Private Delhi

Chapter 43

From that night when he had killed his drunk father to his escape on a train to the holy city of Varanasi, every detail was firmly etched in the killer’s mind. His subsequent experiences had taught him to be prepared and extra vigilant.

Upon arriving in the holy city, the boy had made the railway station his home. What little money he’d had was used to purchase a single meal each day. It hadn’t been too long before his money had run out.

One day a priest wearing a white dhoti and saffron shawl with beads around his neck had seen the boy. Realizing he was hungry and lost, the priest had bought him a sumptuous meal. The boy had eaten ravenously as the priest sipped from a cup of masala tea. His hunger satiated, the boy had confided that he had no place to live and that his parents were dead.

The priest had taken the boy to his home, a basic hut by the banks of the Ganges. “You can stay here with me till such time as you find something better,” the priest had said. “You will need to help me with all the household chores though.” The boy had gratefully accepted the proposal.

The next day they had headed to the woods that bordered the railway tracks to collect firewood for the traditional stove in the priest’s house. The boy had gathered all the branches that had fallen from trees, tying them into bundles that could eventually be carried back. The priest had sat under a tree, looking at the boy’s sweating torso.

“Let me wipe the sweat off your body,” the priest had said, getting up and using his cotton shawl to dry the boy’s back. He’d asked the boy to turn around and face him but instead of drying him, he had attempted to kiss the boy on his lips. The boy had backed off in shock, but the priest had been persistent. “Love is a natural thing,” he had said. “God tells us to love our fellow human beings. I am merely expressing my affection for you,” and he had grasped the boy and pulled him toward his body.

The boy had now been fully alert. It had been as though that terrible night when his father had killed his mother was being played out with him as victim. He’d played along with the priest, allowing the pervert to kiss him and shove his tongue inside his mouth.

And then he had made his move.

The boy had been holding a heavy branch in his other hand when the priest had grabbed for him. He’d now swung it up toward the priest’s head with as much force as he could muster. An involuntary scream had emerged from the boy as he’d brought the wood into contact with the man’s chin.

The priest had sunk to the ground, dazed by the blow. The boy had continued to smash the priest’s skull with the branch until his head was a bloody pulp. “Die! Die! Die!” he’d shouted. He had pulled the priest’s lifeless body to the nearby railway tracks and lain him across the line. He’d waited by the side, at a safe distance, until a passing train ran over the corpse.

That day he had realized that as well as no longer just being a boy, he was no mere killer either. He was capable of taking care of himself and cleansing the world of vermin. Delivering purity in a world of filth. Delivering light in a world of darkness.

He was now the Deliverer.

Chapter 44

The windowless operating room of the Delhi Memorial Hospital was freezing cold. Under the surgical lights a patient lay on the operating table, his eyes closed, an anesthesia mask over his face.

Doesn’t the patient wonder why a routine gallbladder operation is taking place so late at night? thought the senior nurse. She threw a look at Dr. Pankaj Arora: the slicked-back hair, the gap in his teeth. If only the world knew what a butcher he is. She should never have allowed herself to get sucked into his scheme, but the money was good — enough to pay off the staggering debts her husband had accumulated.

The anesthesia machine stood at the head of the table, and a tube ran from it to the mask that had been placed over the patient’s mouth and nose.

Wearing protective caps, surgical masks, vinyl gloves, and long green surgical gowns, the team was led by Dr. Pankaj Arora. It wasn’t an urgent surgery; it could have waited until morning. But Arora had insisted and no one ever argued with him. His temper was notorious.

Arora applied antiseptic solution to the areas he’d marked on the body. He then made a small incision above the belly button and inserted a hollow needle through the abdominal wall. This would pump carbon dioxide into the abdomen, inflating the cavity.

“Do we need intraoperative cholangiography?” asked the senior nurse. It was standard procedure to check if there were any stones outside the gallbladder.

Arora gave the woman a terrifying look. No one asked unnecessary questions while he was operating. “If you had bothered to check,” said Arora, “you would know that he has no stones outside the gallbladder.”

In fact, he has none inside the gallbladder either.

