The Kashmir Trap (24 page)

The government of India contributed, but not just by sending troops. For the first time they were taken care of, without the soldiers coming to ransom their shops and rape their women.

“Sure, the company respected its commitments, and the government, too, up to a point,” said Satar, “but one day a bomb exploded on the site, and soon this fine project turned into a nightmare.”

“Like the one in David's car?”

“A Hinduist job,” said Khankashi.

“I suppose that's what Griffith negotiated: an agreement that allowed hiring quotas, separate work spaces for Brahmins, et cetera,” said Max.

“Well, the first agreement did.”

“The first?”

“There was a second secret one.”

Max was amazed.

“Ten million U.S. paid to the extremists. So, basically, the Hinduists agreed to halt the sabotage, provided she finance their terrorism elsewhere in India.”

“With Griffith between a rock and a hard place, her Muslim workers deserted, and the site was about to close, so she had no choice.”

“Do you have proof of this agreement?”

“Ahmed Zaheer did. That's what David came to look for in Srinagar after the journalist died,” added Khankashi.

It was clear to Max at last. David had carried the baton after Zaheer dropped it, and he'd been killed, too, but who exactly had ordered it?

Genghis Khan smiled sadly once more. “You disappoint me, Mr. O'Brien. You haven't yet asked me with which Hinduist leader Griffith did her negotiating.”

Max looked puzzled.

“With Sri Bhargava, the Durgas chief, the ‘James Bond of Hinduness.'”

“That's what the engineer had revealed to the journalist Ahmed Zaheer when they met,” said Max.

“Not at all. Zaheer's only interest was in ecology,” replied Sattar.

“So David …”

“I never talked to him, never even knew him.”

Max turned to the imam. “But you did. The Indian cops confirmed that David came to see you the day preceding the attack.”

“Simply to tell me that Zaheer had been killed at Niagara Falls, probably by Bhargava's men. He was on the point of doing something that gave meaning to his life: ‘I know why Zaheer's dead. I know what they wanted from him.' What is going on, I asked, and he said, ‘For the first time in my life, I have the power to change things.' The next day, came the kidnapping, torture, and explosion in the Volvo. Years apart, David and his father had sacrificed their lives the same way. For the same reasons, maybe.”

I've become just like him. I feel just what he felt.

“Normally, diplomats don't get involved,” Khankashi went on. “They stay within a very precise framework, a well-established code of conduct that remains the same from one country to the next: the national interest before all else, especially the individual. For David, it was the other way around.”

For Philippe, too.

 

 

T
he
Hinduists, all of a sudden, were dazzled by the light of “reason.” Susan Griffith clearly explained what they doggedly refused to comprehend, and here we are, good buddies straight off. The violence ceases and the site can start up again. You just had to talk to them like grownups, right?

“Oh, sure, way too easy,” Max exclaimed, when he finally got Juliette on the phone from the New Century.

A second agreement. Uh-huh, just a few minor adjustments to cover one's tracks. Meanwhile behind the other curtain, a magic trick, sleight of hand for which Indian Muslims were still paying.

David's meeting with Genghis Khan was “doing something that gives meaning to my life” at the very moment they'd discovered Zaheer's body at Niagara Falls. Griffith and Bhargava, not to mention Bernatchez, naturally. Juliette's thoughts were in complete turmoil, when Max added, “David was convinced Zaheer's death was murder, not an accident, as the cops thought. On his trip to Canada, he wanted to meet the cop in charge of the investigation.”

“Joan Tourigny.”

“He knew why the journalist had been killed and wanted to continue the fight to the finish. What he found in Zaheer's apartment gave him what he needed.”

“Concretely to —”

“Blow the whistle on Griffith and neutralize Bharagava, then stop more massacres from happening. What they couldn't get from the journalist, David had on him.”

“A photo, document, what?”

“Who knows, but it has to be why David was kidnapped first and killed later, also why they tortured him … to make him talk.”

Juliette was half convinced.

They were both bothered by other things Sattar and Khankashi had said. After Zaheer was dead, they must have searched his apartment thoroughly. Yet they found nothing, obviously because David had “it” on him when he got back from Kashmir, unless he found the proof elsewhere, not in Zaheer's apartment. Till now, Max had taken for granted that David had what he wanted already when he came back from Srinagar. What if he hadn't found it after all, and when he realized Zaheer's apartment had already been searched, he looked elsewhere for whatever it was when he went to Khankashi's.

“Try and remember, Juliette. What happened when he returned home — exactly what happened? Did you offer to go get him at the airport?”

“No, I was teaching. Besides, it was trip he made often, routinely even.”

“So he took a taxi, probably frustrated. Did he have one suitcase or two?”

