There was a knock at the door, then, before he could say anything, Indra Singh entered.
“It’s four in the morning,” said Ghandra. “Why are you still awake?”
“Why am I still awake?” Singh asked rhetorically in disbelief. “Your country is on fire, Mr. President. Is there anyone alive who isn’t awake?”
“The crowd has grown larger.”
“Gate thirty-five is a bloody mess,” said Singh, referring to the entrance into Rashtrapati Bhavan. He walked into the spacious living room. He placed his leather briefcase down on the leather sofa and sat down. He was sweating profusely. “The crowd is like rabid wolves. Since when are
we
the enemy?”
“What do you mean?” asked Ghandra.
“What do I mean?” asked Singh, incredulous. “The only reason they haven’t stormed the gates of the palace is because of the twenty thousand men that General Nair has placed between them and you.”
Ghandra stood at a window, looking down on the square in front of the palace. The square was packed with people, most holding candles.
“How many people are there?” asked Ghandra.
“Nair estimates one hundred thousand. It felt bigger. You’re isolated up here, Mr. President. You can barely hear them. A group of young thugs attempted to flip over my limousine. They want to know why we haven’t counterattacked El-Khayab.”
Ghandra turned from the window.
“Did you tell them about the coup?” asked Ghandra, grinning.
“You think it’s funny!” yelled Singh. “There are riots in Hyderabad, Bhopal, Chandigarh, and Mumbai. In southern Delhi, someone burned photos of you at a demonstration.”
Ghandra walked from the window to a large mahogany cabinet, where he turned a key and opened the doors. Inside was a bar. He poured himself a glass of Beefeaters. He walked to the sofa and sat down at the opposite end of the sofa from Singh.
Ghandra took a big sip from his glass of gin, but said nothing.
“I told you the anger would rise,” said Singh. “You didn’t listen. The people of India want answers. You sit here isolated from it all while the people of India wonder if they even have a leader. With each passing minute of silence, they become more bitter and more embarrassed. ‘Has Rajiv no pride?’ my own wife asked me.”
“If I had listened to you, I would have gotten the people of India so riled up that any sort of peaceful resolution would have been impossible. At this moment, they would be tearing down the palace. If I had listened to you, Pakistan would no longer exist and there would be hundreds of millions of people dead in both countries. We would probably be dead too, Indra. Your advice grows more foolish and idiotic by the hour. Get some sleep. The Americans are on schedule and the coup is going to work.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“If it doesn’t, we will attack.”
“The irony, Rajiv,” said Singh, “is that your desire for a coup d’état in Pakistan could lead to a coup in your own country.”
“Is that a threat, Indra?”
“No, it’s a plea from your oldest and dearest friend,” said Singh, leaning forward, his face contorted and red with emotion. “Your own military is questioning your strategy. They talk openly of your willpower.”
“And what would you have me do?” asked Ghandra.
“Hit back. Launch the nuclear attack right now! Apologize to the Americans later. El-Khayab is laughing at us right now. Osama Khan is painting the targets for the next attack. These men are radical jihadists. They want to push it further.”
Ghandra stared down into the clear liquid in his glass. He lifted the patterned crystal glass to his lips and bolted the rest of the gin down.
The sound of breaking glass caused both men to jump up from the leather sofa. A rock smashed through the window just to the left of where Ghandra had been standing, then rolled on the green and red oriental carpet.
Ghandra stood up, stepped around the sofa, and walked to the rock, leaned down, and picked it up. It was approximately the size of a baseball.
“A good arm, perhaps we can recruit him to play for the Daredevils,” he said, referring to New Delhi’s professional cricket team.
Singh stared at Ghandra for several moments, then smiled.
“You’re not going to change your mind?” asked Singh calmly.
“No, Indra, I’m not. There are eight hours left. Let’s give America the time it needs.”
“You know I support you, no matter what,” said Singh. “I would never voice my doubts to anyone but you. When my wife said that to me, I yelled at her. I will need to buy her flowers for the names I called her. I’ll think of ways to redirect the anger of our citizens. In a few hours, we’ll make an announcement about our progress in Baltistan, something to quell the unrest.”
“I’ll call Jessica Tanzer. It’s time for a report from the Americans anyway.”