The senior nurse cursed herself for asking a stupid question. It was never a good idea to get on the wrong side of Arora.

He efficiently attached the umbilical port and then made three more incisions, no more than an inch each, in the patient’s belly. Next he inserted a wand-like laparoscope that was equipped with cameras and surgical tools into the umbilical port. Immediately, the monitor in front of him came to life with a view from inside the patient.

“How’s the blood pressure?” he asked the anesthesiologist.

“Steady — one hundred and ten over seventy,” replied the anesthesiologist, looking at the iridescent numbers and squiggles that mapped the patient’s vital signs.

Arora used the laparoscope to pull back both the liver and gallbladder and removed the connecting tissue to expose the cystic duct and artery. The senior nurse quickly used clips to clamp off the duct and artery. Arora cut the duct, the artery, and the connecting tissue between the gallbladder and liver, and used the laparoscope to suck out the pear-shaped gallbladder.

At this stage all the instruments should have been withdrawn, the carbon dioxide allowed to escape, and the patient stitched up. Instead, Arora increased the size of one of the incisions — to almost four inches.

“More suction,” he said to the senior nurse. She immediately grabbed a long plastic tube, and began using it to vacuum the puddles of blood. Arora was like a drill sergeant inside the operating room.

He used his instruments to separate the colon from the right kidney. He cut the splenorenal ligament to free the kidney entirely. He then cut the ureter, placed an endoscopic specimen retrieval bag around the patient’s kidney, and pulled it out through the larger cut.

From the corner of his eye he saw the senior nurse place the kidney in the Surgiquip LifePort unit, a transport device that would continuously pump the kidney with a cold liquid solution. It would double the organ storage time until it could be transplanted.

Arora began to stitch up the patient.

Surgery completed, he walked over to the scrubbing area, removed his gloves, mask, and cap, and washed his hands. He then walked through the doctors’ lounge and into the corridor. The patient’s wife was seated in one of the visitors’ chairs. She had been looking at the clock anxiously for the past four hours.

She got up instantly. “Is everything all right, Dr. Arora?” she asked.

He smiled at her, his expression softening only momentarily. “Don’t worry,” he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. “He’s perfectly fine. He’ll be discharged in two days.”

A look of relief was evident on the wife’s face. “I was worried when it took so long. I was under the impression that the gallbladder could be removed in two hours.”

“Laparoscopy takes a little longer but most patients seem to recover faster and feel less pain after the surgery,” he explained, taking off his glasses and using his kerchief to clean them. “We also needed to carry out intraoperative cholangiography to check for stones outside the gallbladder. That’s why it took some more time.”

Oh, and we also removed a healthy kidney along the way.

Chapter 45

In his office, Santosh pressed a button on the multipoint controller and watched the oversized LCD screen spring to life. There was a time difference of twelve and a half hours between Delhi and Los Angeles. It would be ten thirty in the morning for Jack, a good time to reach him.

“What’s bugging you?” asked Jack, picking up on Santosh’s worried expression.

“The case,” said Santosh. “I’m wondering whether it leads Private Delhi into a political quagmire.”

“Well, it was always a bit boggy,” drawled Jack. “But how come I’m getting the funny feeling that it turns out to involve the suicide of your Health Minister.”

“Kumar,” offered Santosh. “That’s what they’re saying in the States, is it? That it was suicide?”

“I’ll be honest, Santosh, it’s not that big a story here. But yeah, that’s what they’re saying.”

“Well, it wasn’t. I saw the body. It was murder. We’ve established a link between the city’s hospitals and the body parts found at Greater Kailash. We think there’s a link between that find and an earlier murder in which the victim’s eyeballs were removed. And now Kumar, who was drained of all blood and the blood taken. The theory I’m currently working on is that we’ve stumbled across some kind of organ-harvesting or illegal-transplants operation. And my instinct is that this goes right to the top.”

“Okay, hang in there. I’m on my way back to Delhi to address the Global Security and Intelligence Conference. We can talk more when I arrive.”

“The one being held at Vigyan Bhawan?” asked Santosh.

