his contact finally arrived. The image of a passport photograph was burned into his memory, a common face, but one he would not forget until the mission was behind him and he had no further need of it.
The sat phone in his pocket was a hot line to the States, with Hal Brognola’s several numbers and Stony Man Farm on speed dial, but none of them would help him here. Bolan was off the screen this evening, well and truly on his own.
ABHAYA TAKERI WAS EARLY for his rendezvous with the American. Unlike the stranger he had come to meet, he had no photographs to work from, not even a physical description of the man who’d traveled halfway around the world to meet him in Calcutta. But he had the magic word.
Saffron.
Someone had thought about it and decided it would be the perfect password for a meeting in a restaurant. Why not? They didn’t pay Takeri to decide such things, only to speak the words that he was given and perform on cue in other ways.
This night, and for the next few days, he would be serving the American as travel guide, interpreter, and general font of knowledge on the ins and outs of life in West Bengal. Beyond that—if he had to fight, for instance—they would have to renegotiate.
Takeri hoped that it would be a simple job, but he already had his doubts. His briefing had included details that suggested travel far afield. He didn’t mind leaving the city—he was a former country boy himself—but there were dangers in the hinterland that made Calcutta’s numbing misery pale by comparison.
He knew tourists imagined India as quaint and scenic, with men in turbans and pith helmets riding elephants around plantations, in the shadow of the Taj Mahal. Landmarks aside, their vision of Takeri’s homeland came primarily from 1940s Hollywood, doubly distorted through a camera’s lens and a kaleidoscope of wishful thinking, harking back to times that never were. The West had lost control of India in 1947, and that stranglehold was never the idyllic life portrayed in films or novels. The common Western view of India was no more accurate than the portrait of American slavery painted in Gone With the Wind.
Before his grandfather’s great-grandfather was born, Takeri’s homeland was invaded, subjugated and exploited for the benefit of merchants and their lackeys, living half a world away. The native culture was suppressed, where it conflicted with the flow of tribute back to London, brutality and wholesale slaughter brought to bear when “insurrectionists” fought back. The history of India was written in her people’s blood, spilled by conquerors who left their imprint on the land, the language, everything he saw and touched from day to day.
Takeri’s nationalism didn’t mark him as a die-hard enemy of the West, however. He recognized that there were troubles enough in his homeland, without blaming anyone outside India’s borders. Gandhi himself had never managed to quell the sectarian bloodshed between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims that continued to the present day. That three-way war had claimed Indira Gandhi’s life and countless others, since the British tyrants had withdrawn in 1947. It endured still, in clashes over Kashmir, with the Pakistanis, and echoed in the living tragedy of Bangladesh. Too many children still labored in virtual slavery, while untouchables were scorned and persecuted, women slain in honor killings by their jealous husbands or else immolated when their spouses died.
Change for the better was a slow and agonizing process. Abhaya Takeri shared the frustration of his countrymen who wanted better lives without surrendering the best parts of their native culture. He believed such things were possible. And that, in part, was what had opened him to contract offers from the CIA.
He recognized the irony of his complaints against the West, while he collected U.S. dollars for his service to the lords of Washington. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, from troubled dreams, seething with anger at himself and at the nation that had forced him toward a measure of betrayal. In the end, though, when it mattered most, Takeri managed to persuade himself that he was working for a greater good, on behalf of India and all her people.
This time, for example, if his briefing had been accurate, he would assist in cleaning out a nest of bandit scum who had disgraced West Bengal for over a decade. Poaching was only part of it, an outlawed trade that spawned corruption, theft and murder stretching from Calcutta to the Sundarbans.
How many lives had Balahadra Naraka claimed so far? Two hundred? Three hundred or more? Takeri wasn’t sure, and further doubted that precise statistics were important. Various officials in West Bengal had been negligent or worse in dealing with the problem, throwing up their hands and pleading helplessness in the face of Naraka’s savagery. Their failure was a national disgrace, one Abhaya Takeri hoped to remedy.
While waiting for his meet with the American, he’d made inquiries here and there, around Calcutta. Certain merchants knew when contraband was moving, knew the sellers and buyers, their middlemen, the details necessary to unravel a conspiracy. With coaxing, he had managed to unlock their lips, extract their secrets bit by bit. More remained to be exposed, but for the moment, he was satisfied.
If only he could shake the sense of being followed.
There was nothing he could point to with assurance, no familiar face glimpsed time and time again behind him, in a crowd. But still, Takeri knew someone was watching him. He had a special sense about such matters, which had saved his life on more than one occasion. As he approached the curry restaurant, Takeri was alert to any shadows, spotting none.
He could abort the meeting, leave some message with the restaurant’s proprietor for the American to try another place, another time, but that would start them on the wrong foot, make the stranger feel Takeri was incompetent. Perhaps, he told himself, the feeling was just that—a feeling without substance. If he couldn’t see his enemies, Takeri knew there was at least a chance that they did not exist.
He dawdled through the last four blocks, still early for the meeting, killing time at shop windows and shrugging off the beggars who infested Clarke Street. None was quite so forward as to touch Takeri, but they crowded him, pleading for money or anything else he could spare. Takeri ignored them, brushing past them as if they didn’t exist, and felt the worse for it with every step he took.
He felt the beggars studied him and mocked him while he window-shopped and several times reversed directions, hoping by that method to detect a stranger following. Takeri wondered if the poor and starving thought him mad, then finally decided that it made no difference. Their opinion didn’t matter. It was nothing, written on the wind.
A short block from the restaurant, he was almost persuaded that his fears were all in vain. He’d been mistaken. There was no one after him at all. Why should there be?
And then, two men emerged from London Mews, moving to block his path. They were not beggars, and the hands they offered to him were not held palm-up and empty.
Both were clutching knives.
Takeri stopped, began to turn and glimpsed two other men he had somehow missed, closing behind him now. Long blades sprouted from their dark fists.
Cursing himself for carelessness, Takeri realized he was about to die.
2
The Executioner had started to relax at the first glimpse of his contact. The man was taking his time and double-checking to be sure he wasn’t followed. That was something Bolan could appreciate, a conscientious guide to help him through the next few days.
He wouldn’t jump the gun, Bolan decided, wouldn’t try to brace his contact on the sidewalk, when they’d already agreed to meet inside the restaurant. It was a small thing, but