“Rajiv,” said Singh. “If America has failed…”
“If America has failed, we will proceed with the original plan.”
BRISBANE GRAMMAR SCHOOL
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
Youssef pulled the semi into the parking lot at the Brisbane Grammar School, rolling the eighteen-wheeler to the darkest spot in the empty lot. It was ten o’clock at night, eighteen hours after he hijacked the truck north of Cairns. He shut off the lights, then the engine.
The truck’s driver lay crumpled in a bloody mess in front of the passenger seat. While being caught with the dead body in the truck would likely put him in an Australian jail for the rest of his life, Youssef thought the risk of being seen removing the body was even greater, so he left it there. In the humid Queensland air, the corpse had started to smell. Youssef’s solution to that was to open the windows and breathe through his mouth.
In the darkness, he climbed down out of the cab of the truck, then walked across the deserted playing fields. He could smell the fresh-cut grass. For a brief moment, the smell intoxicated him.
Youssef had grown up in Damascus, but when his parents died he and his younger brother, Ahmed, were sent by their grandfather to an all-boys boarding school in Scotland called Hampden Public. Hampden Public was one step above reform school. Most of its students were from somewhere in the United Kingdom, and had been kicked out of better private schools. For a brief moment, the smell of the grass reminded Youssef of Hampden Public, of its big, open fields and brick buildings. He thought of Ahmed. The smell of the grass brought back a wave of bittersweet emotion.
As he walked across the dark grass, Youssef recalled his last day at Hampden, only a month after he’d first arrived. It was the day a Scottish boy named Simon had pushed Ahmed down a flight of stairs, breaking both of his arms, as well as his nose.
“Did you do anything to him?” Youssef had asked, standing over the infirmary bed, horrified, crying as he looked at his badly injured younger brother. “Did you say anything to provoke this?”
“No,” said Ahmed. “Nothing, Youssef. I swear. I don’t even know this person.”
“Did he apologize?”
“No. He laughed. They all laughed.”
At dinner that evening, Youssef had gone directly to the silverware cabinet. After picking up a butter knife, he’d walked through the dining hall, searching for the boy who’d pushed Ahmed down the stairs. When he saw Simon, a tall senior, sitting at a table with his friends, Youssef had approached the table. He hid the dull butter knife behind his back.
Everyone at the table had ignored him as he stood there, waiting to speak.
“Excuse me,” Youssef had finally said to Simon, interrupting his conversation. “Are you the one who pushed my brother down the stairs?”
Youssef recalled the surprised look on the large boy’s face, followed by the toothy smile, the food in his mouth visible as he looked at Youssef.
“What about it,
Mohammed?
” he’d answered in a thick Cockney accent, to the amusement of his friends. “Yeah, I might have. He shouldn’t a been getting in my way.”
Without saying anything, Youssef had raised the butter knife in his right hand, then swung it down as hard as he could. It ripped through Simon’s blue blazer, through the button-down shirt, then plunged four inches deep into Simon’s neck. Youssef remembered how the blood had spurted out like a garden hose. Ten minutes later, despite the best efforts of a variety of teachers and kitchen staff, Simon lay dead on the dining hall floor. He had never heard someone scream as loud as Simon had that day.
The next few months were a blurry haze of policemen, detention centers, lawyers, mental hospitals, psychologists, foster homes, jail cells, until he and Ahmed ultimately ended up in an orphanage outside of Cairo. But he would do it all over again. The moment he swung that knife blade was the moment he became a man.
The memory raced through his mind as he walked across the football fields, toward the lights of the houses in the distance. He started crying. He’d always been there to protect Ahmed. He’d driven for eighteen hours, and every time the thought of his younger brother crept into his mind, he pushed it away. He’d treated Ahmed like a dog, he knew, but he was the only relative Youssef had. He wondered how Andreas had killed Ahmed. Youssef closed his eyes. Right now, he had to focus on getting out of Australia. He wiped the tears from his cheeks, then pushed the thought of his brother completely away.
At the far end of the fields, he climbed over a wooden fence, then went right on Toombul Road. He then took another right and walked into the parking lot of the Novena Palms Motel. He knocked on the door of unit twenty-two.
“Youssef,” said an older man with a beard and glasses, who opened the door. “Sit down. Take off your coat.”
