by Hugh Miller
Deena yelped. Sabrina turned and saw the man whose knife she had taken. He had snatched up the rifle from against the pillar and was pointing it at her.
She didn’t hesitate. She dropped to her knees, forcing him to adjust the angle of the gun. Her left hand found the pistol she had put on the floor. It was in her hand and pointing at the bandit as his finger tightened on the rifle trigger. Sabrina fired three times and put three holes in his face. He jerked backwards and fell across a marble table. The rifle fell from his hand without firing.
Sabrina got up, pocketed the gun and went to Deena. She was trembling so hard she couldn’t make herself speak.
‘Listen to me,’ Sabrina said. ‘What has happened here will make a miniature earthquake. It will mean a huge change in the balance of criminal power in these parts. Hafi’s followers will be really sore about that. So I have to get well away from here, and so do you.’
Among the bags of money by the altar Sabrina found her own shoulder bag. She checked and was again grateful to find that everything she valued was intact — even her gun, snug below the false bottom. She snatched up a leather folder full of papers and stuffed it into her bag.
‘Help me carry the money, Deena.’
They made their way out to the daylight. Deena stumbled as she walked, still shaking and dazed.
‘Oh, glory!’ Sabrina pointed. At the edge of a stand of trees her car was parked. Branches had been thrown over it in a casual attempt at camouflage.
Sabrina ran to it, pulled off the branches and opened the passenger door. ‘Put the money on the back seat, Deena.’
‘Will you keep it?’
‘I hadn’t planned to.’ As they put the last bag in the back Sabrina pointed to the writing on the sides. ‘What does that say?’
‘They are the names of towns. They are not far away.’
‘I’ll find them on the map, then I’ll drop the money outside the police station in each place. First, though, I’m taking you home.’
‘Will that not cause you inconvenience? It is two hours away.’
‘If you get back to where you came from without being seen around here, and say nothing about being taken away, then no one will connect you with what happened to Hafi.’
Deena understood. She slipped into the front passenger seat. Sabrina got behind the wheel and started the engine. ‘The sooner you’re home, the sooner I’ll do the Robin Hood bit, and the sooner I’ll be on track again.’ She glanced at Deena. ‘You maybe find it hard to believe, but I have a serious job to get back to.’
* * *
Philpott was on the telephone. ‘Speak to me, Michael,’ he said, ‘and try to keep it informative. I’m pressed for time, as ever.’
‘I wanted to go on record as saying it was a great idea of yours to draw Lenny Trent into our act. He’s an ace co-ordinator.’
‘I had to weigh his obvious merits against the probability that the two of you would put your friendship before your function as colleagues on a mission.’
‘We both have a sense of professional balance, sir. With respect, I think you sometimes oversimplify things.’
‘And for my part I think you occasionally evaluate my motives in a childlike way,’ Philpott said coolly. ‘Which is all beside the point. Tell me how things are shaping.’
‘You know about Reverend Young being murdered, and I told you about our visit to Dr Arberry. No headway has been made on the murder and there’s not likely to be any. As for Arberry, I’ve now had time to read his notes. His suspicions about bandit activity, especially the drug-running kind, tend to be supported by several things Commissioner Mantur told Lenny.’
‘I gather, from Trent’s comments in his last report, that there is suspicion of a new kind of trade in top-quality drugs, with rich clients and dealers waiting to collect. Do you go along with that?’
‘I do,’ Mike said. ‘I also find it credible that the source of supply for the new trade is right here in the Vale of Kashmir.’
‘In that case,’ Philpott said, ‘I think you should be formulating a plan to seek and destroy.’
‘That’s what we’ll be doing, as soon as we’ve some idea of where our target is. First off, I’m setting up a local agent of Drugwatch International to make himself available for mule duty. Then I plan on getting myself up into the hills and sniffing around a convoy or two.’
‘With a view to what?’
‘Thrashing them at their own game, sir.’
‘Splendid.’
‘Any news of Sabrina?’
‘I spoke to her an hour ago,’ Philpott said. ‘She’s suffered another setback, but she’s on the road again, moving up towards you and learning about India the hard way.’
‘What happened to her this time?’
‘I’ll leave her to tell you herself. It’ll make colourful after-dinner talk.’
‘How’s the review of techniques and procedures coming?’
‘You mean,’ Philpott said icily, ‘the bureaucratic plot to bring me to heel? We’re trying to mount a counter-attack, we being myself and Whitlock.’
‘Do they stand a chance of nailing you?’