“Just one,” she replied, “the same one he left with a few days before. He unpacked it in our room as soon as he got back.”

“In front of you?”

“Yes.”

“Any gifts, souvenirs, surprises?”

She said, “No, not this time. At first there'd been small things, but after a while …”

Nothing.

She was trying her best to unravel the last hours in her husband's life, but no dice. She had answers to all Max's questions and doubts. If David did bring something back, it wasn't on him when he arrived.

The Montreal conference was tomorrow, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. On the political front,
détente
was the order of the day. After generous offers to exterminate one another, India and Pakistan were all kissy-kissy. A day earlier, the demonstrations of love took a new turn. Diplomats were exchanged, airline routes were reactivated, and there were moving joint declarations and accolades. Suddenly, it was a festival of love. The media chronicled the return of foreign expats, looking humbled and guilty, to the indifference of locals.They, of course, never believed any of this silly war talk for a minute. These Westerners, they're so fatalistic.

Juliette spotted Vandana near the buffet at the Sheraton Centre, in a hurry to fill her plate before the stampede. She was perplexed by what Juliette had to tell her.

“The slightest detail is important,” Juliette told her.

“Look …”

“Please, I beg you.”

“Well, David was tense, more than usual,” she said, “irritable, in fact. He had the conference to prepare for, and he got a late start on it, so I had to pick up the slack. Caught between two fires, he said.”

“What, exactly?”

“A whole lot of paperwork he asked me not to send until he returned. Then he blamed me …”

Juliette closed her eyes. So that was it. So obvious now. She could kick herself for not thinking of it before. The “preparation,” the dozens of document boxes put together by the High Commission.

Vandana looked at her in confusion. Then Juliette briefly explained what she and Max now knew.

“David didn't give you anything?”

Vandana shook her head.

“Some object, a document or some ‘insignificant' thing?”

“Why me?”

“That was one of your jobs, wasn't it?”

Vandana shrugged, “Well, I wasn't the only one in the office that did that sort of thing.”

“Wait a minute, I've just thought of something. One evening he said, ‘Vandana's swamped. She doesn't know whether she's coming or going.'”

“So he would have taken the document with him if it was that important.”

“He was afraid the same thing would happen to him as Zaheer, so he wanted to be certain that” — Juliette cut her herself off, then continued — “who was in charge of receiving the documents? I mean the ones sent to Canada after the so-called trip to Kathmandu?”

“Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, like all the others.”

As well as to any participant who requested them.

The airport in Burlington, Vermont, was dead calm when Max landed after a detour via Philadelphia. At the Avis desk, there was a weekend promotion. He chose a Pontiac Grand Am and headed to Montreal on Highway 89. After Juliette's call, he could understand David's nervousness on his return from Srinagar, not to mention his disquiet and insomnia. He needed to find a safe place for “it” in case Zaheer's killers came after him, too.

“So he hid it in the papers needed for the conference,” Juliette explained, but he still needed a contact, someone in cahoots who would keep it safe till he got there.

A friend.

Patterson.

Juliette remembered they'd spoken several times that evening. Late into the night. She, of course, thought it was about the conference, yet when Max met him the first time, Patterson said he hadn't talked to David for days. Lie number one. So, when he got back from Srinagar, David planned to send the famous document hidden among the file material for the conference. Patterson received it at the same moment David was bombed thousands of kilometres away. That also explained why Pattrson had hired private security for David. He realized what the young diplomat had sent him, and he knew how much it could endanger his life, both of their lives now. So that's why he was so suspicious, especially of Max.

All sorts of questions poured through his head. Why was Patterson laying low? Why not tell the cops and neutralize the threat to himself? There were things Patterson had known from the beginning, much more than he was letting on. All he ever told Max was already known anyway. Max lost himself in theories, when Patterson was safe and dry in reality, watching him flailing around without reaching out to help.

The consultant was only too ready to lay the blame for the attack on Islamist groups and steer Max's search in a particular direction. It had taken Vandana to open his eyes later to the Hinduists, something Patterson should have done from the start. They had their own reasons for getting rid of David. The security agents he hired for David in the hospital were to reassure Juliette, who had not asked for any of it. He knew that the terrorists never invaded hospitals to finish off their victims.

For reasons still unknown to Max, Patterson did not want his mission to succeed. He'd even tried to discourage him and put Roberge on his trail. “He forced me,” he said. Maybe, maybe not. So Roberge's blackmail had arrived in the nick of time. But if Patterson was playing a double game, why?