“Precisely,” said Jack. “Grab a cab, pick me up from the airport, and we’ll chat in the car on the drive into town.”

“Will do. Just one small request in the meantime.”

“Shoot.”

“I need you to find out whether any American insurance companies encourage their customers to come to India,” said Santosh.

“For what?” asked Jack.

“For organ transplants or medical procedures,” replied Santosh. “It’s called medical tourism.”

“Anything else?” asked Jack.

“If any of them do encourage clients to have their procedures performed in India, then which ones? I’m particularly interested in one company: ResQ.”

Chapter 46

Jack Morgan sat at the round ink-black lacquered table in the octagonal “war room” of Private Los Angeles. Padded swivel chairs were clustered around the table, jumbo flat-screens mounted wall to wall.

Opposite sat the CEO of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, headquartered in Kansas City — a man called Denny. Jack had helped him with several delicate investigations involving insurance frauds worth millions. Requesting Denny’s help that morning, he had not expected him to be in LA for a meeting, but as fortune would have it...

“So here’s the deal, Jack,” said the insurance man, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses to read from a folder on the table. “There is indeed an increasing trend to send American patients to India on account of the new super-specialty hospitals that have been established there. Doctors’ services are a fraction of the cost. In addition, postoperative care is also cheap. Insurance providers can cut costs tremendously by doing this.”

“And clients are willing to travel halfway around the world for medical procedures?” asked Jack.

“Around a hundred and fifty thousand patients travel to India each year for medical procedures. The size of the industry is already around two billion dollars per year.”

“Any specific insurance companies that specialize in the India game?” asked Jack.

“Leading the pack in this effort is a company called ResQ,” said his friend. “It’s listed on the NASDAQ but their main operations are now in India. The name of their CEO is Jai Thakkar.”

Chapter 47

Ram Chopra sipped his morning coffee as he scanned the newspapers. In New Delhi, the commonly accepted joke was that the Times of India and the Indian Times were read by people who ran the government; the Hindustan Times and the Daily Express were read by people who thought they ought to run the government; the Indian Express was read by the people who used to run the government. The Mail Today was read by the wives of the people who ran the government. And The Hindu was read by people who thought the government ought to be run by another government. The readers of the Delhi Times weren’t bothered about who ran the government as long as the women on page three had big tits.

Chopra was almost unique because he read them all. His routine started with the mainstream dailies published in Delhi, followed by the morning dailies from outside Delhi. The tabloids came last. They were usually vulgar but utterly delicious.

His wife and daughter were asleep, both being late risers. Usually, Chopra enjoyed the solitude of his mornings with a cup of coffee and the first cigar of the day.

But not today. The butler had just poured him a second cup of arabica plucked from the plantations of Coorg when Chopra clumsily dropped the cup. It fell to the floor, the delicate china shattering to little pieces along with the rich brew. “Bastard!” shouted Chopra, crushing the offending tabloid page in his hand and flinging it across the table.

The butler hurriedly brought a mop to clear up the mess on the floor and wondered what had set Chopra off. He noticed the tabloid that Chopra had been reading now lay in a ball on the floor. He vowed to read it later to find out what had caused his boss to detonate.

Chopra got up from the dining table and headed to his study. The butler hurriedly cleared up the coffee spill and the broken cup fragments along with the crumpled newspaper and headed back to the kitchen. He made himself a cup of tea and retrieved the balled-up tabloid pages. The news item instantly caught his eye. It was on the gossip page.

So, darlings, it’s me, back again this week with another installment of juicy chatter. News is that one of the high-and-mighty politicos of our great capital city is miffed with a powerful businessman. It seems that the politico has a sweet daughter of marriageable age and the businessman had swept her off her feet. But (gasp!) he’s had a change of heart! The princess was left standing at the altar with her father waiting to give her away. The whisper in town is that the old man is fuming at the humiliation and has vowed to avenge his family’s “honor.”

Chapter 48

The Delhi Golf Club dated back to the early 1930s and was home to the championship eighteen-hole Lodhi Course that was part of the Asian PGA Tour. Samir Patel played there twice a week. On Thursdays he would play with just one colleague while on Saturdays it was usually a four-ball.

