Kalkoot- The Lost Himalayan Secret Page 5

  This was a desperate gamble from a desperate man. If they did find him, they would smoke him out like a rat from a hole.

  ***

  After climbing up the loft, Bani used a mop he had taken up with him to move the chair away from his position. The chair made a creaking sound as he prodded it away.

  For a second, Bani froze, afraid the creaking noise may have given him away.

  Nothing moved. Bani eased up slightly, desperately stifling a sneeze as the dust from the cardboard boxes enveloped him, as did the darkness and the fear.

  He could hear some noises in the distance, probably his tormentors entering the kitchen.

  Bani did not exactly believe in God, but that instant, he prayed that none of the chefs and waiters in the kitchen should have noticed him entering the storage room.

  Bani’s rumination was disturbed by the sound of heavy footsteps and the noise of a couple of voices harshly questioning somebody. The voices sounded like they were right outside the storage room.

  The loft was dark, and uncomfortable, and Bani’s knee was throbbing. But even more distressing was having to desperately avoid a sneeze. Bani could hear every sinew in his body beating in rhythm with his heart, and it seemed like this beat was audible a good ten metres away, within earshot of those that hunted him, like wolves sniffing out a prey.

  ***

  The footsteps seemed to come closer, and then the door to the storage room opened.

  There was the sound of one pair of footsteps entering the room. To Bani, the sound seemed deafening as thunder, as did the sound of his heartbeat and his breathing. He almost wished there was a way he could stop breathing altogether.

  The footsteps grew louder. The man was probably coming closer. There was some noise as the man kicked around a few of the cardboard boxes below. This was followed by a loud cacophony of clanging noises and glass hitting the floor.

  The man had probably stumbled on a crate of drinks.

  Bani could hear him swearing.

  The footsteps paused for a few seconds, then receded and finally died away.

  Bani waited in the loft another twenty minutes before jumping down and then gingerly venturing out of the storage room. His pursuers were nowhere to be seen.

  He closed his eyes and heaved a sigh of relief. But his relief was short-lived as he realised that his pursuers would have probably stationed themselves at the front entrance and rear exit of Tantra.

  The only way he could avoid falling into their hands would be to stay locked up inside all night, hoping that they would give up their watch posts after seeing the last of the staff troop out.

  ***

  Three hours later. . .

  Kolkata, Monday, 3 a.m.

  The night dragged on slowly. Bani had slumped into one of the chairs in the storage room, his feet on another chair, hoping to get some shut-eye, but his agitated mind and hypersensitive reflexes did not allow him to sleep a wink.

  The chefs, waiters and the partygoers were all long gone, the pitter-patter replaced by an eerie silence and all-encompassing darkness, the revelry of three hours before now a distant memory.

  Bani got up, startled, as he heard a sound from the opposite corner of the storage room. He walked up the place and realised that there was nothing there. Was his imagination playing tricks on him?

  He tried to distract himself from the tension of the moment by replaying the verses from the scroll in his mind.

  He clearly recalled one of the verses:

  He who is still in the face of the most intense motion

  He who observes the flow of the universe with equanimity

  For that person, the waters shall not pose a danger

  He shall reach his destination without much effort.

  Steve had probably found some clues to crack the verses, and now he was injured, maybe even dying.

  Did a similar fate await him?

  ***

  Kolkata, Monday, 6 a.m.

  After the longest six hours of his life, Bani was quite on the edge as he heard the sounds of a key turning in the lock, accompanied by the sound of footsteps.

  Through the slightly ajar door, he noticed that the cleaners had come in through the rear door to clean the club.

  All clear so far.

  Bani gingerly made his way towards the rear exit when nobody was looking, hoping that he was not walking straight into a trap.

  ***

  Park Street was just about beginning to wake up. The shops and restaurants were still closed, but a few walkers were purposefully striding away. The cries of birds and panting of stray dogs provided a familiar backdrop to the morning.

  Bani permitted himself a mild sigh of relief only when he found himself a few hundred metres away from The Park.

  There was no way he could head home now. He would be walking straight into a trap. He would just have to head to Goa directly.

  He remembered the message he had left for his friend Shrikant.

