Asiya took a sip before she answered.

  ‘I wish there were more in the government who had the same view about our community. Most government servants I have seen believe in mocking and insulting everything we believe in, just because we are the ones who believe in it.’

  Ajay sighed sadly.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But my duty and my faith can coexist in harmony. And my allegiance is sworn to the idea of this country, to the Constitution of India.’

  Asiya rolled her eyes, as if this was hard to believe. ‘Speaking of co-existence,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of solipsism?’

  ‘As a philosophical idea, it means that only my mental states are real and that I cannot be aware of anything beyond them.’

  ‘So can you ever be aware of the existence of the other, the enemy whom you are fighting all the time?’

  ‘I do not have the luxury of humouring grey areas,’ Ajay said. ‘Things are binary for me, most of the time. One or zero. Yes or no. Right or …’

  ‘… wrong?’ Asiya said. ‘Our moral compasses are guided by our circumstances. The person you brand as a terrorist may be a hero for somebody else, someone doing God’s work.’

  ‘No God wants the blood of innocents, of children, of women, to be spilled in their name.’ Ajay paused reflectively. ‘In the context of Islamic history, you must have heard of the Year of the Elephant.’

  Asiya nodded, surprise evident on her face. Ajay was possibly the only non-Muslim who had even heard of this.

  The year which Ajay was referring to roughly coincided with 570 CE when Abraha-al-Ashram, an Abyssinian ruler of Yemen, was marching towards the Holy Kaaba with the intention of reducing it to rubble. Accompanying him was a huge army of nearly forty thousand men, led by mammoth war elephants. Several Arab tribes who had tried to stop Abraha were swiftly defeated.

  When Abraha was near the city of Mecca, different Arab tribes united to defend the Holy Kaaba. The Abyssinian ruler then sent an emissary to these Arab tribes saying that his intention was to only destroy the Kaaba, and if they let him have his way they could save their lives. Otherwise, they would meet the same fate as the others who had tried to stop his march. Abraha’s army had also captured a few camels which belonged to Abd al-Muttalib, the grandfather of the last prophet of Islam.

  al-Muttalib, who was among the defenders of the Kaaba, entered a negotiation with Abraha-al-Ashram. Surprisingly, he raised the matter of his missing camels.

  Abraha was flummoxed. Here he was about to destroy the holy structure but those deemed to be its protectors were worried about a flock of camels. Abd al-Muttalib responded by saying that the camels were his property, thus he was bound to be concerned. The House of God, the Holy Kaaba, was in the protection of God, who was its owner, its ultimate defender, and He would protect what was His and not let dishonour fall upon His slaves.

  The next day, as Abraha was about to launch his campaign towards the final objective, a flock of birds (Ababil) appeared across the dark skies carrying small stones in their beaks. The birds dropped the stones on Abraha’s army. And even small stones were capable of much devastation when thrown from great heights. The war elephants marching towards Mecca were reduced to pieces of straw. And thus the powerful Abraha-al-Ashram was defeated.

  ‘God is the creator and protector of man. And this is basically what most faiths preach, when you get down to it,’ Ajay said. ‘Which boils down to the simple fact that there can be no justification for killing another innocent human in order to protect the God who created us.’

  Ajay and Asiya continued speaking late into the night, and the more they talked, the more convinced Ajay was.

  Finally, close to midnight, he stood up and went to the wardrobe. With a smile on his face, he opened a drawer and brought out the ring he had hidden inside. He walked back to the bed where Asiya was reclining. She saw the case in his hand and shot up, now sitting upright with her eyes wide.

  Ajay climbed onto the bed and slid close to her.

  ‘Asiya,’ he said simply. ‘Will you marry me?’

  Asiya grabbed his kurta lapels and pulled him close into a long kiss.

  21

  At 3 a.m., Asiya opened her eyes. She needed no alarm to wake up.

  She turned slightly to check if Ajay was asleep. His back was turned towards her. She leaned over to his side and noted his closed eyes and the rise and fall of his chest.

