Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

As always, while waiting I spent time with my accountant. He was a full CA, my Partha Mukherjee, a good Bengali boy who had grown up in Bandra East. He had prospered with me, had moved his parents and sister into a flat in Lokhandwalla, and had already found a boy for the sister. The wedding was to be in November, with a five-star reception. I paid Partha Mukherjee well, with double bonuses, but that was exactly what he was worth to me. My company's annual turnover at that time was three hundred crores, and tracking that money and funnelling it from here to there, and investing it and expanding it, this in itself was a job and a half. Of course we still made money the old-fashioned way, from our taxes on businessmen and movie producers, from commissions earned from good middle-class householders who needed their retirement flats emptied of sticky tenants, from moving substances and materials across borders, from bookies and touts. But we had legitimate investments thrown across Bombay and into India, we had funds and stocks and real estate and start-up companies. All this Partha Mukherjee managed with his computers and his various assistants in various cities across Asia. I gave him half an hour every evening to summarize for me the worming of my money across countries. He showed me charts, and drew arrows on hand-drawn maps to explain to me where it was all going, from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Bombay. I understood, and directed its flow. Fat old Paritosh Shah would have been proud of me.

When Guru-ji's call came I always threw Partha Mukherjee out. But that day it was not his phone that buzzed, but the other secure phone beside it. Mukherjee stood up without being told and gathered up his papers. All the boys knew, when the special grey phones rang they had to leave me alone. After the door had shut, with a small, reassuring, vacuum-sealing sound with a metallic click at the end of it, I tapped my code into the phone to start the scrambler. The phones were secure at both ends.

'Ganesh.' It was Mr Kumar, as stealthy and gentle as always.

'Kumar Saab.'

'The Bhavnagar information was good. We got four of them.'

'Including the local contact? All dead?'

'Yes. Shabash, Ganesh.'

'This is only my dharam, sir.' And there would be no publicity for me or for Mr Kumar. Perhaps the local Bhavnagar police would announce that they had broken a cell of ISI agents, and captured a stash of arms. But for us, who had engineered the entire operation, there was only this quiet shabash between colleagues, on a private phone. This was how the secret agencies worked. Mr Kumar had explained it to me: when we do our work properly, nobody knows. When we fail, everybody knows. This operation had succeeded, now he had plans for a new one.

He said, 'We are going to hit Maulana Mehmood Ghouse.'

'Saab, that's a very big wicket.' Mehmood Ghouse was a Pakistani mullah, a preacher who had been very active in the Kashmir valley. He boasted openly of how many kafirs he had killed with his own hands, and for a while every television channel had been showing a grainy clip of him at a jehadi prayer meeting in Multan, holding up the rotting, decapitated head of an Indian soldier by the hair.

'Yes, he's big,' Mr Kumar said. 'And he's getting bigger. He's standing for elections. Suddenly he's a politician, and he's saying the man in the Multan video is not him at all.'

'Who will believe that?'

'The British government. They're very impressed by the fact that he used to be an electrical engineer, that he uses computers and is a modern mullah. They've given him a visa.'

'Maderchod.'

'He's going to be there for a week. He will address public meetings, try to meet English politicians.'

'Nobody will meet him, saab.'

'Maybe, maybe not. But he's stepping out into the open. He thinks he's going to come back with bags full of pounds and new batches of chelas and an international profile. So we will make him international news. You get a couple of teams in place in London.'

'What is the timetable?'

'We think he arrives in London four weeks from now.'

'Four weeks. Easy.' We had a base in Cannes, and moved business through Europe routinely. We recently had taken an interest in Slovenia and the Baltics. We were learning and expanding.

'We will pass you information as we receive it.'

'We'll be ready, saab. But why now, saab?'

'It is a message. These people think they can strut about on television. Bas.'

'And the message is to be from?'

'It is to be anonymous, at this point. But let's see how the operation goes. Maybe we can send it from your address.'

'Of course, saab.'

'Bye, Ganesh.'

'Salaam, saab.'

He was always clipped and to the point, my Mr Kumar. Just so much talk as was necessary, no more. He was not my friend, despite our months of conversations. But this order today, this was a mark of trust. Everything I had done so far was minor compared to this, and I was glad. Not just because being given more sensitive jobs meant that I could ask for more in return, but because I felt genuinely involved in this war. Now I was fighting at a higher level. Chotta Madhav's men had some years ago hit a Nepalese politician, a main supporter of the Pakistanis in Nepal, but that had only been in Kathmandu. I was to do this work in the centre of Europe, in fancy vilayati London. I would not fail. I would do it despite battalions of bodyguards and all of Scotland Yard. I set about organizing the logistics.

I called in Arjun Reddy, my computer-wallah, and he sent out my commands through secure e-mail. He assured me, as he did every week, that we were using the most advanced encryption technology, that we changed our cipher every week, that even if the CIA and the entire American government spent a billion dollars and their entire computer force on one of our e-mails, it would take them two hundred years to break the code. But e-mail still made me nervous. No matter how much Reddy assured me of steel-clad protection, I couldn't get rid of the image of my words swimming through the stomachs of the planet's computers, alone and vulnerable. But anyway, I wrote to my people in Cannes: ' London mein fielding lagao. Do team bhejo, Sachin aur Saurav dono. Ready rehna, instructions baad mein .' The op was four weeks down the line, but I had learnt from experience to have the elements in place early. Sometimes events speeded up, and in any case it was a good thing to have your boys learning the landscapes of the stalking ground, to get them used to the language and the buses and the neighbours, and to have the neighbours getting used to them.

Once the serious work was done, Reddy continued my own instruction in computers. I could handle Windows now, and knew in principle how to open a document and make a new one, how to slide through a spreadsheet and its layers, but I still got lost often. Sometimes I couldn't find the document I wanted, and sometimes I would get stuck in some box on the screen and nothing I did would back me out. It wasn't just the English that confused me, but the whole universe inside that screen, I couldn't reason out where the ground was, and which was the sky. Reddy drew diagrams on paper, but I couldn't grasp the geography, and it drove me crazy, especially when he tip-tapped with his twenty-three-year-old fingers and sped through the internet, and made the machine and the entire world-wide system do things, do what he wanted it all to do. I had thrown things at the computer a couple of times, coffee cups and dishes. But, still, I always calmed down and came back to the computer. This little box ran everything now, I could see that. I had to understand it. And I had to hire Reddy, and if necessary a hundred others like him.

That evening I made Reddy shut up and watch quietly as I started up the machine, typed in my password, connected to the net and found my way to a couple of websites. He was completely silent but vibrating with impatience at my slow clicking and laborious one-fingered hunting at the keyboard. Without looking away from www.myindianbeauties.com, which published a new actress or model picture every day, I said, 'All right, chutiya. You're making me nervous. Out.'