The man inspected the wound on Youssef’s right arm, poking it with his finger, even sniffing it.
“It’s not infected yet,” he said. From the table, he took a syringe. “This is an antibiotic, just in case.” He stuck the needle into Youssef’s arm.
After the man bandaged his arm, Youssef went into the bathroom. He leaned into the tub, turned on the faucets, put on a pair of rubber gloves, then took a bottle of black hair dye and rubbed it through his hair, turning it black, then dried it. He removed the gloves, then put on a striped button-down shirt the man had brought.
“Sit down,” the man ordered.
He took photos of Youssef.
“There’s food over there,” said the man as he looked over the photos, deciding which one was best. “Crackers, fruit, and cookies. Eat while I do this.”
“Why the passport?” asked Youssef. “I thought Nebuchar had arranged for a private plane.”
“A charter,” said the man as he worked on the fake passport. “They will inspect your passport before takeoff.”
Half an hour later, a black Camry pulled into the Hawker Pacific Flight Center at Brisbane Airport. The car drove onto the tarmac and up to a shining dark blue and white Hawker 4000 jet. Youssef climbed out of the car and walked over to the Hawker’s air stairs. At the base of the stairs, a young man in a light green Australian Customs and Border Protection Service uniform was waiting. He inspected Youssef’s passport, then stamped it without asking any questions.
“Have a nice flight,” said the man.
Youssef climbed up the airstairs, nodded at the pilots in the cockpit, then sat down in one of the leather seats in the back of the jet. When the jet was airborne, Youssef opened his cell phone.
“I’m in the air,” he said, running his hand through his short, spiky hair. “Thank you for making the arrangements. See you in Beirut.”
BENAZIR BHUTTO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
ISLAMABAD
Deputy Inspector General Sahi, Agent Hasni, and four other Capital District policemen, as well as a pair of customs agents, reconvened in the second-floor conference room at Benazir Bhutto Airport.
“I ran the manifests,” said Hasni. “For the three hours leading up to the discovery of the bodies, there were eleven arriving flights. Eight were domestic, three were from outside Pakistan. I ran all eleven manifests, a total of one thousand nine hundred and forty-four passengers.”
“What did ISI flag?” asked Sahi.
“None of the passengers set off the ISI watch list,” said Hasni. “So I focused on the three international flights. There was a Thai Airlines flight out of Bangkok, and two PIA flights, one out of Chicago, the other London. On those three flights, there were four hundred and eighty passengers. Three hundred and eighty-one were Pakistani. I eliminated them, as you suggested. We can always go back to the bigger list.”
“Yes, yes. Go on.”
“Of the ninety-nine foreigners, forty-two were men. I removed anyone under twenty and over fifty. This reduced the number to twenty.”
Hasni pushed a short stack of papers toward Sahi.
“And here they are, Inspector,” said Hasni.
Sahi started to flip through the small stack of papers. Each sheet was a photocopy of the individual passenger’s passport entry page, along with photo, and entry customs visa form, in which each passenger is required to list their profession, duration, and purpose of visit.
Sahi analyzed the pages, quickly separating ones he felt were improbable from individuals who looked, at least hypothetically, like they could have killed the two men. Out was a group of four men from Colorado who were climbing K2, three doctors from Canada who were traveling to Baltistan to volunteer for a month at a rural health clinic, and several others with equally disqualifying backstories.
It did not take long for Sahi to narrow the group of twenty down to three: the first was an American from Chicago who was an executive for a U.S. defense contractor called Sallyport. The second was a Chinese man from Shanghai who worked for a Chinese pharmaceutical company called Pleineir. The third was a journalist from Paris, a correspondent for
Le Monde
named Jean Milan.
“Get these out immediately,” said Sahi, pushing the three sheets of paper to one of his deputies. “Police, border patrol, customs, TV stations, hospitals, newspapers, hotels, military. I want these men brought in for questioning.”
* * *
Back at Capital Territory Police HQ, Sahi closed his office door. He studied the three sheets of paper. Of the three photos, it was the photo of Jean Milan that Sahi found himself going back to again and again. The man simply didn’t look French. He looked Pakistani. Sahi went to his computer and searched the CDP database, found a number, then picked up his phone.