  After she had accepted his proposal – as simply as he had proposed, with a single ‘yes’ – they had made tender, sweet love and fallen into each other’s arms, exhausted. Soon, both had drifted off to sleep, happy and content.

  Asiya slipped out of bed and slowly, ever so slowly, picked up Ajay’s laptop bag. Then she tiptoed out to the living room after taking one last look to make sure Ajay was still sleeping.

  She placed the laptop on a table, but did not switch on the lights. The slightest noise could awaken Ajay and she didn’t want to take any risks. She lifted the laptop lid. The screen came to life.

  In the past week, she had obtained Ajay’s login credentials through ‘shoulder surfing’. Shoulder surfing was a social engineering technique by which hackers could obtain passwords of unsuspecting victims simply by looking over their shoulder as the victims accessed their devices. In the previous week, Ajay had had to log in to his work laptop from home for an emergency video call. Asiya had used that moment to slip behind Ajay and mentally note his password. By the time he turned around, she was already in the kitchen and he hadn’t suspected a thing.

  Now Asiya logged in and opened a chat website. Her contact at the other end was already using a virtual private network to protect his identity. Along with the VPN, he was also using various applications to mask his identity and make tracing difficult for authorities. His connection to Ajay’s computer was routed through a chain of unsuspecting machines and networks.

  With her contact online and waiting, Asiya started to search for the files that she wanted. The search took her deeper and deeper into the file directory. Some of the folders were encrypted and would have to be copied so that they could be decoded on another machine.

  Sitting in the dark with only the light from the screen shimmering on her face, she was growing edgier by the minute. This was taking longer than expected.

  Noiselessly, she typed out a message to her contact, telling him that she hadn’t found anything and that she would try again later. She planned to repeat her attempt when Ajay was in the shower later that morning.

  She quickly closed all windows, logged out and shut the laptop, plunging the room in darkness. Then she picked it up and stood up to go back into the bedroom.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Ajay’s voice sounded in the darkness, making every muscle in her body stiffen. ‘That was a replacement anyway.’

  Ajay flicked on a switch and the room was flooded with light. He was standing in the doorway between the living room and the bedroom, wide awake, his face a mask of cold fury.

  ‘You know,’ Asiya said simply.

  ‘I know,’ he replied, equally to the point.

  There was no point in lying, she realized.

  With one strong movement of her arm, Asiya hurled the laptop at Ajay’s head. He must have been expecting the attack, as he ducked almost as soon as the laptop left her hand. It sailed over his head as he rolled forward. At the same time, Asiya vaulted over the table that she had placed the laptop on. Both came to a stop face-to-face, inches away from each other.

  Asiya attacked first, letting loose a volley of punches. Ajay matched her move for move, blocking or parrying each punch, refusing to give an inch of ground.

  Within minutes, Asiya understood that it wasn’t going to be of any use. She took two quick steps back and kicked out, her leg jack-knifing up towards his head. Ajay didn’t miss a beat as he caught her foot in a vice-like grip.

  Asiya quickly bent sideways from her waist so that by the time he jerked her foot to throw her off-balance, both her hands were already touching the floor. Using the floor as support, she lifted her other leg, swirled around in the air and drove the heel into his face, catching him squarely in the forehead.

  Ajay crashed to the floor, letting go of her leg, and Asiya picked herself up. In the few seconds that it took him to regain his bearings and stand up, she had run over to the small table near the window, which had a fruit tray and a knife. She picked up the knife and pointed it at Ajay as he came rushing towards her. He saw it just in time and stopped a couple of feet away.

  ‘Surrender now and make it easier for both of us,’ he said.

  ‘Never,’ she spat, backing away towards the door.

  He stepped forward but she was already at the door, unlatching it without even looking behind.

  A janitor was clearing the dinner trays left outside the rooms. In a flash, Asiya moved behind him, grabbed him by the neck and put the knife to his throat.

  Ajay stopped in his tracks. He somehow knew that Asiya would kill the janitor in a heartbeat.

  ‘This isn’t over,’ he said.

  ‘Of course it isn’t, Ghazi,’ she breathed.