  ‘Hey, Zico, Pele here. Drop everything and meet me in Goa. 8.30 p.m. tomorrow, Monday. In front of the band at Ephesus Hotel. And watch out for people following you. This is getting dangerous. Very dangerous.’

  He hoped that Shrikant had heard the message. Bani knew that he would be walking straight into a storm in Goa, and he could use an ally.

  Bani located a pay-phone and called his neighbourhood travel agent, Souvik Das.

  ‘Souvik-da, I need a ticket to Goa. Urgently. Don’t send the ticket to my home; keep it with you and I will pick it up.’

  Souvik-da spat the paan he was chewing and spoke into the phone, ‘What, Bani-da . . . Goa, and that too a one-way ticket? Have you found a mishti woman for yourself there?’

  CHAPTER 8

  Shree Motel, near Metro Inox, Mumbai, Monday, 8.15 a.m.

  Ji-hoon Kim started his day with the zeal of a man on a mission. He showered, shaved, changed and checked out of his hotel room, all in the span of twenty minutes.

  Damini surveyed him enviously from her spot in the alcove. After the overnight vigil, she, too, could do with a shower.

  She was dressed like a college student, complete with faded jeans, a T-shirt and a rucksack. The cover of a college student allowed her to blend in with the scenery. St Xavier’s college was not far from Metro Inox, and the area attracted its fair share of students anyway.

  Even though she was twenty-nine, she could easily pass off as a student. At least as a Masters’ student, she muttered to herself.

  Her cover had not been blown despite the unsavoury incident with the idiots in the SUV. That was fortuitous; the Chief would have skinned her alive if she had lost their only lead.

  Unfortunately, her relief was short-lived. Ji-hoon Kim settled the bill at the hotel reception, crossed the road and headed straight for the alcove where Damini was hiding.

  ***

  Damini heaved a sigh of relief. Ji-hoon Kim had headed straight not for her but for Kyani, the iconic Irani bakery in the adjacent building.

  Damini settled a few tables away from Ji-hoon and ordered Kyani’s famous bun-maska with tea. She was ravenous. It was not every day that you got to eat at Kyani’s while on an ACG surveillance mission.

  She had radioed the ACG control room, manned by Mini and a very jealous Kunal, to inform them that she was hot on Ji-hoon Kim’s trail. The backup van, manned by two ACG operatives, was on high alert and had moved position to the main road. Damini’s motorcycle, her vehicle of choice for its ability to manoeuvre traffic snarls, was parked in the lot right next to Kyani’s.

  As Ji-hoon Kim sipped on his coffee and buried his head in a newspaper, the pendant that Damini was wearing, which had a small high-resolution camera on it, was beaming images that the ACG control room was dissecting in real time.

  Damini’s earphones were plugged into her smartphone as she sipped on her chai.

  ‘Identification confirmed.’ That was Mini on Damini’s earphones.

  Damini turned casually around so that the camera could capt
ure the other patrons at Kyani’s. There was the old man behind the counter, a couple of old ladies two tables away from Damini, a man with deep eyes at the corner table, a couple of college students sharing a samosa and a guy who looked like a bodybuilder eager to gain viewership for his biceps.

  ‘No matches found for any customers yet.’ Mini again.

  Damini whispered. ‘There are still a couple of customers I need to point the camera towards.’

  Her antennae suddenly went up as Ji-hoon walked up to the counter and asked for the bill. As he was waiting, he reached for his mobile phone to check a message.

  Damini acted quickly. She got up and walked towards the counter, pausing for just a split second at an angle where her pendant camera could capture an image, even if somewhat imperfect, of Ji-hoon Kim’s smartphone screen.

  ‘Wait, getting that,’ Mini was saying.

  ‘Fast,’ Damini said.

  Damini was just about reaching the counter as Ji-hoon, with lightning speed, bounded out of Kyani’s onto the main road and was promptly picked up by a Honda Civic that had stopped right outside.

  ‘Dammit, he’s getting away,’ Damini shouted as she slammed a hundred-rupee-note on the counter and ran to her bike, mentally noting the license plate number of the Civic. She barked on the microphone, ‘Mini, I need speed. What did the damn message on Ji-hoon’s phone say?’

