The Dust Will Never Settle (29 page)

By the time Jasmine decided to call it a night, Ruby was exhausted. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t sleep. After a while she parked herself in the bay window overlooking the front lawn.

A full moon rode high, playing hide-and-seek between the fluffs of clouds. Ruby saw it all with unseeing eyes.

Her mind was far away, watching a happy little girl playing hide-and-seek with her parents. She could see Rehana and Ravinder walking through the house looking for her.

‘Come out, come out, wherever you are…’ their singsong chants rang out, making her giggle from the bedroom cupboard.

Then Ravinder was no longer there. Only Rehana, and she did not seem happy. And the little girl was not happy either. They were both quiet and subdued.

Soon Rehana too vanished. The little girl was alone, only not so little now. She was angry. And she felt betrayed.

Across the corridor, Ravinder tossed and turned, dead tired but unable to sleep. It was that nagging feeling of having missed something. Perhaps the feeling that he should have gone with the evidence and taken Ruby into custody. Perhaps that he could not reconcile with the fact that his daughter might be the enemy. Perhaps it was that look in Ruby’s eyes when Jasmine had mentioned she was leaving.

He felt an increasing foreboding that something awful was straining to be unleashed.

His uneasiness reached out to Simran. Lying awake beside him, she too was aware of the unhappy young woman who had disrupted their lives.

They lay in silence, almost touching, waiting for the endless night to recede.

Seven miles away as the crow flies, in his room at the Ashoka hotel, Chance also lay awake in bed. Finally, he too gave up, took out a Coke from the minibar and sat near the window, watching the moon outside. The beauty of the calm October night slipped past him, unnoticed.

Like an erratically choreographed movie, bits of the past flowed through him. Ruby loomed large in many of them. Ruby laughing, pensive, morose. He wondered again if she was involved.

And always, hanging like a dark cloud over his thoughts, was the morrow slowly approaching. He hoped the days ahead would pass peacefully and it would all end well.

A few hundred miles to the north, standing on the porch of a LeT safehouse near the Pakistani town of Muridke, Pasha watched the same bright moon. He patrolled the porch restlessly, wondering how his assassin was faring. The shocking assault that had taken out Anwar, and the total absence of communication from Ruby sickened him. The agent provocateur knew that under pressure of the end game, even the best-trained agent could falter. But he also knew that the battle had already slipped out of his hands. As it always did once a mission was launched.

Nothing to do now, but wait.

A neatly dressed man got out of the car and walked up to the main gate of the Gill house. He had a piece of paper in his hand and was referring to it as he approached the gate. Barring the light from an occasional street lamp, the street was dark.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to the guard standing outside, holding up the paper. ‘Can you please tell me where Mr Mahajan stays?’

The sentry shouldered his rifle and held out his hand. ‘Show me the house number.’

The man drew closer.

Two other guards heard the exchange and came closer. Now all four men were just a few metres apart.

The sentry was taking the paper from him and failed to see the man’s right hand creep up to his waist. There was a soft click, which registered with none of the guards. The bomb wrapped around the man’s waist went off with a thunderous roar. Nothing within a seven-metre radius remained standing.

All three guards and a part of the metal gate blew up. The bomber himself disintegrated. Only one of the guards had been standing farther away and he survived, but even he was knocked unconscious.

The roar of the explosion had not yet abated when the door of the car in which the man had arrived flew open and another man leapt out, a Chinese T-56 assault rifle in hand.

Rushing past the body of Aslam, his former cellmate, who had taken out the guards at the cost of his life, Javed Khan headed straight for the front door, his rifle on the ready. The mission given to him by the Jaish-e-Mohammed chief was clear. He had to kill the ATTF chief, or die trying.

Levelling his rifle at the door, he fired a long burst, shattering the lock. He kicked open the remnants of the door and entered the house. He saw no lights on the ground floor. The curtains were drawn and the house was swathed in darkness. Cursing, Javed began to feel his way forward, trying to find a light switch.

To Ravinder the sound was so loud, so close, that he knew the house was under attack. The popping crack of an assault rifle confirmed it. Not pausing to think, he leapt out of bed, grabbed the Browning from the bedside table and, clicking off the safety, headed out.

‘Go to Jasmine’s room and lock yourselves in,’ he yelled at Simran as he ran. ‘And call the control room.’ In the heat of the moment he forgot about Ruby.

Simran ran for Jasmine’s room.

Jasmine too had been jolted awake, but she was befuddled. Then she saw her mother rush in, wild-eyed.

‘We’re being attacked!’ Simran screeched. She reached out and grabbed Jasmine, and began to blubber hysterically.

Simran was still wailing when she reached for the phone and dialled 100, the police control room, managing to get the message across. The two women clutched each other, terrified. In her panic, Simran had forgotten to lock the bedroom door.

Sitting by the guest bedroom’s bay window, Ruby saw the blinding flash of the bomb. She froze. The rifle burst galvanized her into action. Instantly, her training took over. She ran for the weapon that should have been by her bedside. But her hand came away empty. Then she realized where she was. The pistol in Jasmine’s room flashed in her memory. A dozen quick steps and she burst into Jasmine’s room.

Jasmine and Simran screamed when the door flew open.

Ruby took in their condition at a glance. Without breaking her stride, she raced to the jewellery box, snatched out the pistol, her hands instinctively checking if the magazine was loaded. It was. She chambered a round.

A loud metallic clang from the living room spurred her on. She swivelled around and ran out.

Cursing the darkness, Javed clawed the walls to find a light switch. He had taken about ten steps when he collided with a large brass lamp. It toppled and hit the ground with a loud clang.
Hell! By now someone would have called the cops and they’d be on the way.
He was still deciding what to do when…