‘I pray not, Michael. I’ll know better what I’m up against after lunch tomorrow. I’m meeting an old friend whose ear is tuned to the rumblings of the disturbed creatures who run Policy Control.’
‘Best of luck, anyway,’ Mike said.
‘Luck be damned,’ Philpott snapped. ‘If I win this one, it’ll be on the strength of the combined talents of Whitlock and myself. Luck’s for people with no resources of their own.’
12
‘This is Amrit Datta,’ Mike told Commissioner Mantur. ‘We have high hopes for him.’
Mantur winked at the young Indian. ‘They say they have high hopes, Amrit, yet they want you to take a risk similar to marching blindfold across a Delhi street at rush hour.’
‘Such is my destiny, Commissioner,’ Amrit smiled. ‘I was born to be put upon.’
He was twenty-seven, a slim Kashmiri with fine, regular features and a boyish quiff of sleek black hair. He had a look of innocence that suited him for his job. The last thing he resembled was an enforcement officer, but in two years with Drugwatch International he had helped dismantle major trafficking operations in three Indian cities.
‘I can’t say I have a pleasant morning organized for you,’ Commissioner Mantur said. ‘Mr Graham here selected the illustrative material, so blame him. Not many laughs, but it will be instructive.’
The Department of Records at Srinagar Police HQ was in the cellar, a green-and-cream painted room with fungus on the walls and a smell like wet livestock. An early model Kodak Carousel slide projector was set up on the table, its lens pointing at an old projection screen on a rusty stand. The Commissioner, Mike and Amrit sat down in canvas chairs and the clerk in charge of records doused the lights.
The first slide on the screen showed a young Indian woman smiling stiffly at the camera. She was ordinary looking, a healthy enough person whose clothes indicated she was quite poor.
‘Kadija was recruited as a mule six months ago by a man who stopped to buy a paper at her father’s corner news stand in Allahabad. She swore to tell no one about the offer, but of course she told her best friend, since best friends are not other people, they are extensions of ourselves. The best friend told us Kadija thought about the proposition for a week, at which time the man returned for her answer. She said yes.’ Mantur shrugged. ‘It was an extremely tempting offer. Ten thousand rupees for one job. In English money that would be about two hundred pounds, Mr Graham. A fortune for a peasant girl trying to scrape a living in the city.’
Another picture came on the screen. It was the same girl. This time she was not smiling. Her eyes were half closed and her tongue protruded at one side of her mouth.
‘She paid the penalty for being caught,’ Mantur said. ‘Police on the Chinese border stopped her and found two kilos of heroin. She was put in a detention cell, where she took a capsule of cyanide fr
om her navel and swallowed it.’
The next slide was of a man in a business suit, complete with club tie and a dark yellow silk handkerchief in his breast pocket.
‘You’re not saying he was a mule?’ Amrit said.
Mike nodded. ‘That’s what we’re saying.’
‘What tempted a man like that? He looks like he doesn’t need money.’
‘Come on, Amrit, everybody needs dough. The point the picture demonstrates is that no one knows for sure what he’s looking at. Keep it in mind. The trick of selling yourself as something you’re not is to conceal by display.’
Amrit pursed his mouth politely. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
‘I mean you can best hide something about yourself by covering it with something that says more, or says otherwise. Any seasoned undercover police officer will tell you — when you’re pretending to be what you’re not, make sure you throw in a percentage of exaggeration, just to hide the fact that you are hiding something.’
‘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.
‘Do the clothes tell you anything?’ Mike whispered.
‘Nothing.’ The man wore a heavy dark cloak, a turban and a swathe of cloth across the lower half of his face. ‘He looks like any other hill bandit. Probably smells the same, too.’
Mike watched the rest of the convoy disappear round the bend. He lowered his scope. ‘I know we’re only here to watch and digest — but what do you say? Do we go for this?’
‘I’d say it fell in our laps.’
They crept up the hill side by side and moved apart as they neared the road. Lenny waited for a signal from Mike, who was crouched two metres behind the horse. When the signal came, Lenny stood up, right on the edge of the road.
‘A fine evening for a spot of smuggling!’ he said.
The horseman leapt back at the sound. Mike grabbed him by the back of his cloak and swung him face down on the ground.
‘Don’t go being gentle, now,’ Lenny warned. ‘There’s no point with these characters.’
‘As if I would.’
Mike punched the man behind the ear and stood up. The man groaned but didn’t move. Lenny had opened one of the panniers and was pulling out the contents. Mike opened the other one and did the same. When they were finished they had piled up twenty-four two-kilo plastic sacks of powder.