  It was Kunal on the line. ‘Not good. We caught only one word, and that was “tail”. Most likely somebody messaging him that he had a tail. Your cover is probably blown.’

  ***

  ‘Damn,’ Damini barked as she got onto her bike and accelerated toward the Civic, which was now far ahead on the road. ‘There must’ve been somebody else watching. Backup van, where are you?’

  ‘We are right behind you.’ This was Najeeb, the ACG operative in the backup van.

  ‘Ok, wait for my instructions,’ Damini said, as she narrowed down the distance between her bike and the Civic. The crowded road gave her an advantage as her bike snaked through the traffic.

  Damini braked as the Civic took a sharp turn into a lane on the left. This was a narrow lane just before the main road.

  Damini’s sixth sense, honed by hundreds of hours of fieldwork, told her that something was not right.

  ‘He knows he has a tail, and yet he has avoided the main road and has just turned into a small lane with only one exit. He’s going to try something.’

  ‘What?’ Kunal asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet, genius. I’m still figuring it out,’ Damini barked.

  ‘Damn you,’ Kunal cursed.

  Damini turned into the narrow lane behind the Civic.

  ‘Najeeb, don’t follow me. Get on to the main road and await my instructions,’ Damini said.

  ‘Ok,’ was Najeeb’s terse reply as he manoeuvred the backup van in the traffic.

  Sure enough, the Civic screeched to a sudden halt in the lane outside what looked like the rear of a shop.

  ‘Near Parsi Dairy,’ Damini barked into the microphone, referring to Mumbai’s iconic dairy that was located on the main road. ‘He’s getting in from the rear end of one of the shops next to it, and is probably going to come out of the other end on the main road. Najeeb, I need you in position there.’

  Ji-hoon Kim had jumped off the Civic and had disappeared inside the shop near Parsi Dairy.

  Damini jumped off the bike and followed, and was immediately accosted by a maze of provisions and supplies in the shop.

  She ignored the baffled stares of the employees as she ran after Ji-hoon Kim right through to the shop’s front entrance.

  Her hunch was right. In a practiced series of steps, Ji-hoon bounded out of the front door of the shop and into the waiting open doors of a Ford Endeavour SUV.

  ‘This guy’s a goddamn pro,’ she radioed to the control room as she ran out of the shop around forty seconds after Ji-hoon Kim had jumped into the Ford Endeavour.

  ‘Of course, he is,’ Kunal retorted. ‘He just helped North Korea build a nuclear arsenal.’

  Damini ignored Kunal’s jibe as she spotted Najeeb’s van. She hopped into the van just as Najeeb stepped on the accelerator pedal.

  ***

  The road outside Parsi Dairy leads on to a flyover that is crowded even at the best of times. At 9 a.m. on a weekday morning, it resembled chaos itself. Blaring horns merged with the sounds of a million footsteps as Mumbai’s morning madness played itself out on the streets.

  As luck would have it, a big, ugly bus that was belching smoke through its rear was positioned right in front of Najeeb’s van, blocking any possible view of the Ford Endeavour.

  ‘Can we have satellite imaging on the Ford Endeavour, please?’

  Damini asked.

  Kunal replied. ‘The Endeavour is at the far end of the flyover, and it looks like it is heading for Marine Drive.’

  ‘Far end already?’ Damini exclaimed, puzzled. ‘That seems a little too quick, considering the traffic.’

  Kunal snorted. ‘So you’ve started to disbelieve satellite images in favour of your own imagination, huh?’

  Again, Damini ignored the jibe.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she sensed a motion which made her jump up.

  Ji-hoon was jumping over the railing on the opposite side of the flyover.

  ***

  Damini jumped out of the van and rushed towards the railing.

  The Ford Endeavour was still clearly on the first half of the flyover. Why the hell was Kunal’s satellite feed showing that it was at the far end?

  Anyway, there was no time to contemplate on that.

  Ji-hoon had jumped not on to the road below but on to an elevated pathway immediately adjoining the flyover. This pathway merged with the foot over-bridge directly above the Marine Lines local railway station.