He was dressed in his customary bush shirt. The only concessions he had made for the golf course were checkered pants, a sleeveless sweater, and a cap that covered the vermillion mark on his forehead. And today, as he returned to the clubhouse following his game, he was feeling very pleased with himself indeed. It was time to enjoy what he liked to call “a couple of swift libations.”

In the parking lot outside sat his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. The driver, a good man known to Patel as Babu, was well enough acquainted with his boss’s habits to know that there would be precisely three “swift libations” taking around an hour and a half, at which point his boss would stride slightly unsteadily from the clubhouse and onto the gravel of the parking lot, aglow with the morning’s golf and the afternoon’s alcohol, making more conversation than usual as he was transported back home to his luxurious, well-appointed home.

Not for the first time, Babu thought how sweet it must be to be one of the big bosses. What a life, he mused as he set his phone alarm for an hour’s time — an hour in which he planned to continue his nap.

But first, a piss.

And off he went to the course-side restrooms, unaware that he was being followed.

Indeed, he remained unaware, even as he stood at the urinal, barely hearing the restroom door open as a man in black slid in behind him. His first — and, as it turned out, his last — thought was, Why is someone standing behind me? But he never saw the man in black. He didn’t see the skewer the man held. His only sensation at the point of death was a sudden fierce pain in his left ear as the skewer was rammed hard and fast into his brain.

The man in black let the chauffeur’s body slump into his arms. He was already using a rag to staunch the flow of blood from Babu’s ear. Moments later he had maneuvered the corpse into a stall and was helping it out of its clothes.

An hour later, just as the recently deceased Babu had predicted, Samir Patel was exiting the clubhouse. An extremely happy Surgiquip chairman, he had won his game and been the recipient of exactly three celebratory drinks, and intended to spend the rest of the afternoon at home. His domestics had the afternoon off, and he planned to fill the remainder of his day slumped in a leather armchair, reading the papers, and catching up on an occasional email, knowing he had complete privacy.

Or so he hoped.

Babu stood holding the door open for him. “Thank you, Babu,” he said, hearing a slight slur in his own voice as he settled into the lush leather interior. He really shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach. The door closed. Babu took his seat in front. The central locking clicked.

In the next instant Patel knew — even in his relaxed state — that something was amiss. Babu had been his driver a long time. He knew the man’s mannerisms. He knew how his presence felt.

And he knew this wasn’t Babu.

“Hey,” he managed, but then the man in the front was swiveling in his seat and God, no, it wasn’t Babu, of course it wasn’t Babu, because this man was holding a hypodermic syringe.

He recognized the man.

“No. You” was all he managed before the hypodermic needle was jabbed just under his jaw. It was too late to throw himself toward the door in order to escape, because the sedative had already started to work.

Chapter 49

When Patel surfaced it was to the relief of knowing that the man with the hypodermic syringe had been an illusion of the mind, for he had awoken in his own bedroom, lying on his back in bed.

“Thank God,” he whispered to himself, feeling like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. “It was just a dream,” and he went to turn over in bed and find a more comfortable position — only to realize that he couldn’t. His outflung arms were held in place, tied with rope, and when he tried to turn his head the movement was prevented by a wide band of something around his forehead. His eyeballs skittered madly in their sockets as he tried to see his legs, knowing that they, too, were strapped to the bed.

Another thing: he was naked.

He became aware of someone else in the room, moving around.

“Are you awake?” said a voice. Bright torchlight made his pupils contract.

“Please. Please. Please, don’t do this,” he said in a whine that was disgraceful to his own ears.

“Do what, Mr. Patel?” came the voice.

The familiar voice. Yes. That was right. He knew the man. He knew his attacker and if he knew his attacker then surely he could reason with—

“What are you doing?” he said, seeing something in his peripheral vision. The man was moving closer to the bed, a shadow that refused to fully form in his drug-fogged mind. All Patel knew was that once again a syringe was coming toward him.

“Just some pain relief, Mr. Patel. I want you to remain conscious, so you can see everything I am about to do to you. So you can appreciate its enormity.”

