza,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘I can’t let her die. Not after what I did to her mother.’

  Mirza took a deep breath.

  ‘Sir,’ he said fervently. ‘Please tell me you haven’t already given them the access codes.’

  45

  Wednesday afternoon, Delhi/Lakshadweep.

  As Mirza ran to the fighter jet at the Palam Air Force base, which was already waiting, he felt as if his mind was in a whirl.

  Naidu isn’t a bad person, he thought, recalling the story the PM had narrated, as he jumped aboard and buckled in.

  Thirty years ago, Naidu was a newly appointed regional party president from Bangalore. In the eyes of everyone around him, he was a young man with a spotless reputation and a bright future ahead of him. What no one knew at the time was that he was also father to a six-month-old girl, thanks a night of indiscretion.

  Vaishali’s mother Divya was a dedicated party worker. During an election rally which Naidu was leading, they had got closer than they intended to. When she became pregnant, she could not bring herself to kill her unborn child. Naidu had made it clear that he had national ambitions and was not going to let marriage slow him down, and Divya would have to live with that. He made her relocate to Mumbai and set her up in a flat, while she told her neighbours that she was a widow.

  Every month, Naidu would send as much money as he could so that Divya and Vaishali’s needs were taken care of. He would even visit Divya discreetly when he was in Mumbai. Vaishali met him several times and grew up looking forward to his visits, as he always brought a lot of gifts and goodies, but she did not know who he really was.

  When Vaishali was twenty, Divya told her the truth about her father. She reacted by telling her mother to stop taking his money from that day onwards. The next time Naidu came visiting, Vaishali told him to go away and never return.

  ‘You made your choice twenty years ago, Mr Naidu,’ she said before shutting the door in his face. ‘Nothing you do can change it now.’

  Over the next seven years, till he was elected PM, Naidu made several attempts to contact Divya and Vaishali, but in vain. After his election three years earlier, he asked an IB officer, who was part of an elite cell reporting directly to him, to keep checking on them. The officer would give him periodic updates, including when Divya started suffering from heart problems and ultimately died of cardiac arrest.

  ‘And then there is that cache from 1993,’ Naidu had finished his story, wiping his tears. ‘They’re offering to give me back my daughter and leave Mumbai unharmed. How do I not obey them?’

  Mirza thought hard and fast.

  ‘They’ll still need to get into Dweeprakshak before they can use the codes,’ he said.

  Naidu nodded.

  ‘They will call off the attack on Mumbai the minute they have control of Lakshadweep. I have been told to clear every police and naval officer from Kavaratti so that they can take control unhindered. Then they’ll give me the locations of some places where they have planted bombs, while their men, who are prepared to attack key locations in the city with assault rifles and grenades, will simply disappear. The entire cache will be ours to seize,’ he said.

  ‘What happens next?’

  ‘They enter Dweeprakshak and take Vaishali and the others to the edge of Kavaratti under armed escort. Once they have access, they will call off the escort and let them leave the island.’

  ‘And you believe them?’ Mirza asked.

  ‘I don’t have a choice, Mirza. I’m not the one holding all the cards.’

  ‘You have a few aces up your sleeve, sir,’ Mirza said. ‘A whole pack of aces, led by me.’

  ‘I can’t risk it,’ Naidu said. ‘As much as it kills me, I have to comply with them.’

  Mirza stood up.

  ‘I’m not giving you a choice, sir,’ he said. He pulled out his cellphone and put it to his ear.

  ‘You got all that?’ he asked.

  ‘My God! I mean, yes, sir,’ a shell-shocked Mankame said from Mumbai.

  ‘Make multiple copies,’ Mirza said before ending the call. He looked up at Naidu, who was staring at him, terrified.

  ‘What the hell have you done, Mirza?’ he asked, trembling.

  Mirza looked at Naidu silently as the old man walked shakily to his chair and sat down.

  ‘How much do you trust me, sir?’ he asked the PM.

  Naidu just shook his head bitterly.

  �
��I’m serious. You’ve seen my work. You know me. If I told you I had a way to get Vaishali and everyone else back safely, would you trust me?’

  ‘You have a way of doing that?’ the PM asked hopefully.

  ‘I have one chance,’ Mirza said, looking at his watch. ‘We are seven hours away from the deadline they’ve given us. Give me six.’

  Naidu stared at Mirza for a long time before looking away.

  ‘Like you said,’ he replied. ‘You’re not giving me a choice.’

  Half an hour later, Mirza walked out of Naidu’s office and called Shaina on the aircraft carrier and had a brief conversation, after which he asked her to put Goyal on the line.

  ‘I don’t care if you don’t understand, lad,’ he told a flummoxed Goyal after relaying his instructions. ‘Just get it done.’

  Then he ran to the helipad in the PMO compound, where a chopper was waiting to take him to the air-force base.

  You better know what you’re doing, boy, he thought, recalling the conversation he had had with Vikrant in private before turning him over to the hijackers.

  46

  Wednesday evening, Lakshadweep.

  One of the basic lessons that Vikrant had been taught about crime and investigation was the value of foresight. Everyone that Vikrant had learned under, from his instructors at the IPS training academy in Hyderabad to the many officers that he worked with, including Mirza, had drilled into him how important it was to always think ahead.

  ‘Not one, not two, as many steps as you can. You register a case, you think of the arrest. You make an arrest, you think of the investigation. You start drafting a charge sheet, you think about the conviction. Everything is always about the future,’ one of his instructors had told him.

  After being posted to the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad as a DCP, years before 26/11, Vikrant had attended a training session where Mirza was one of the speakers. That was when the future mentor and protégé had first met.

  ‘Where there is terrorism, there is espionage,’ Mirza had said in his talk as a roomful of young officers from anti-terrorism agencies from across the country listened intently. ‘No one you arrest will simply be a foot soldier of a terror module. He will be a rung, a doorway for you into the module. Play your cards right and at least one of them will lead you across the border, where our friendly neighbourhood nemesis, the ISI, pulls the strings. That is a fight you win not with your fists, but with your brains. And that is where patience comes in. Because if you play your cards right, success will surely come, even if it’s at the eleventh hour.’