Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'We have capabilities in the area of encryption,' Anjali Mathur said, with a certain pride, 'that are even ahead of the western countries. And that DeepCrypt encryption program they used was not very good.'

'That's good luck for us,' Sartaj said.

'Very good luck,' Kulkarni said. 'As it turns out.'

Anjali nodded. 'What we found on the encrypted drive were blueprints, technical documents and progress reports. From analysis of all this, we are convinced that there is indeed a device, that this device has been made with materials brought into the country and that it is technically sound. They bought spent nuclear fuel on the international black market and brought it into the country. They then used converted mass spectrometers to separate and extract enriched weapons-grade material from this spent fuel. Mass spectrometers are machines that are routinely used in academic institutions and laboratories. They can be legally bought on the open market. A mass spectrometer converted to work as a calutron will only produce tiny amounts of enriched weapons-grade material over weeks and months, but if you are patient enough you will ultimately have enough for a device. And we know they were using a number of calutrons, maybe as many as a dozen, fifteen. So they had the material and they had the knowledge and expertise. We know they made a device. And we know that the device has already been brought into this city. This is clear from e-mails and documents that we found on the hard disk.'

'Device,' Sartaj said. 'You mean a bomb.'

'Yes.'

'Where? Where is it?'

'That is the problem,' Anjali said. 'We do not know.'

'Nothing else? No clues?' Sartaj felt detached from himself, as if it were somebody else having this bizarre discussion in the back of a car in front of Terminal Two, on a muggy night like any other, with travellers and their relatives hefting suitcases into dickies. He tried to focus, to bring his usual hunger for details to bear on the problem at hand. It was important to keep working, to be professional in the face of this bad fantasy made worse reality. 'There must be something.'

'No, there is not much. There is a reference to a house in Mumbai. The exact sentence is, "I hope Guru-ji is enjoying the terrace at the house," and the implication is that this house is inside the city. That is all.'

'Why are they doing this?'

Kulkarni took off his glasses and polished them. 'We are not sure. On the hard disk,' he said, 'there are also files from a publishing program. These include the text and images and fonts for three pamphlets. The pamphlets are supposed to be the product of an extremist Islamic organization named Hizbuddeen.' He put his glasses back on, with the air of an absent-minded professor. 'We ourselves have collected printed copies of these pamphlets during raids on various banned organizations. Our impression was that Hizbuddeen was a fundamentalist organization with Pakistani links. We knew Hizbuddeen funded other such organizations, and was perhaps planning a big terrorist operation. Now, this new information would suggest that Hizbuddeen is actually a false front, a fake organization created by this Guru Shridhar Shukla and his people. Our theory now is that their plan is to set off this device and blame it on Islamic fundamentalism. So, the evidence we have so far collected on Hizbuddeen is a false trail, laid by this man Shukla and his organization. The idea being that, after a nuclear incident, Hizbuddeen would claim responsibility, and would be believed.'

'But why? What do they hope to gain?'

The light fell flat on Kulkarni's glasses, making little half-moons of them. He shrugged. 'We are not sure of the intended consequences, or the motives. Perhaps they want heightening of tension, escalation, perhaps retaliation.'

Sartaj didn't want to think about what retaliation might mean in this instance, but he couldn't stop himself from asking about the first looming disaster. 'If they set this, this device off,' he said, 'what will happen? How big is it?'

Kulkarni deferred to Anjali with a tilting of his glasses. Apparently she was the detail person on their team. 'From what we can gather,' she said, 'it is not a small device. The construction may actually have taken longer because they wanted to deliver a larger payload. And they don't care about miniaturization at all. It was probably driven into the city in the back of a truck. If it goes off…' She swallowed. 'Probably much of the city.'

'Everything?'

'Almost. If they plan carefully and place it well.'

Sartaj had no doubt that they would place it extremely well. They had calculated the instrument, and their purpose, and they would make sure of the destruction. There was only one question left. 'What do we do?'

Kulkarni had something like a plan. 'We are setting up a working committee right now,' he said, 'at the Colaba police headquarters. We will issue an alert in the next two hours. But there will be no mention of the device. We will just say that there is a reliable tip on a big terrorist operation. Any mention of the device may cause widespread panic, people rushing to leave the city, that sort of thing. We don't want that. It would be impossible to control.'

Sartaj could well imagine the rush, the highway clogged with cars and trucks, the desperate shoving to get on to trains, the screams of lost children. And he could also feel the need, in some other corridor of his mind, to warn Mary, to get Majid Khan's children out of the city. But he nodded, and said, 'Yes, yes.'

'If information about the device leaked to the general public,' Anjali said, 'then the people in charge of the device might also learn about it. They may set it off then, to prevent discovery and prevention. The whole investigation has to proceed with that in mind. It has to be very tight.'

'Fully tight,' Sartaj said. 'But what are they waiting for?'

'We know nothing about their timetable,' Anjali said. 'We would like to continue what you have been doing for us. You have done very well. Use your resources to investigate.'

And with that, they let Sartaj out and left him swaying in the exhaust of their several Ambassadors. He felt completely alert, but quite dazed. There were orange lights burning over the terminal building. A trickle of sweat, released by the gathering heat, moved down his collarbone. Review the information, he told himself. But there was very little: the apradhis maybe included a famous guru in a wheelchair and a yellow-haired foreigner, they were maybe in a house that had a terrace, the house was maybe large enough to hold a large machine, maybe there was a truck near by. That was it, that was all. On this, everything depended. Don't worry, Sartaj told himself. Just go to work. Just work.

So he hurried to his motorcycle, slung a leg over it. Then he was unable to move. Had the last few minutes really happened? In his memory now, everything that had happened in the car had the feeling of jerky, speeded-up film. Sartaj tried to slow his breathing and parse the conversation, recall it bit by bit, but all he could find was a jumble of sentences and words: 'It is not a small device'; 'intended consequences'; 'payload'. How were Anjali and her boss able to speak so calmly and efficiently of such things? Maybe people like that were used to speaking of unspeakable things. Maybe international spies used that language all the time. Sartaj had thought of this thing before, this device, he had encountered it in fictions and newspaper reports, but now that it was inside his city, in his home, he was unable to imagine it. He tried to see it, some sort of machine in the back of a truck, but all he could see was an absence, a hole in the world. What came out of this void was an avalanche of regret, a knifing pain in his gut for everything left undone and for all the memories of the past. He bent over. In the bulge of the silvered handlebar there was the shine of the streetlamp and a thousand faces, a boy he had fought with in Class Three and humiliated in front of the whole school, Chamanlal the paan-wallah from the main road corner, a beautiful girl that Katekar had once told him about who worked for Gulf Air at the international terminal, that lame beggar who worked the crossroads at Mahim Causeway. Everything would be gone, not just loved ones and enemies. Everyone. This was the unbearable promise of this device, now made real. It was ridiculous but it was true. Sartaj sat in the car park and tried to comprehend this, to hold it in his head so that he could think about it, and decide what to do next. Finally – he did not know how much time he had passed, just sitting – he gave up. Better to leave it as a blank, and think around it. At least then you could work. Yes, work. Go to work. He started the motorcycle, and began.