by M J Anand
Amjad drove through it to reach the bureau headquarters albeit a bit late. Shankar had finally heeded to his request for a stimulated interrogation. The subject would have to endure repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. The interrogation team had already primed him for the last two days.
Khalid had relinquished any semblance of control. They knew it when he had decided not to run away even when the guard had left his cell open the previous night. Khalid had stayed inside the cell, for he had realized escape was futile.
It was time for the last nail in the coffin now, and Shankar had chosen Sunaina to do it. She had a reputation for interrogations and was most likely the best at it amongst the senior personnel’s at the agency. Sunaina was unhappy with the way Amjad had dealt with her a few days ago.
He entered the room and braced for some bitterness. ‘We’re all set.’
Shankar was there before him, thankfully. He sat in the head chair. Indians had thrown every known conventional technique at Khalid, but his mind was just too strong. It forced them to shift gear to psych-ops—a dirty word in public. The technique was all about priming his brain to accept that he had no choice but to adhere to any command the Indians gave him. It included drugging him, offering food only after he had finished a preset sequence of physically strenuous tasks, depriving him of sleep till his eyes were swollen and blood red. The list went on. Even for a brain like his, it took just two days to turn compliant.
‘Here’s the script.’ Shankar handed it to her.
Sunaina sat across from Amjad. Their eyes locked, and Amjad saw no awkwardness. She smiled, and Amjad duly returned it. It was a good sign, for Amjad needed to be on the right side of the Border Intelligence now.
At Shankar’s cue, they followed him to the basement and sat in a minivan painted in the colors of a food delivery van—a necessary disguise to break the trail to Khalid. The minivan left the Intelligence Bureau headquarters from its back gate at the regular food delivery time. The driver followed the route to the kitchen and, only twenty minutes later, took a detour. After an hour, abandoned open-pit mines appeared on the sides. They had almost arrived. Soon, they were inside the Asola wildlife sanctuary. The van drove through the sanctuary’s mud paths till it arrived at a set of two houses in the deep jungles. The Bhadkal lake, an important source of water for Delhi, stood still in the background. It was a quite night, only so far. They went to the observation room.
Amjad smiled at Sunaina and opened the door.
She struggled to smile back. Perhaps it was the stress of the interrogation.
‘Take it easy.’ Amjad passed her a bottle of water.
Khalid was pinned to the chair with his hands tied and eyes blindfolded. He hadn’t given away anything yet, and it was the Indians who were on edge now. They had to make this work at any cost.
‘We’ve been trying the wrong things on him. He has a very strong mind, a PhD from MIT after all. But he doesn’t have an equally strong body.’
Shankar and Amjad took their positions in the observation room while Sunaina moved into the interrogation room. The guards closed the door. It was dark, with a slight ventilation. The sun rays through the ventilation fell directly on Khalid’s face.
Sunaina nodded at the guard.
He pulled a glass shutter at the ventilation to increase the light intensity and removed Khalid’s blindfold.
Khalid was rendered unsighted for the first few seconds. ‘Water.’ He looked around desperately. They hadn’t given him any liquids in the last two days. His body yearned for just one touch of the Adam’s ale.
‘You like water?’
Khalid nodded respectfully. He searched for the face behind the voice, but no light shone on Sunaina, though she sat right across the table.
‘Khalid, will you comply?’
He looked at where the voice had come from and nodded abjectly. From stress, Khalid sweated effusively, not good for a dehydrated body.
‘I will help you with water, but before that, you must help me with some questions.’
Khalid looked away from the voice, perhaps looking to bury his head in sand.
‘Will you?’
Khalid stayed quiet.
‘For every right answer, I’ll offer you a capful of water.’
He looked up at the voice. His eyes were almost knocked out.
Sunaina repeated sternly, ‘Will you?’
He stared at the voice and nodded obediently.
‘Here we go.’ Shankar’s anxiety was only little less than Amjad’s.
‘Tell me the name of your kids.’
‘Ayan and Riyan.’ He was telling the truth. That was a check question, and Sunaina could move to the next level. She would have to slowly rely more on his body cues.
‘Who’s your wife, and what does she do?’
‘Rukhsana. She died.’
The Indian Intelligence already knew it. The crosschecks had ensured the subject was indeed primed. His drugged eyes were also moist now.
Sunaina saw an opening. ‘How did she die?’
Khalid looked away from the voice. A teardrop rolled down his cheek, for he hadn’t spoken of it with anyone, though it was the cause of all his guilt. ‘I killed her.’
‘What?’
‘Yes, I killed her.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she knew too much.’
Sunaina leaned forward into the light. ‘Too much about what?’
His neck twitched. Khalid was panicking. Stress was taking a toll on him.
Sunaina grew worried about his red face, which was fluttering to the left, away from the light. ‘Okay, leave it. Take some water.’ She offered him a glassful.
He lunged at it with force, but the chains restrained him, yanking him back.
Sunaina was scared for a moment, but the guard entered, held Khalid’s mouth open and offered him water sip by sip.
‘We need to probe further, Sunaina.’ Shankar thought they were onto something, but Sunaina was anxious to probe further.