The needle sunk deep. The plunger depressed. Next it was as though a wave of bliss and well-being rolled through Patel, so that even though his eyes were wide and straining in their sockets, there was something almost comforting about the roll of surgical instruments that was unfurled on the bed beside him.

The figure retired and then moments later reappeared, only this time the man wore hospital scrubs and a mask. He had moved a mirror from the bathroom and angled it so that Patel could see his own abdomen.

“The doctor is in,” said the intruder.

He lifted a scalpel from the roll of instruments and held it up for Patel to see. Even with the etorphine working its magic Patel felt the first tremors of terror, knowing this was no dream; that there was no escape.

He was going to die.

“Anything,” he slurred, “I’ll do anything.”

“Anything? You have done nothing — nothing but take, take, take. And now it is your turn to give.”

He made his incision. Patel did not feel it, but he heard it, and he saw the blade pierce his flesh between the ribs, the scalpel held between index finger and thumb, angled and then drawn down, opening a red ribbon to just above his belly button. Patel saw his own flesh part, the glistening meat visible beneath, bits of himself he would have hoped never to see.

Damage! screamed his mind, like some kind of automated response. Damage, damage! But in the next second he was thinking, But if my attacker stopped there I might be all right. I might heal.

I could still live.

The intruder placed the scalpel back onto the bed and then brought something else into view. A clamp. Then another. The man inserted them onto each side of the incision and still Patel felt no pain — one part of his brain screaming while yet another competing part insisted that he might be okay, he might be okay.

And then the man was opening the incision in his chest, opening it wide, so wide, and Patel was seeing his own exposed insides and he was no longer thinking that everything was going to be all right, he knew now that his death was imminent and was thankful that at least it would be painless. The attacker reached inside with two hands and his forehead furrowed in concentration as he rummaged within Patel’s chest cavity.

Patel felt pulling. A sucking sensation below.

And then his eyes bulged as he saw what his attacker held up before him.

It was his own heart.

Chapter 50

The black van stood at the corner of Jama Masjid Road and Chawri Bazar Road in the congested Chandni Chowk area of Delhi.

Windows had been replaced by mild steel panels that had been spray-painted to match the black exterior.

A frightened old man entered. The interior was nice and warm but the smell of disinfectant was overpowering. The inside of the vehicle was fitted out in a style similar to an ambulance.

Iqbal Ibrahim motioned the visitor to be seated. Ibrahim was a burly fellow dressed in blue jeans and a green T-shirt that bore the first line of the Quran in white calligraphy. On his head was an embroidered white skullcap. His hooked nose was big — almost like the beak of a bird.

Ibrahim had been brought up in the slums of Delhi, one among nine children of a rag picker. When he was just six, their shanty had collapsed while he was inside. His parents and the neighbors had pulled him out of the rubble to find him unhurt. It had been a miracle. Four years later a car had missed him by inches while he was playing cricket on a public road. At age twelve, he had been swimming in the Yamuna with his friends when the authorities had released water from the upstream dam without warning. Two of his friends had perished but Iqbal had survived. Ever since that day Ibrahim had believed in his own superhuman nature. He could never fail.

The superhuman had struggled through school and had managed to get into med school via a special quota but had flunked. In spite of failing, he had turned out to be much more successful than the average doctor. On his desk were two cell phones, identical except for their covers. One was red while the other was green. He had nicknames for both: the red one was called “Supply” and the green one was called “Demand.” The choice of colors was significant. Supply implied bloody surgeries, hence the choice of red. Demand implied money, often dollars, hence the choice of green.

“Have you brought the money?” asked Ibrahim as the old man sat down. The old man nodded wearily as he passed a brown-paper-covered parcel across the desk.

Ibrahim opened the parcel and took out the individual bundles of cash. He placed each one into a currency-counting machine on his desk and totted up the result. Six lakh rupees. Around nine thousand dollars.

“You realize this is only half? The other half is payable immediately before the transplant?” asked Ibrahim.