  The mention of that codename stunned Ajay for a second, and before he could react, Asiya was gone.

  22

  The suite had been completely taken over by the police. Uniformed cops bustled about. The laptop that Asiya had accessed was placed in a clear plastic bag.

  Kumar was sitting next to Ajay, while Pratap was pacing about, supervising the collection of evidence.

  Once Ajay was momentarily shocked into inaction, Asiya dragged the janitor to the staircase. There, she pushed him away and ran down the stairs, with Ajay in pursuit. She reached the lobby with Ajay still one staircase behind, cut through the sparse crowd and disappeared.

  The police were now trying to track her movements through CCTV cameras outside and around the hotel, but Ajay didn’t have much hope.

  Pratap came up to him and Kumar.

  ‘We’re done with evidence collection, sir,’ he told Kumar. In a minute, the senior cops were alone in the suite after asking everyone else to clear out.

  ‘Okay,’ Kumar said. ‘Start at the beginning and tell me everything.’

  Ajay started from the time he followed Nazneen to the Kurla boutique.

  It had taken three hours for the fire brigade to put out the fire at the boutique. As soon as the site was declared safe, Ajay was the first to enter. He had already laid claim to the blast scene even as firefighting operations were underway.

  Within the next one hour, the fire brigade and the Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad confirmed that no explosives had been used; it was a gas leak explosion. The fire brigade also opined that given the intensity of the blast, it was possible that someone had deliberately opened the valve of the gas cylinder, leading to a sudden rush of LPG in the air.

  A body was also pulled out from under the destroyed shop. It should ideally have been charred, but the debris that came crashing down on it had saved it from the worst of the flames. Hence, Ajay could clearly make out the face through the partially burned burqa. It was Nazneen.

  ‘With Nazneen gone, I had no way of proving that it was she who killed Moshe. The footage from Chandrashekhar’s lane was useless, as she was in a group. But in the one outside Moshe’s house, she was alone. Probably because the murder was planned at short notice.’

  ‘And so,’ Kumar said, ‘you went to Pune to get the gait analysis done?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ajay replied.

  Before Ajay left for Pune, he had collected the final piece of the puzzle. He had no footage to compare the gait against the one from outside Moshe’s house. So he drove to the Esplanade court, where Nazneen had been produced for her bail hearing. He took a copy of her walking out of the gate with Asiya by her side. Then he left for Pune.

  ‘Shit,’ Pratap said sympathetically.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ajay replied curtly.

  Dr Prasad inadvertently pulled the ground from underneath Ajay’s feet, when he told him that the suspect’s gait analysis was a perfect match … but for Asiya, not Nazneen. Ajay was left shell-shocked and stunned. Asiya …

  Ajay desperately wanted to dismiss the theory, even as it began taking shape in his head. He was in love with Asiya and he hated himself for even suspecting her. But his job had taught him never to dismiss anything as coincidence without verifying every bit of information.

  Asiya had been in his arms the night Moshe drunk-dialled him. The inebriated Moshe was loud enough for her to be able to hear him. And, one night later, he was killed. It was too much to ignore. Still, hoping against hope, he had passed on Asiya’s number to his friend in the TERM Cell. The results had only confirmed his suspicions. Asiya’s phone was switched off at the time of both the murders, and a criminal lawyer could not afford to keep her phone switched off for that long.

  Ajay had driven non-stop to meet Kumar and tell him what he had found. Kumar had wanted to arrest Asiya immediately, but Ajay had managed to convince him to wait for twenty-four hours.

  ‘Which brings us,’ Kumar said, ‘to your plan. Tell Pratap here, will you?’

  Ajay nodded.

  ‘After talking to Kumar sir, I booked this room and got her here. While talking, I casually let it slip that I was carrying some crucial information on my laptop. I had hoped that she would not be able to resist this, and I was right. She tried looking for the “information” on my laptop while she thought I was sleeping. What she didn’t know was that I’d replaced my personal laptop with a replica, with certain modifications.’

  ‘And I’m guessing that the fun part lies in these modifications?’

