Sometimes he wished he was more unrestrained, the kind of person who would express anything that came into his head and would be adored as the eccentric one. Maybe, he thought, his aversion to drawing attention to himself was what made him such a good spy.

  The same tendency helped him melt into the crowd right now as he followed his target.

  Nazneen walked down a crowded lane in Kurla, with Ajay discreetly following her in a Pathani suit, his face artificially tanned and kohl lining his eyes. A skullcap completed his disguise.

  Ajay’s suspicion was based on the axiom that the simplest solution is usually the right one. He had racked his brains looking for some mysterious squad of deadly assassins that had slipped into India in the dead of the night. What he had overlooked was the fact that you no longer needed to spend time in Pakistani training camps, thanks to the internet. Chandrashekhar’s murder was by no means a job involving precise, surgical martial arts. He had been overpowered, injected with alcohol and hanged. Anyone with reasonable strength could have done it, especially with Chandrashekhar drunk and unable to fight back.

  Same with Moshe. If Moshe had let his guard down and the killer had him at a disadvantage, it was just the matter of who pressed the trigger first. And, before he had arrested Nazneen, Ajay had had absolutely no idea about her background, physical fitness or abilities. As soon as they received the information about her being in touch with Pakistani numbers, the NIA had elected to move fast with the arrest. Ajay had wanted to spend some more time on surveillance, but the decision was a political one, and hence not his to make.

  As Nazneen entered a tailor’s shop named Perfect Cut Boutique toward the end of the lane, Ajay found a seekh-kebab–paratha stall and sat on a stool. He signalled for one plate.

  Around him, three of his best men, also in disguise, were slowly taking up positions. One of them sat at a bus stop. The second entered a saloon and asked for a head massage. The third made himself comfortable on a concrete ledge at the edge of the road and lit a cigarette.

  The stall boy handed Ajay a steel plate with four seekh kebabs, two thin wheat parathas, green chutney and sliced onions. Ajay placed it on his lap, keeping his eyes firmly on the boutique. As he dug in, he stole a glance at his watch. Around five minutes had passed since Nazneen went in.

  Five minutes turned to ten and ten to fifteen before Ajay decided that it was time to move. He had finished his food. His colleague at the bus stop was getting increasingly uncomfortable with a young couple cosying up next to him. The one in the saloon had got his head massage and was running out of small talk. The one on the ledge had already smoked two cigarettes.

  Ajay paid the stall owner and started walking. His colleagues got moving as well. At that instant, a swarm of seven to eight burqa-clad woman came out of the boutique, walking fast. Ajay and his team stopped in their tracks. They exchanged bewildered glances as the women fanned out, already losing themselves in the crowd.

  Ajay swore. He pulled out his cell phone and called his office.

  ‘Put out an alert for Nazneen Dharker. Arrest her the moment she is seen. Get Mumbai police to help.’

  He shoved the phone back in his pocket and had just turned to run into Perfect Cut when an explosion threw him off his feet.

  18

  Ajay sped down the Mumbai–Pune expressway in his official car. He was on his way to meet Dr Mahesh Prasad, the deputy director of the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) in Pune.

  After the incident at the shop, Ajay and two of his team members who had been impacted were rushed to the Sion Hospital, along with several injured civilians. Since he wasn’t injured too badly, he was discharged after a check-up and first aid.

  It had taken all his strength and will power, however, to convince Asiya that he was fine. When he reached home, she had pointed angrily to the laceration on his forehead and then the cut on his forearm. He had to tell her the truth, after which she insisted he should rest until he got better. But time was running out.

  Finally, after much pleading and convincing, she agreed to let him make the quick trip to Pune the same evening.

  ‘You will keep your phone on the whole time and you will answer my call no matter where you are, or I swear to God …’ she had threatened.

  Ajay reached the CFSL well before evening. The centre at Pune was one of seven forensic agencies across India, operating under the Ministry of Home Affairs.

  Dr Prasad was waiting at the reception of the forensic podiatry division. This was a newly created division, which dealt with investigations around feet and the footwear at a scene of crime. Such investigation could then be used to construct a profile of the perpetrator.

  ‘Thank you for meeting me at such short notice,’ Ajay said.

  ‘Of course,’ Dr Prasad replied. ‘Calls from the NIA mean serious business. What brings you here?’

  ‘I wanted some footage analysed.’

  ‘What kind of analysis do you need?’

  ‘Gait analysis,’ Ajay said. ‘I was told that you are amongst the few experts in the country.’

  ‘Well,’ Dr Prasad said, ‘I’ll do my best not to disappoint you.’

  The two men walked towards the lab. In the corridor, Dr Prasad explained that gait analysis was a critical component in the study of locomotion of humans and animals. A frame-by-frame examination of a person’s walking pattern could reveal a ‘gait signature’. This signature was generated by composite factors such as the person’s posture, the length of his strides, the motion of his limbs, the tilt of his head and the angle of his feet. This signature was, arguably, as unique as a fingerprint. No two people walk in the same manner. The crime investigation department of a neighboring state had even used gait analysis to identify the culprit in the murder of a journalist who had a tendency to speak up against the current government.