After Khalid calmed down, she resumed the script. ‘How long have you been working in the Pakistani Army?’
‘Twenty-five years.’
‘Right after you graduated MIT?’
‘No, I worked as a professor for five years. Then I joined the army.’
‘Why did you join the army?’
Khalid was quiet again.
Sunaina leaned forward into the light and repeated her question.
He eyed the voice and said nothing.
Sunaina signaled the guard, and he tightened the chains behind his hands. The chair had acupressure pins at the back, and the sensation was quite comforting at first, until it was pressed against the back for long and turned terribly painful.
Khalid groaned.
Sunaina repeated the question.
‘To serve God. He gave me the command, and I obeyed it.’ The illusion was trustworthy for a religious soldier but not for a professional. Sunaina knew he was telling the truth.
‘Tell me, Khalid, do you know anything about Cortex?’
His eyes widened. It was the first time during the interrogation he had responded to that name. He nodded.
‘What do you know about it?’
He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out. The sweat on his face was visible to even Amjad and Shankar across the glass wall.
‘I hope the stress doesn’t break him before we break him,’ Amjad said, concerned.
‘I cannot.’
Sunaina leaned back, exasperated. Khalid was not stalling, but it was something new.
‘Try it politely. We need a name, Sunaina.’ Shankar said in her earpiece.
‘Why, Khalid?’
‘God will punish me.’
Something struck her. For the first time, it appeared as if God was not God but someone specific, someone Khalid knew in flesh. She leaned forward and asked him again, ‘Who is your God?’
Light from the ventilation turned toward her as the sun went down t
he hole. This time, her face had a ray of light.
Finally, Khalid had a face for the voice commanding him. Khalid had not engaged in any serious human interaction in the last forty-eight hours. Khalid leaned forward, studied her chest and smiled.
‘Is he going mad?’ Amjad asked. ‘I won’t be surprised, given the dosages.’
‘You mean Allah?’ Sunaina asked; perhaps it was all along the God.
Khalid smiled again. ‘Allah is kind. Not this one.’
She was getting frustrated. ‘Who is your God, Khalid?’
He mumbled something Sunaina couldn’t discern then said, ‘My hands.’
‘What happened to your hands?’
‘They are burning.’ Khalid’s smile had disappeared. ‘I can’t feel my hands. Can you open them?’
Sunaina was confused. ‘Please!’
‘It’s okay. Open them,’ Shankar prompted her. The interrogation was taking its toll on Khalid, and Shankar didn’t want to lose him altogether. They couldn’t kill the hen that would lay the golden egg.
The guard opened the cuffs and stood between the two of them.
‘Water.’
The guard offered him a glass full.
Khalid drank it one sip at a time. With every sip, he looked sharper. A glass of water seemed to have done him a lot of good. Khalid kept the glass closer to Sunaina. ‘It’s a nice shirt.’
Sunaina was surprised. He didn’t look like a man under stress now. ‘Thank you. Now you need to answer me, Khalid.’
Khalid pulled out his hands that carried red spots of inflammations and flakes from dehydration, stretched them and put them firmly on the table. He nodded. ‘I was just a professor when I met him.’
Sunaina had finally done it. She leaned forward in excitement, her face almost upon Khalid’s face now. ‘So, he is a person?’
Khalid was quiet. He looked toward the ventilation. Something had distracted his attention.
The guard looked at him, surprised, and turned toward the ventilation by reflex.
In that split moment, Khalid’s hand stretched out, and before Sunaina could react, he pulled her pen from her shirt.
The guard turned back at the first noise of the movement, but it was already too late. He saw Khalid’s hands at her chest and lunged forward to retract it. The guard held Sunaina, who was in shock.
Khalid was completely in control, and nothing could explain that action.
But, in trying to hold Sunaina’s balance, the guard had lost precious seconds on Khalid.
Khalid plunged the pointed end of the pen into his jugular vein. Blood poured from it. In a matter of moments, the floor was blood soaked, and Khalid was dead.
Amjad and Shankar rushed to the interrogation room and switched on the lights. Despair and gloom had befallen them.
His eyes were wide open, as if caught dead in the headlights. All their efforts of the past weeks had been flushed down the drain in a single moment of madness.
Sunaina was in complete shock, and Amjad held her to no avail, even as the in-house doctor rushed in to announce the fated, ‘He is dead.’
The reality sunk in, and the Indian Intelligence top brass stood there, gasping for any grip on the circumstances.
‘Why?’ Shankar held his head in his hand. ‘I thought we had him under control.’
His eyes said a story of its own.
Amjad closed them. ‘Fear.’ Amjad regarded Shankar. ‘We need to find his source of fear.’
Shankar looked at those eyes.
As the doctor bagged the body, their shoulders dropped. The despondent look on all their faces said it all, that they had lost their only lead to the source.
Chapter 15 - Duty Call
IB Headquarters, January 19
Amjad lifted the paperweight. It was gifted to him on the successful completion of the Chennai mission in 2006 by none other than the current NSA himself. Amjad played with it to release stress but to no avail. It felt heavier between his fingers today. Another similar mission was taking its toll on them as the pieces of the puzzle refused to add up. The agency was already under severe media scrutiny. An exceptional officer and an exceptional informant had been lost to a rigged decision. The hard disk refused to yield much, and their most important lead, Khalid, was dead. To top it all, his lead commando had his sights set on retirement—never a good omen in middle of a mission. The institution he led was breaking down.