  Ajay nodded.

  ‘The best hacker on the NIA’s payroll had programmed the laptop to spy on anyone who tries to break into it. As soon as Asiya started chatting with her contact, a hidden programme started tracing this person’s IP address and relaying it to a team that had been on standby since last morning. Plus, the camera was programmed to turn itself on and record a continuous video of whoever was using it. If this case ever goes to court, that alone is going to be clinching evidence of Asiya spying on a government officer.’

  ‘That’s quite brilliant, actually,’ Pratap said. ‘So, who was her contact?’

  ‘My team has already put him under surveillance. For now, I think we should just wait and watch. I don’t think Asiya knows how much we know.’

  ‘And what about Asiya herself, if that is even her real name?’ Kumar asked.

  ‘I think we should flash her photo across the country and issue a red notice in her name, sir,’ Pratap said.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t agree, sir,’ Ajay responded.

  ‘Why?’ Pratap asked, a little irritated.

  ‘Because,’ Ajay said, ‘that would mean revealing to the country not only what Asiya is wanted for, but the existence of the K-e-M. And the country would go batshit insane if that came out.’

  There was a silence. Both Kumar and Pratap had to agree.

  Finally, Kumar spoke.

  ‘Anything else we should know, Ajay?’ he asked.

  Ajay paused for just a moment while his mind flashed back to the last thing Asiya had said to him.

  ‘Of course it isn’t, Ghazi.’

  Aloud, he said, ‘No, sir.’

  23

  Mahesh Dhoble was making his way into the Sheldonian Theatre of the Oxford University for the graduation ceremony of the academic year of 2023. He had arrived late and could see his son standing with the other students. His son was looking around worriedly for his father. Both caught each other’s eye as Dhoble was taking his seat, and smiled at each other.

  Dhoble had got late because he had romped all night with a young foreigner whom he had met at his hotel bar. He had taken her back to his room for a wild night filled with sex and drugs. Next morning, he had trouble waking up, but somehow made it to his son’s graduation.

  Dhoble’s son climbed up the stairs of the stage to collect his graduation degree. The father clapped the loudest and resisted the urge to whistle aloud.

  Dhoble was the chief of security at the Indian Atomic Research Centre. He had taken the last few weeks off to spend some time with his son. As he held a sensitive posting, it was not unusual for the government to attach a security detail for him. The security detail not just provided cover to high-ranking officers but also kept an eye on their conduct. This was to ensure that the officer would not expose himself, by choice or otherwise, to foreign intelligence agencies.

  Intelligence agencies often tried to recruit high-ranking officers to their team on such visits. The most famous of such incidents was the case of Rabinder Singh, a R&AW officer who was trapped by the CIA at a foreign station and turned into a double agent. When he was detected by the R&AW’s counterintelligence in 2004, Singh fled to the USA, where it is believed that he was killed in a road accident in 2016 after the CIA abandoned him.

  But Dhoble had served the establishment for thirty-five years and was beyond suspicion. Therefore, he had had no security detail to hinder his escapades the previous night.

  After his son collected the degree, he posed with Dhoble for a selfie when the father and son were photobombed by another gentleman in a three-piece suit. Dhoble’s smile vanished when he saw the man in his photo.

  ‘Young man,’ Khush Dil said to Dhoble’s son, even as he put his arm around Dhoble’s shoulder, ‘your father must be very proud today.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Dhoble’s son said. ‘I’ve met most of Daddy’s friends, but I don’t think I’ve met you before?’

  Dhoble cleared his throat. ‘He is—’

  ‘I am a friend of your dad for special occasions, sonny boy,’ Khush Dil interjected. ‘Mahesh, why don’t we talk in private?’

  Dhoble patted his son’s shoulder and asked him to carry on. His head suddenly felt heavy. He knew Khush Dil Khan, a freelance operative occasionally used by Indian intelligence agencies for dirty work. And the reason why he was used only occasionally was because KD, as he was known, had a nasty habit of popping up when you least expected him, to call in favours. These favours always cost someone or the other very dearly.