Jack tore open the door and took aim with the Colt. At the bed, Aakash turned just as Santosh barreled from the door behind Jack and knocked his gun arm. “No, Jack! We need him alive.”
Jack cursed and threw himself forward, covering the yards to the bed as Aakash returned to his work, straining with the effort of tightening the garrote, no longer savoring the kill but wanting to finish it fast. Jack saw Nisha’s hands and feet straining at her binding. He saw her eyes that seemed to be popping out of their sockets. In the final moment, Aakash swung with his fist but Jack caught him around the waist, using his forward impetus to take Aakash off balance. The two of them crashed to the boards of the warehouse floor.
The fight was over in a matter of seconds, Jack easily overpowering Aakash, grateful to hear Nisha cough and splutter—hurt but alive—as he planted a knee into Aakash’s back, dragged his arms behind him, and secured his wrists with a plasticuff. As he picked up Aakash to drag him away from the bed, Aakash looked up at Nisha, still coughing and spluttering, with a grin.
“You were right,” he said, “I never will find peace.”
She turned her head away, and when Santosh sliced the first of her hands free with his sword, she covered her eyes and began to cry.
Jack glanced over. “Get him out of my sight,” he told Hari. As Hari dragged Aakash away, Jack went to the bed, fishing his hip flask from his jacket pocket. He offered it to Nisha’s parched lips—maybe not the best remedy for her thirst, but a remedy all the same.
What happened next, nobody was sure. Did Aakash goad Hari? Had Hari planned it all along? The first Santosh saw of it was when he glanced toward where Hari stood with his gun trained on Aakash, and realized that Hari wasn’t simply holding Aakash captive—he was about to execute him.
Aakash knew it too. Kneeling on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back, he looked up at Hari and he smiled, and it was as though the two men knew and shared each other’s madness.
“No!” shouted Santosh. Mubeeen and Jack, both tending to Nisha, swung around. “No, Hari, no!”
But he was too late, and the sound of the bullet reverberated high up in the rafters of the old warehouse, scaring birds that were nesting up there. Aakash’s body pitched sideways, half his skull torn away.
A moment later, another shot rang out as Hari put the gun into his own mouth and delivered himself from his suffering.
Chapter 106
SANTOSH AND MUBEEN sat in the Private India conference room. There was nothing to say. Shock, grief, and guilt hung over them.
Nisha was in hospital, sedated for shock. Alive, at least: the case hadn’t been a complete disaster. No, wait—yes, it had. Santosh stared at memos on his desk, hardly seeing them: Bhosale, the driver of the vanity van, was to bring a wrongful confinement suit against the state; the government was asking the Attorney General to step down over allegations of mismanagement of the Sir Jimmy Mehta Trust.
And these were good things. Tiny glimmers of light in the dark. Staring off into space, Santosh wondered if he was in shock. Dimly he heard the call of a drink, and knew he would answer it, and the drinker’s voice inside told him that the case going wrong had an upside, and the upside was that it gave him an excuse to drink.
He should have seen it. He should have known. Hari should never have been with them. Rest was what he had needed. Probably a shrink. And because Santosh had failed to see that, Hari was dead and Aakash, their last chance of reaching Munna and Nimboo Baba, was dead too.
“There’s one last option open to us,” Jack had said, taking off, and Santosh had thought he knew where Jack was going—to reach Munna before the news of Aakash’s death. To play their last remaining card as though it were an ace when in fact it was a two.
Santosh wondered if, after his ordeal, Hari had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and whether Santosh himself was, too. He thought these things with a sense of detachment, totting up the trauma of the past forty-eight hours and wondering if a human being could possibly cope with it all.
Little knowing there was more to come.
Chapter 107
“HELLO, MUNNA.”
Jack Morgan had been shown to Munna’s usual booth at the Emerald dance bar, wondering why Munna’s goons hadn’t bothered to search him but grateful all the same. He’d have felt naked without his gun.
And in front of him sat Munna, Jabba-like, his shirt open to display the gold ropes at his sweat-glistening chest, shining with grease beneath the lights. In his lap was a very young and very strung-out girl wearing next to nothing. Lank, greasy hair, a vacant expression. She should have been at home counting teddy bears and staring longingly at posters of Bollywood pin-ups on her wall, not here.
Munna had been stroking pudgy fingers through her hair, but now he clicked his fingers. The bodyguard to his left used a remote control and the music in the booth dimmed, the bassy thump-thump coming through the walls.
“The famous Jack Morgan. Didn’t I see you on the arm of Lara Omprakash the other day?”
He gestured at a television mounted in a high corner of the booth.
Jack nodded carefully, face blank, his heart hardening.
“A beautiful girl,” added Munna slyly. “A shame what happened to her.”
Jack thrust his hands into his pockets. “You’ll be pleased to hear her killer’s now in custody.”
Munna looked at him sharply. “Is that so?”