Amjad reviewed the list of MARCOS he had prepared for Abhimanyu’s replacement. In his heart, he wasn’t comfortable with any of them. Not many had worked on a nuclear attack in the past. The situation was now escalating quickly, and the prime minister’s office were preparing scenarios for a potential catastrophic failure. In desperation, he dialed Sonia, who was back with the coders and working on the disk. ‘Have you settled in?’
‘Yes. I’ve been trying to understand what happened to this disk.’
‘What do you mean?’
Sonia paused. ‘Do you think it’s possible for someone … to mishandle the disk?’
‘Mishandle?’
‘Tamper. Corrupt.’
Amjad stared into the abyss. The walls were closing in too fast. ‘I wouldn’t disregard that doubt completely.’
‘In that case, I feel the disk has been tampered. Few indices are missing.’
‘English, please?’
‘When you delete data in your laptop or hard disk, the OS typically only changes the pointers to the data. Each file has a pointer which acts as the address of the data bytes on the hard disk. It tells your operating system the start and the end of the data.’
‘Go on. I’m tracking.’
‘When you delete a file, the operating system only deletes the pointers and marks those sectors to be written over in the future. We have discovered a sequence of pointers missing from the overall sequence. And how is that possible, unless …?’
‘Unless someone has deleted data from the disk. Can you pinpoint when the indexed data went missing?’
‘We did the digital trace analysis already. It’s been erased in the last week.’
Amjad took a moment to digest that. He couldn’t leave anything to chance, for the many implications it had. ‘Can you explain more?’
‘I meant the data sectors from which the files are deleted belong to the part of hard disk which was written earliest. Normally, hard disks write linearly in one direction, so the earlier in sequence your data is, the older it is. That is, of course, unless the data was deleted then overwritten, which would lead to deindexing. But every time you delete and rewrite a data sector, it leaves behind digital traces. These traces are often enough to tell how far back the files have been deleted, since they are indexed. Depending on the system, it can be a month or a year. It is never day dated.’
‘So, you can’t give me the date but month maybe of when it was deleted?’
‘Yes. It was deleted this month.’
‘The disk has been everywhere this month. Remember, it came to us only last week.’
‘But the digital traces are very detailed—fresh. The software can’t pass that judgement, but I know when I am looking at it. These have been generated within the last week, not just the last month. I can’t prove it to you, but that’s what my experience says.’
Amjad had known Sonia long enough to know her own analysis was never wrong. She had a reputation for it. It meant two MARCOS had spoken to him about a mole, separately. He could not wait to act on it anymore. ‘Have you spoken to Abhimanyu about it yet?’
‘No, why?’
‘He has a similar theory. He thinks someone within our network is helping the terrorists—a mole.’
Even though Sonia was implying the same, she was appalled, because she hadn’t expected to be taken seriously. She hadn’t taken herself seriously. But two different people had arrived at the same hypothesis. The probability was not just twice but exponentially double. While she reckoned with the probabilities, her heart dreaded the prospects of a mole. It would
n’t be easy to circumvent a mole at this stage of the operation. ‘We should act on it, now.’ A steely determination replaced the dreadful fear of a mole in her eyes.
Amjad dialed in Abhimanyu. ‘Are you alone?’
‘Give me a second.’ Abhimanyu checked outside his door and even windows. He saw no one but a commando guarding the house far from his room’s door. He closed the door without a sound. ‘All alone.’
‘Sonia has discovered that the hard disk has missing indices, and based on the digital traces, it has been done recently.’
‘How recent?’
‘Very recent. Last week or so. It means your theory could be right. The mole is perhaps more resourceful than you or I had thought. He found a way to the hard disk.’
Abhimanyu sat on the chair, hand on his mouth. ‘It tells us at least one thing. He is certainly not an IT expert. Perhaps an administrative employee who could have access to the evidence room. No tech savvy person will forget to take care of digital traces.’ Abhimanyu’s mind was as sharp as ever even though he was still recovering.
Amjad eyed Sonia to check if that made sense.
‘It’s not as simple as that. But yes, if the person has managed his way to the hard disk, we should expect him to be adept at destroying all trails.’
All it meant was Abhimanyu felt vindicated. ‘Oh, I wish I was there. I finally have your ears, Amjad.’
Amjad saw a little ray of light even in this dire situation, for he could sense the soldier in Abhimanyu hadn’t faded yet.
‘Did you check the evidence room logs?’
‘There are many senior people who don’t need to log their entry,’ Amjad interrupted Abhimanyu’s line of thought. ‘How’s your recovery?’ Amjad needed Abhimanyu to be in the field again.
‘Quite good. A bit of pain here and there, but I can walk and even run a bit now. The nurse says a few more days of rest and I can be mission fit.’
Things were escalating, and Amjad needed his brain in the control room if not in the field. ‘In that case, why don’t you come here now? Delhi has the best doctors anyway.’