  The analysis lab was a complicated set-up of machines and wires. Dr Prasad switched on a computer, which came to life with a series of beeps. Ajay handed over an external memory disk containing the footage to be analysed.

  ‘I have footage of a suspect captured from two different locations,’ Ajay said. ‘I presume that gait analysis can confirm, with some degree of confidence, if the suspect in both the videos is indeed the same person.’

  ‘Absolutely correct,’ Dr Prasad said.

  Dr Prasad clicked on the first file. The two men waited until the file was fully uploaded to the gait analysis software.

  The first footage was the one which had been captured from the CCTV in Colaba, in which a burqa-clad suspect was seen limping towards Moshe’s house. Ajay was sure that the suspect had faked the limp to throw off the police, but he decided to wait for the specialist’s opinion. On the monitor, the suspect was transformed into a three-dimensional model in hues of blue.

  A link of blue and green dots appeared along the figure’s axis, which was then plotted onto a graph. The results began to show up to the left of the window for each frame. The software measured the angle of the subject’s trunk, hip, knee and ankle with each stride. It also measured the distance of the arms from the body in each swing. Dr Prasad made a note of the findings and then proceeded to build a gait signature.

  ‘Do we know the gender of this suspect?’ Ajay asked.

  ‘Female,’ Dr Prasad said. ‘Aged about twenty-eight to thirty years.’

  Ajay watched as the scientist opened the second video on the pen drive and uploaded it to the software.

  ‘Give it a minute,’ he said. ‘The analysis takes time. I had them modify the software a bit to run all the same comparison twice, to eliminate any scope for error. Works wonders in court when we get on the stand and say that the tests were run twice. Solid piece of evidence for the prosecution.’

  Ajay only nodded. The computer kept emitting ticks and beeps sporadically as the software did its work. Finally, it threw up a dialog box on the screen.

  Dr Prasad thumped his palm on the wooden desk.

  ‘Perfect match.’

  Ajay took a deep breath.

  ‘Dr Prasad,’ he said. ‘I need you to do me one last favour.’

  As Ajay drove back to Mumbai, he stopped for a cup of tea near one of the many food plazas along the expressway.

  He glanced at his watch. It was nearly midnight, but he decided to take a chance and call up a high-ranking officer named Nimit Shukla in the Mumbai branch of the Telecom Enforcement Resource and Monitoring (TERM) Cell. Shukla was one of several sources whom Ajay had cultivated over a decade of networking. Ajay had this uncanny ability to nurture relationships with people who could help him at the right moment. Undoubtedly, Shukla could dig out the information which Ajay needed so desperately.

  ‘Where are you?’ Ajay asked as soon as Shukla answered the call.

  ‘Just about to leave office,’ Shukla said.

  ‘Real quick. I need you to pull me a favour,’ Ajay said. ‘Off the record.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve texted you a telephone number,’ Ajay said. ‘I need the location of this number on the date and time I am messaging you now.’

  ‘What?!’ Shukla almost screamed and then toned down to a whisper. ‘That means I will have to log into the Central Monitoring System!’

  ‘So?’ Ajay asked. ‘You have the access, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Shukla stammered. ‘But I also need orders from a superior. I can’t randomly pull up numbers for surveillance.’

  ‘No one needs to know, Shukla. I’m trusting you with a matter of national security.’

  Shukla mumbled a few half-hearted protests about getting overlooked for promotion if he was caught in an audit of the system logs. But Ajay promised to speak to his boss, who was on good terms with the telecommunications secretary, and put in a word for Shukla’s promotion during the next review cycle.

  Ajay heard the click-clack of the keyboard as Shukla fed the information into the CMS, which was a clandestine mass-monitoring system by the Government of India. He could imagine Shukla seeing telecom towers blinking on a map and the view beginning to zoom in. Finally, Shukla obtained a location.

  ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘I’m emailing you the number’s movements for the entire day.’

  ‘You’re my hero, Shukla,’ Ajay told him. ‘Consider yourself promoted.’

  Ajay got back into his vehicle and headed straight towards Neeraj Kumar’s residence in Mumbai. He waited until Kumar stepped out for a morning walk, flanked by two of his security guards, before coming out of his car.

  Kumar took one look at Ajay before hazarding a guess.

  ‘That bad, huh?’ he said.

  19

  A year ago, Nikhil Prasad, aka Nick, was a software engineer with the world’s largest computer security firm, working out of the San Francisco Bay area. He had everything going for him – a large cabin, a seven-figure salary in dollars and a beautiful wife. He was well-respected in the community of technocrats and looked upon as a role model by the many Indian engineers who migrated to America each year.

  But there were aspects about Nick’s life which were not in the public domain. A few years ago, he used to moonlight as a black-hat hacker. He had met a group of Russian hackers and together, they had developed a computer virus that had caused widespread disruption in networks of banks across the world. But that was just one half of the story. No one knew about this, not even his wife. In office, he was the technical genius whom everyone admired. Using his position in the computer security firm, Nick had also developed a security patch for the same virus, which had raised his stock to an entirely different level and even got him an out-of-turn promotion.