  ‘Dammit,’ Damini swore to herself. She hadn’t thought of this. And clearly Ji-hoon, or whoever was helping him, had.

  The Mumbai commuter railway system is one of the busiest in the world. It carries four million passengers every day. And most of these commuters choose the morning hours to get to work.

  Damini sighed as she scaled the railing. Ji-hoon Kim was already lost in the ocean of commuters who were using the foot over-bridge. She could barely make out his outline among the crowd.

  She gave chase, for whatever it was worth, but Ji-hoon had already hopped on to a crowded local train that was leaving the station.

  There was no way she could get to him now.

  ***

  Damini was livid when she got back on radio communication. ‘Can someone tell me what the hell just happened there?’

  Kunal’s tone was not apologetic. ‘There were two Ford Endeavours on that bridge. We probably were looking at the wrong one.’

  ‘Probably?’ Damini smirked. ‘Anyway, this discussion is freakin’ pointless. Najeeb, can you try to tail the Ford Endeavour?’

  ‘Am on it,’ Najeeb answered. Kunal didn’t answer.

  Damini buried her head in her hands and slumped to the ground, right there at Marine Lines station in the midst of the Mumbai morning commuters’ rush.

  She had lost the trail. She was quite sure a search of Ji-hoon Kim’s hotel room would yield nothing. The only hope was that Najeeb would be able to interrupt the Ford Endeavour.

  ***

  Damini dialled the Chief’s number. She had to own up and bite the bullet.

  As the Chief came on line, Damini said, ‘I will find him again, sir, that’s a promise.’

  In characteristic style, the Chief did not lose his cool or let out expletives, but his words were so caustic that she wished he would chastise her outright instead.

  ‘I hope you can make it to your yoga class now.’

  Damini had half a mind to rat on Kunal, but the Chief hated it when field agents did not take the onus of a botch-up squarely on themselves. She gritted her teeth and muttered, ‘Sorry, sir.’

  The Chief had already hung up.

  ***
>
  Those fifteen minutes at Marine Lines station were the longest in Damini’s professional life.

  The Ford Endeavour had been abandoned before Najeeb could reach it. The Endeavour, as well as the Honda Civic, whose number Damini had noted outside Kyani, were hired vehicles; thus, checking out their ownership documents would yield nothing.

  The ACG could make enquiries about the persons who had hired the vehicles, but Damini was certain that they would have been decoys. It didn’t look like the bunch she was dealing with would leave those kinds of obvious clues.

  A Honda Civic and a Ford Endeavour. Minutely coordinated to be exactly at certain places at certain times. It was unlikely that Ji-hoon Kim had figured out the intricacies of dodging pursuers through the narrow bylanes of Mumbai all by himself.

  She was dealing with some real pros here. And clearly, they had some pretty strong local help.

  Then there was the question of how they realised that Ji-hoon Kim had a tail. And why the control room had given her wrong input about the satellite feed on the Endeavour.

  Could it be that someone within ACG had wanted her to fail? Or worse still, was that someone in cahoots with Ji-hoon Kim’s bunch?

  There was only one way she could find out.

  She called Mini privately on her hand phone number.

  ‘What’s up?’ Mini asked.

  Damini spoke fast. ‘Mini, I need you to scan every single feed which may give some clue as to what the North Korean guys are up to. Satellite images, surveillance videos, Interpol alerts, intelligence agency intercepts, web chatter, everything. If a North Korean agent as much as opens his mouth or types an email, I want to know about it.’

  ‘Got it, Damini,’ Mini said.

  ‘And, Mini…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need you to make sure Kunal doesn’t get wind of any of this.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Two hours later. . .

  Charni Road, Mumbai, Monday, 11 a.m.

  Damini, chastened by the morning’s debacle, had been busy. She was at one of the ACG’s innocuous city offices in a commercial building.

  Mini had been feeding Damini details on Ji-hoon Kim as well as on various other North Korean agents—their travel itineraries, bank accounts, families, mistresses, pet peeves, everything. There were also exhaustive transcripts of communications between North Korean agents—tapped phone conversations, decrypted chats, hacked email messages and so on.