“Yes,” said the old man, who had sold off his wife’s jewelry in order to pay for his only son’s operation. The previous year, the boy had been diagnosed with alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, an absence of a vital enzyme in the liver. They had tried every possible treatment until the doctors had eventually advised a liver transplant.

“Where should I admit my son?”

“Check him into Delhi Memorial Hospital and sign him up with Dr. Pankaj Arora as the doctor on record. We have identified a donor. Inshallah, your son will get a new liver tomorrow. You are lucky there is no foreigner in the queue for this one. I make them pay twice what you are paying!”

Chapter 51

The senior nurse felt inside the pocket of her starched white uniform. The syringe containing epinephrine was right there. Every fiber in her body wanted to run away. But then an image of Arora would appear before her. It was the fear of Arora that kept her there.

Epinephrine, also known as adrenalin, was a hormone that could be used as medication for a number of conditions. The common side effects included anxiety, sweating, increased heart rate, and high blood pressure. The amazing thing about epinephrine was that it could make the vitals of a patient appear as though a heart attack was being experienced.

She walked past the nurses’ station and the janitors who were mopping the floors of the long corridor. She stopped only when she reached the door of room 303. She opened it gently and entered the dimly lit room. The sole occupant appeared to be asleep on a bed that was slightly elevated toward the head. An IV line ran into the patient’s hand while a bedside monitor mapped the patient’s vital signs. He had been in a persistent vegetative state for the past four years.

The nurse took a deep breath, knowing she was crossing a line, for it was one thing when paired organs were taken from a living donor; people could live on a single lung or a single kidney. Similarly, blood, bone marrow, and parts of livers could be taken, knowing that they would regenerate eventually.

But it was quite another when it came to organs such as the heart.

The problem was that harvesting organs without getting the patient into the operating room was impossible. Epinephrine would do the trick by simulating a heart attack.

She held the IV port and inserted the needle into the lumen of the IV line. She prayed to her god as she slowly pressed the plunger, knowing that she was no longer a mere accomplice but a killer in Arora’s perverse plans.

He had convinced her that the vegetative-state patient was dead by acceptable medical criteria and that harvesting his useful organs would be a service to humanity.

Nonsense! the alternate voice in her head said. What they were doing was wrong. Beyond wrong. It was monstrous.

Chapter 52

Santosh had left his cane behind for this particular expedition. He was walking through the underground tunnel, sloshing through a foot of water, wearing a black plastic coat and pants. On his feet were gumboots and on his head was a miner’s helmet with a battery-powered light. He wore a charcoal filter mask around his mouth and nose to avoid methane poisoning.

He trudged through the water, oblivious to the stench of sewage. In his hand was a laminated map. It showed the major arteries that ran under the streets of Delhi as well as access points. He had marked his destination in red and the route in blue.

It was mostly quiet inside the tunnel, but every drop of dripping water seemed to be amplified and echoed, and was punctuated by the squealing of rats. He kept walking but he had a nasty feeling he was being followed. He stopped for a minute and strained his ears to check for the sound of footsteps. There were none.

He looked at his watch. He had been down there for over thirty minutes. He sped up and took a final turn. And above him he saw the manhole. A rusted iron ladder snaked up from the drain to the manhole and he carefully climbed it, ensuring that he tested each rung before actually using it.

At the top of the ladder, he examined the manhole cover. He could see his scarf — now soiled and stained — hanging from the underside handle. Just to make sure his theory was right, he held on with one hand and used the other to nudge the cover. It did not require too much effort. A single arm was sufficient to nudge open the cover and slide it away with minimal noise. Switching off the light beam of his helmet, he popped his head above ground in the darkness and pulled himself out. He looked around to ensure that it was the house that he had estimated on the drainage map.

Satisfied that it was, Santosh headed back into the drain, closing the manhole behind him. He had proved his hypothesis: it was indeed possible to access Kumar’s house by following a drainage map obtained from the Irrigation and Flood Control Department.

Now, if only he could find who were the people who had bought similar maps. Unfortunately, the list provided by the superintendent engineer had been useless. Anyone could provide a fake name and the department would accept it at face value.

