Алистер Маклин - Borrowed Time

‘So what if I want to look poor?’

‘Then lay it on with a trowel. Look poorer than poor, look like poor is what you’ve always been, like it’s what you can’t help being.’ Mike pointed at the screen. ‘Do what he was doing. Exaggerate, submerge yourself in the falsehood.’

‘What was he?’

‘A street sweeper.’

Amrit stared at the picture. ‘Him?’

‘Nearly impossible to believe. It’s true, though. And he’s a success story. That shot was taken as he boarded a plane out of India for ever. He made a stack by taking on three deliveries at one time.’

‘The money for that kind of deal isn’t triple,’ Commissioner Mantur said. ‘Because it’s possible to move a lot of product at one time, the value of the deal goes way, way up. A hundred thousand rupees, plus a ticket and a work permit to the USA.’

‘He was the perfect mule,’ Mike said. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamed of stopping a guy like that.’

‘The only reason we found out about him,’ Mantur said, ‘was because he likes sailing close to the wind – which was probably why he became a mule in the first place, and why he took the risk of carrying such a big load.’

‘How did you find out about him?’ Amrit said.

‘He told us about himself.’ Mantur nodded at the screen. ‘Sent us that picture. Gave us the whole story.’

‘Was he extradited from the States?’

‘It wouldn’t be likely, even if we could have found him,’ Mike said. ‘By the time he revealed how the scam had worked – how he had made the big delivery using so many disguises along the way that nobody could keep track of him-he was already somebody else in the USA. Adopting new personas and new appearances to match them appears to be either a vice or a compulsive game with this man. But bear in mind what I said, Amrit. What he did and the way he did it, that’s how to pass yourself off to the drug people, or to anyone else you need to impress with a lie.’

They looked at pictures of another thirty mules, mostly before-and-after sets, with Mike supplying some of the commentary and Mantur providing the rest. When it was over the three of them moved out of the police HQ to a sidewalk café a block away.

‘The concentration of carbon monoxide in the air at this spot,’ Mantur said, ‘is marginally less harmful than the mould spores in our basement. I hope you learned something from the exercise, Amrit.’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘Then tell Mr Graham and me what you learned.’

Amrit frowned. ‘I learned what makes a winner and what doesn’t. If I want to pass myself off as a candidate for mule work, I need to look helpless but not stupid, poor but hopeful, and worn-down enough by poverty to jump at any chance of decent money that I’m offered.’

Mike took his wallet from his pocket and slipped something from inside. ‘I brought this as a clincher. It’s to show you how important it is to convince drug people you’re who and what you say you are.’

He passed a postcard-size photograph to Amrit. He looked at it and winced. The man in the picture wore a T-shirt with the Nike logo, and his jeans were good-but-ancient Levi’s. His haircut looked expensive. His face was not recognizable, because someone had fired a gun into it at zero range.

‘John Lenehan Patel,’ Mike said. ‘He was half American, half Indian. Spoke Gujarati like a native. He came over here to work undercover for the UN in 1992. He managed to get himself recruited as a mule, with a six-job commission, doing back and forward flights to New York carrying heroin and prime Indian cocaine.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He wasn’t a good enough actor,’ Mike said. ‘He fooled some of the people, but not all of them. Somebody got suspicious of the sophisticated and clearly expensive work he got done on his hair. And there were mannerisms that didn’t fit a downtrodden person. And the general glow of health, the kind never seen in a person who has gone hungry more times than not.’

Amrit stared at the picture. ‘Did he know they were on to him?’

‘I don’t think he had a clue. He was a good operator. But that wasn’t enough.’

‘It’s like Mike says,’ Mantur said. ‘Learn to act, learn to put on a thick coat of who you are not, right on top of who you are.’

‘And always remember,’ Mike added, ‘for someone like you, working undercover on the side of the angels, it’s not the rigours of the law you have to worry about. It’s the viciousness of the people you try to fool. If they ever catch on to you, you’re a goner. Now have you got all that?’

‘I hope so,’ Amrit said. He sighed. ‘I think I could use another coffee.’

‘In the end it comes down to whether you want to be sure you survive, or whether you accept a few serious risks with a view to making progress.’

Lenny Trent was lying at the foot of a tree on a sloping hillside ten kilometres south-east of Srinagar. The tree was one of a cluster growing five metres below a narrow road that ran from Parbor, a kilometre north of Srinagar, all the way south-east to the Chinese border.

‘Those options apply to any job,’ Mike Graham said. He lay at the foot of an adjacent tree, peering up at the road through a night-vision scope.

‘Except that when people like you and me use the term “serious risk”, it’s death we’re talking about.’

The road they were watching had been selected from eight probable drug-traffic routes on the maps provided by Commissioner Mantur. Lenny knew the road and had suspected it himself, although surveillance, until now, had never been seriously proposed. For one thing the road was hard to see unless an observer moved dangerously close; it was also impossible to organize a confrontation or an ambush because there was not enough flat ground to deploy men in useful numbers. Tonight Mike and Lenny had decided to go on watch because it was Tuesday, and Tuesday, according to Mantur’s notes, was a day when drug convoys passed through the Vale of Kashmir.

‘The worrying thing about the risks,’ Lenny said, ‘is I get to need them.’

‘Old story.’

‘But I never thought it would apply to me. I visualized work as something I did, not something that would turn into a major part of what I am. When I take a risk and it pays off and I come out without a scratch or with only a couple, I’m up for days. My feet skim the ground. But the time comes round when I’m edgy again, strung out, needing my fix. Do you get that way?’

‘I play it differently,’ Mike said. ‘I take elaborate precautions, I keep myself ready for anything that might turn up–’

‘But you don’t avoid trouble.’

‘Uh-uh.’

‘You run at it.’

‘Well …’

‘It’s true,’ Lenny said. ‘You get the machine all oiled and battle-ready, but then you got to test it. No sense leaving it in the garage, all sleek and capable and full of potential it’ll never achieve. It’s not that kind of machine, is it?’

‘I think what we’re doing here is, we’re dressing up the fact we’re both kind of suicidal.’

Lenny raised his hand at a sound from the road. They put their night scopes to their eyes and watched. Above them to the right a horseman had appeared, ghostly green and white in the flickering artificial brightness of the viewfinder image. As he moved nearer, another horse was visible, then another and another. As they passed above Mike and Larry, loose dirt and stones rattled down among the trees.

‘A full-blown convoy,’ Lenny whispered. ‘Twelve or fourteen horses carrying big panniers.’

Mike watched as the last horseman stopped and dismounted. He called something ahead, another voice acknowledged, and he crouched beside the horse. Mike could see that a pannier strap had snapped. The man unwound a length of twine from his pocket and began looping it through holes in the strap above and below the break, drawing the twine tight, uniting the broken ends.