“Spare me the analysis. Are you saying Colonel Shigri was one of those people who wanted your greenbacks?”
Dad’s bank manager came to see me the day after his funeral and transferred his account to my name. Three hundred and twelve rupees in credit.
“Oh no. Not at all. Not remotely suggesting that.”
I yanked the stick to the left, and pushed in the right rudder to keep the plane from drifting. I wanted to have a good look at Bannon’s face. He took a deep breath and peered out of the cockpit, surveying Black Valley where some enterprising bugger had cut down the pines on a mountainside and arranged whitewashed stones to read: Mard-e-Momin, Mard-e-haq, Zia ul-Haq, Zia ul-Haq.
“I’m all ears,” I said, banking away from the mountains. I was in no mood to give him an Urdu lesson or explain what the Man of Faith was doing on top of a Black Valley mountain.
“You know how much money was passing through Colonel Shigri’s hands? Not putting a price on the hardware here, not counting the humanitarian aid. Just the moolah in Samsonites. Three hundred million dollars cash. Every quarter. And that is American taxpayers’ money, not taking into consideration the Saudi royal dosh. So twenty-five mil goes missing — and I say this with my hand on my heart — that sounds like a big pile of greens but it was nothing. No one batted an eyelid at our end. Hey, you don’t count pennies when you are fighting the single worst enemy since Hitler. But. But. Twenty-five mil is a lot of money for your folks. You knew your dad better than I did. I know he had his flash uniforms and rigid principles but the man liked his Scotch, he liked his female companions, so you never know.” I stared at him without blinking. “Look, man, all I’m saying is this: I don’t know and you don’t know how much a hooker costs in Switzerland. But it sure don’t cost twenty-five million US dollars.”
“Do I look like someone who has inherited twenty-five million dollars?”
He looked at me blankly, wondering why was I taking it all so personally. I rummaged in my pocket and produced a crumpled fifty-dollar bill. “This is all I’ve got.” I threw the note in his lap where it lay like an unproven accusation.
I wondered if I should tell him that I helped Dad take care of that money. Bannon would have never believed me. I took a deep breath and pressed the radio button. “Fury Two, beginning radio silence drill.”
I pushed the stick forward till it wouldn’t go any further, threw in the full left rudder; the plane went into nose dive and its wings danced a 360-degree dance. The plane headed down, revolving on all three axes. The nose was chasing the tail, the wings were whirring like the blades of a blender; negative Gs were pulling our guts into our throats. The green squares of fields and shimmering straight canals were dancing and becoming bigger with every rotation. I glanced towards Bannon. His hands were flailing in the air, his face contorted with a suppressed scream.
Dad was screwing hookers in Geneva while I was waking up every day at five in the morning to justify his investment in my public-school education and spending my summer vacations inventing physical exercises for myself?
Bannon was a bullshit artist.
The altimeter read two thousand feet. I cut the throttle, yanked the full right rudder in, eased back the stick and the plane slowly curved upwards. The greens began to recede again. Bannon’s voice was frightened, hoarse.
“Are you trying to kill an American?”
“I am just trying to talk,” I flicked the radio button on and gave the air traffic controller a call. “Radio silence out. Spin recovery completed.”
Bannon began to speak in a measured tone, as if making a speech at his favourite aunt’s funeral.
“He didn’t have a case officer or anything. It was a loose arrangement. But we knew he was one of the good guys, and trust me, there weren’t many of them. We were gutted. I wasn’t involved then. I wasn’t even on the South Asia desk, man, but I knew some guys who had worked with him and they were crying in their beers. It was a big loss. And not that people didn’t raise a ruckus, but it was all about staying the course and moving on, all diplomatic bull.”
“So nobody bothered to find out?”
“No they didn’t. Because they knew. The orders came from the top. They didn’t want to rock the boat, so to speak. I mean it’s no secret. Shit, sure you know. From the very top.” He waved to the black mountain with white stones. “Mard-e-Haq.”
I was pleasantly surprised at his grasp of Urdu. I patted his shoulder and gave him an understanding nod.
“So what are you doing here now? What do you want from me?”
“Shit. I am only the Silent Drill instructor. You know the rules.”
I stayed quiet for a moment. “It must have come up in meetings, memos. After all, he was your best man.” I moved the stick left and started preparing for landing.
“What were they going to say? Hey, stop the Cold War, our cross-eyed Mard-e-Haq is not fighting by the book? But trust me, man, this is all guesswork. Educated guesswork done by folks in Langley who loved your dad, but guesswork nonetheless. Nobody knew for sure. It was all very low-level stuff. I’ve got no clue who pulled the trigger.”
“I would have understood if it was the barrel of his gun in his mouth. He was that kind of a man. But it was his own bed sheet,” I said, before asking the tower for permission to land and informing the air traffic controller that I had an airsick passenger on board.
Secretary General’s whispers are echoing in the cell. I can’t decide if he is in a delirium or trying to entertain me. “Comrade, I think I’ve gone blind. I can’t see anything.” I rub my own eyes and don’t see anything. But I know I am not blind. “I swear I can’t see anything. They brought food, they opened the door but I didn’t see anything. Not a thing.”
“It’s probably night-time, comrade,” I say, trying to suppress a yawn. Remember day and night? Night, day, then again night.
SIXTEEN
After the Inter Services Intelligence’s counter-espionage unit carried out its weekly sweep through the living quarters of the Army House for any bugs or jamming devices, Brigadier TM started an old — fashioned, hands-on inspection of the premises. He removed the hand-woven burgundy silk covers from the sofa cushions and ran his fingers along their velvet lining. He gave the matching drapes a good shake, combed his way through the brown silk tassels and looked suspiciously at the silver curtain holdbacks. The Persian rugs, plundered from the palaces of Afghan kings and presented to General Zia by Afghan mujahideen commanders, were removed one by one and TM’s boots searched for any uneven surfaces on the grey synthetic underlay. The table lamps, shiny brass with silk cord switches, were turned on and off and on again. Brigadier TM’s mistrust of the ISI was based on a simple principle: the cops and thieves should be organised separately. His problem with the ISI was that everything was being done by the same people. After sweeping through the living quarters with their bug detectors and scanners and patting the seats of some random chairs they had simply signed a document saying no espionage devices were detected. Brigadier TM never knew whether to trust these signed documents. After all, potential presidential assassins don’t go about their business signing affidavits as they close in on their target. Brigadier TM had done his staff and command course, and he understood why a country needed an intelligence service, why an armed service needed spies to spy on its own men and officers, and he could live with that. But there was another reason he didn’t like these military intelligence types. Brigadier TM didn’t like them because they didn’t wear uniforms. It was hard enough to trust anyone who didn’t wear a uniform, but how on earth could you trust someone with a rank, who didn’t wear a uniform? Brigadier TM considered ISI a menace on a par with the corrupt Pakistani police and lazy Saudi princes, but since his job was to watch and keep quiet, he never mentioned it in front of General Zia. Going through the trophy cabinet, he concluded that the sheer amount of stuff in the Army House was a security hazard. “Who needs all these photos?” He stood in front of a wall covered with framed portraits of former generals who had ruled the country. Brigadier TM couldn’t help noticing that they had progressively got fatter and that the medals on their chests had multiplied. He came to the end of the row of photographs and stood in front of a large portrait. In this oil painting, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Founder of Pakistan, was wearing a crisp Savile Row suit and was absorbed in studying a document. With a monocle in his left eye and his intense gaze, Jinnah looked like a tortured eighteenth-century chemist on the verge of a new discovery.