Chapter 53

Hyperion hospital in Delhi looked more like a five-star hotel than a hospital. Each patient enjoyed a luxurious private room with a flat-screen television and a room service menu. The lobby downstairs featured a waterfall and a vertical garden. The hospital was the brainchild of the scion of a pharmaceutical conglomerate. It was specifically targeted at delivering efficient — and luxurious — services in the health care sector at a fraction of the amount they would cost in America. All of the design, planning, and equipment had been supplied by Patel’s company, Surgiquip.

The couple from Minneapolis were dropped off in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz van. Their “relationship manager” waited at the entrance to greet them. Every detail had been taken care of for them. This included procuring Indian visas, arranging business-class travel, blocking rooms at the Imperial Hotel for the first night, arrangements at the Joint Commission International-accredited hospital, doctor consultations, diagnostic tests, postoperative care, and even leisure travel in India after recovery.

The husband sat in a wheelchair pushed by a nurse provided to them from the moment they had landed in Delhi. Their relationship manager greeted them as they entered the lobby of the hospital.

“When will you operate?” asked the wife.

“I have been in touch with the Delhi Memorial Hospital,” replied the relationship manager. “The matching kidney will become available tonight.”

Chapter 54

Neel was hunched over his computer, palms sweating. He was accessing a grim, dark world of human filth, a deep web of depravity that was hard to define. It was an Internet beyond Google, Amazon, and eBay but the markets were no less robust. In fact the underworld of the web was far larger than what appeared above the surface. It was large and anonymous, making it relatively easy to hide from law enforcement.

He was using Tor, an abbreviation for “The Onion Router,” an anonymizing filter that could resolve addresses that could not be identified by a regular browser. These websites ended in.onion instead of.com or.org, and were in a constant state of flux so that they were never in a given place for too long.

It was pretty incredible what was on offer. The Hidden Wiki, a directory to all the illegal stuff, had 3,099 listings under drugs alone. In addition, you could find passport forgeries and fake driver’s licenses from around the world, firearms, counterfeit bills, contract hit men accepting fees in Bitcoin, human experimentation, child pornography, sex slaves, snuff films, and human organs. Neel felt sick to his stomach as he continued to explore.

On a thread that helped wannabe murderers, there was someone suggesting that dissolving a body in lye was the quickest way to dispose of it. The message board had other users contributing their own dark expertise to the knowledge forum. An active user seemed to indicate that 70 percent of the bones and teeth would remain if lye were used. He advised using acid to dissolve the remains. Yet another thread was entitled “Producing Kiddie Porn for Dummies.” This was the smelly underbelly of the World Wide Web that highlighted the greatest depravities of human nature.

Neel clicked into the organs marketplace and was dumbfounded to see a price list as though they were offering items from the daily specials of a restaurant:

He scanned the comments below the price list. Someone had posted: “If you are reading this thread, it means that you are searching for a human organ for yourself or a loved one. Ignore all the crazy prices that are listed here. We can get you reliable donors at a fraction of the cost from India.” The seller was using the handle “Dr. O. S. Rangoon.” An Indian cell phone number accompanied the message.

Chapter 55

Nisha and Santosh watched the five men working along the banks of the Yamuna river. They hefted heavy, soggy sheets on their heads and dumped them into a milky concoction of bleach, alum, and other compounds before giving them a final rinse in the river. Without this chemical rinse, the men knew they would never be able to get the filth out of the fabric because an extended soak in the effluent-laced river water would always leave a grimy patina on cloth.

The work had used to be much easier some years before. The river’s waters had been clean and had done most of the work. The overall increase in Indian prosperity had, ironically, reduced the prosperity of the dhobis. The washing machine had eaten into the business of dhobis but the men at the Yamuna had faced a double whammy owing to the degeneration of the river. Even hospitals were wary of sending their stuff to the Yamuna. Fear of infection from effluents had stopped most of the better ones. In previous years there would have been fifty men at work instead of five.

Santosh walked up to the group along with Nisha. “Terrible work these days,” he commented. One of them looked up wearily to see a man who looked as though his clothes had been washed by them in the river.