Max went around the Champlain Mall in Brossard keeping an eye out for any cops that might be around. Customers, loiterers, and nothing else. He stopped his car at one of the entrances and looked at the time. Still a few minutes to go before his rendezvous with Juliette. If anything went wrong, Max would go to Patterson's office alone. A Diamond taxi stopped in front of the shopping centre, and Juliette got out. Max glanced around but didn't see any suspicious-looking cars, doggedly aimless pedestrians, or overly nonchalant employees. He waited five minutes, then got out, too. Inside, he paid no attention to the hair salon and video arcade, then went up the central aisle to the drugstore, and there was Juliette again by the candy counter, pretending to choose between two chocolate bars.

“Grab one for me, would you?” he asked.

She threw herself into his arms, and the show of emotion surprised him.

“I was so afraid!”

Max just smiled. “How's the son and heir?”

“Great, but I can't say the same for his mother. Nonstop headaches.”

“Join the club!”

Out in the car, she told him that Patterson was waiting for them at his place. She'd talked to the consultant on the phone that morning. He was working from home, so they could drop by anytime. The former diplomat lived in the west part of town on the corner of Saint Marc and Lincoln, a crash-pad he'd had since his divorce in 1993, after some financial woes. His wife had kept the house in Repentigny; he got the debts and souvenirs. Here in the middle of all these boxes, he and Max had made their financial agreement. It was humiliating for Patterson, and he'd rather have done without Max's help, but he had no choice. The bank was after him, and his ex's lawyers, too. His life was one very leaky boat, so one day, like Philippe, he'd placed the usual ad in the daily that Max read every day in the vain hope of renewing contact with David or Béatrice. And then one day, surprise, surprise, Max agreed to Patterson's request, for reasons he'd already explained to Juliette. No way was he going to let David's “surrogate father” go bankrupt and leave David high and dry.

The building was populated by divorcées and bachelors drowning their solitude in workaholism and trying to give some meaning to their lives. They got no answer in the entrance — strange — so Max took advantage of one tenant's leaving to slip into the hallway and up to the twelfth floor, where Patterson lived. He rang, but still got no answer. He had no difficulty picking the lock and entering the apartment. The place was dark — the vertical blinds kept out the daylight. Juliette made to open them, but Max signalled her not to touch anything. Besides, by now, their eyes had adjusted. Max looked around and saw three rooms in relative order, obviously the work of a cleaning woman. Minimal decor: white, cold, impersonal, but functional furniture that Max already knew. A worker ant's retreat, one more workaholic. The bedroom was bland, too. The bathroom showed clean towels hung in an orderly fashion around the bathtub.

But where was Patterson?

Max took another turn around the place, drawn by the table in the kitchenette that was strewn with papers. Max took up a file and glanced at it: a series of letters to a Korean fibre-optic company based in British Columbia and some bills. Also a map of Vancouver, an Air Canada schedule, and hotel names and phone numbers scribbled on a notepad.

“He left in a hurry,” ventured Juliette.

“Without his agenda?” replied Max leafing through a notebook with rigid binding.

Now Juliette was rifling through a small desk in the corner on the way into the dining room, looking for some clue, a document, something, anything, while Max explored a cupboard on the other side of the room. The desk drawers weren't locked, but all they held were mostly pens, staplers, and Scotch tape; not much in the way of files. The bottom compartment, though, was a filing cabinet. Juliette pulled out some documents and started leafing through them rapidly. Press releases, a lawyer's bill, the lease. Then Juliette opened another file. Personal letters, some very old and still in their envelopes

Out of one of them slipped a copy of an old passport form with the regulation photos stapled to it. She picked it up and glanced at it casually. Then her face froze, and she felt dizzy. She just stood there, still holding it and unable to move. She turned to Max, who was busy rifling through the cupboard. She didn't know what to do … keep quiet and not say anything? Well, not right now, anyway.

She slipped the form and photos of Pascale into her bag.

Max was on the floor near the couch, poring over a box of archives pulled from under a pile of books. Mostly tax accounts and financial records. That's when he noticed something down there, lying in between the carpet threads. Dirt. Someone had been in the living room after walking on soft, wet earth. Intrigued, he looked farther. No plants. Then he looked at the glass door to the balcony and the vertical blinds, which he pulled aside. Light flooded the place and he saw the cement rail of the balcony, an overturned flower box, and a footprint. He opened the door and went outside. The footprint was pretty large, probably Patterson's. The earth was still moist.

He straightened up and looked around him. On all sides he saw balconies identical to this one. He heard the sound of skateboards. He went to the edge and looked twelve stories down to see kids using the garage roof for practice. The noise echoed all the way up there. He was about to go in when he saw something, and so did the teens at the same moment. Patterson's body was jammed into the garage vent. The kids quit skating to get closer. Then came the police sirens.