  However, Pakistan’s ISI had not only managed to dox his identity, it lured him into a honeytrap with multiple women at the same time and recorded the act. They then threatened to reveal his hacking activities to the American authorities. It would mean a jail term in foreign lands, loss of face in the NRI community and a divorce from his wife. He had even applied for American citizenship, but if Uncle Sam would get the slightest idea of Nick’s past, his American dream would come crashing down in seconds.

  So the ISI had made Nick an offer. They would pay him more than what he’d make in ten years to build a virus that would disrupt the electron accelerator being developed by the Indian DRCI and the IARC. The device was named KALI (Kilo Ampere Linear Injector) and could be used as a beam weapon to target enemy missiles and aircrafts.

  Nick was a high-profile capture for the ISI, unlike the pawns Indian agencies had intercepted recently. The last such instance was an employee of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) in Nashik. He had been arrested for supplying sensitive information about India’s fighter aircrafts to his handlers in the ISI. Such examples were not uncommon, especially in the age of social media. Social networks had made it easier for intelligence agencies to establish contacts with those it wanted to trap. Agencies would often set up fake female profiles (referred to as catfish accounts) and try to get in touch with government personnel who had access to confidential information.

  But for Nick, the ISI had conducted a full-blown operation and successfully compromised his position. Not giving in would mean that he would have to let go of everything he had worked for over the last decade.

  And so it was that Nick had flown down to India two days ago and was now sitting in a hotel room with Hafsa, his laptop up and running.

  Nick stared at some coloured lines of code. ‘I’ve been working on this project for the past three years,’ he said with a heavy American accent. ‘And I am close to a breakthrough.’

  ‘Such attempts have been successful earlier?’ Hafsa asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Nick said. ‘There are many examples in recent history.’

  In 2017, a cryptoworm named WannaCry had encrypted the data of more than 200,000 computers across 150 countries. To retrieve the data, the hackers had demanded ransom in the form of cryptocurrency. The total damage caused was estimated to be in billions of dollars.

  ‘But Stuxnet is a better example of our strategy,’ Nick said.

  He went on to explain the evolution of Stuxnet, which was a cyberweapon developed jointly by the US and Israel to target Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. The effects of the virus began surfacing in 2010. It had been introduced into the targeted network of Iran’s nuclear sites through an infected USB drive. It had caused extensive damage to the Natanz Nuclear Facility.

  ‘Such a cyberweapon is capable of complete chaos,’ Nick said.

  Stuxnet went crawling into the computer network over which Iran’s nuclear programme was built and caused a series of accidents. In one instance, the operational capacity of the centrifuges at the site dropped by nearly 30 per cent. It also managed to shut down some centrifuges and caused a major incident at the site, due to which Gholam Reza Aghazadeh (then head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran) had to resign. The cyberweapon had damaged nearly ten thousand centrifuges at Natanz before the Iranian authorities could respond effectively.

  ‘A similar attack will lead to the disruption of the KALI accelerator,’ Nick said.

  KALI was designed to work in such a way that if a missile was launched towards India, the particle accelerator would destroy it through highly focused energy beams. The project was such a secret that its existence had never been confirmed by India. If KALI was sabotaged, it would leave India vulnerable to attack. And that, combined with Ajay’s death, would be the K-e-M’s ultimate objective.

  Hafsa grinned at Nick. He was working under duress, and it was clear that he had crossed a certain line with the country of his birth. She was aware that the ISI had trapped Nick by applying pressure at the right points.

  But none of this made any iota of difference. For years, she had only dreamt of one thing. And she could now see her dream turning into reality.

  20

  Ajay was not a frequent visitor to luxury hotels. But the occasion demanded a certain level of style and hence, here he was inside the suite of the only seven-star hotel in suburban Mumbai.

  Earlier that day, after meeting Kumar and briefing him about his findings, Ajay had booked the hotel room and called up Asiya, asking her to meet him in the hotel lobby.

  Once she arrived, he had surprised her by taking her up to the room, saying it was theirs for the weekend. Asiya was delighted, but also a little reproachful about the expense. Ajay smiled at how well she knew him and waved away her admonitions.

  ‘Asiya,’ he had told her, ‘there’s a lot going on at work right now. The information I have on my laptop can set the entire country on edge if it comes out. The kind of people I’m chasing are evil to the core. Which is why I need some semblance of normalcy in my life right now. And you are the only one I can turn to.’

  Now, she was standing in the balcony, watching a cargo ship approach the harbour. Ajay checked the fully stocked minibar. His fingers glided across the beverages – the Breezers, the bottles of red wine – and he finally picked two cans of cranberry juice and walked over to Asiya’s side.

  Ajay opened both cans, and handed over one to her. They clinked the cans as Ajay broke into a subtle smile while Asiya laughed wholeheartedly.

  ‘Interesting,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Ajay asked, smiling, as they both settled into easy chairs.

  ‘You never once asked me if I drink. And you’ve always offered me non-alcoholic stuff. Plus, I’ve never seen you drink either.’

  Ajay chuckled.

  ‘If you were a drinker, it would have come up by now. It didn’t, and hence my most logical thought was to respect your choices.’