“It’s the only way we know how to keep hunger from our doors, sahib,” said the man. “Most households have given up on us. After a wash in the Yamuna, their garments are often returned reeking of sewage.”

“So how do you survive?” asked Santosh, leaning on his walking stick.

“The cloth sellers still need their fabric to be shrunk before tailoring,” replied the man. “In addition there are government hospitals that still send their bed linen to us.”

Santosh took out a five-hundred-rupee note from his wallet and handed it over to the man.

“What is this for, sahib?” asked the man. His colleagues also stopped their work, eyeing the money.

“It’s for all of you,” said Santosh. “Go have a good meal. It’s my good deed for the day. My good deed.”

“Thank you, sahib,” said the washerman. “May God bless you and the memsahib. If there is anything that I can ever be of help with...”

“Now that you mention it, there is something that you could help me with...” began Santosh. At Private, Neel had reconstructed a larger sample of hospital gown from the tiny fragment they’d been given. Santosh pulled it from his pocket...

Chapter 56

Santosh picked up his phone. It was Neel. “Patel has been murdered,” said Neel. “It’s our boy, no doubt about it. His driver was killed and he was kidnapped from Delhi Golf Club then taken home. A housekeeper found what was left of the body this morning.”

“What do you mean, ‘what was left’?”

“He’d been eviscerated. The housekeeper found most of his internal organs nailed to a wall.”

“Most?”

“The heart was missing.”

“Certainly sounds like our man,” said Santosh.

“So we can assume that Patel was an enemy of the organ-harvesting operation?”

“We never assume, Neel.”

“True,” replied Neel. “You want to visit the crime scene?”

“Better that I stay away,” replied Santosh. “No point getting Sharma all worked up. In any case, I have a meeting at noon.”

“You want me to go instead?” asked Neel.

“That would be good,” replied Santosh. “Oh, one more thing, Neel.”

“Yes?”

“That hospital gown came from Delhi Memorial Hospital. Chances are that most of the bodies were from there. Everything seems to be adding up, given that it’s the closest hospital to the Greater Kailash house and the black van seen there was owned by Arora, their chief surgeon.”

“Your hunch turned out right,” said Neel.

“Any luck with the online search?” asked Santosh.

“The biggest supplier from India seems to be a Dr. O. S. Rangoon. I’m searching various databases to find if someone matches up.”

“What did you say the name was?”

“Dr. O. S. Rangoon.”

“Don’t bother with an online or directory search,” said Santosh.

“Why?” asked Neel.

“Dr. O. S. Rangoon is simply an anagram of ‘organ donors.’ Try tracing the cell phone number instead.”

Chapter 57

Santosh made his way to his appointment on foot, partly savoring the heart of Delhi as he moved through the streets, partly thinking about the case.

He passed newspaper vendors and cast his eye over headlines. Patel’s murder dominated the front pages, of course — no attempts made at suppression or spin there — and one or two of the newspapers had linked his death with that of Kumar.

Suddenly a free-sheet was thrust into his hand. They were being handed out by a young man who walked on swiftly, moving against the tide of pedestrian traffic and giving out leaflets to whoever would take them. The leaflet showed pictures of Kumar and Patel, doctored with bloodstains, and the headline: “RIP THE ‘GREAT’ AND THE ‘GOOD.’”

Santosh caught sight of a police car in the road and watched the young agitator shove his pamphlets into a backpack and melt into the crowd. He pocketed his own, moving on, wondering about the mood in the city.

There was no doubting the mood at the building occupied by ResQ Insurance. Fear and paranoia ruled over a reception area that teemed with security guards. Santosh passed through a metal detector where his cane was inspected — not very efficiently: the blade inside remained undiscovered — and then he was approached by a guard wielding a wand of some kind.

Finally he made his way in the elevator up to the seventeenth floor of the steel-and-glass tower. Five floors of the building were entirely occupied by ResQ Insurance, a company that had built its fortune by taking advantage of lower health care costs in India.

Founded by two brothers from Cleveland, ResQ had originally started out as a third-party administrator for the large insurance companies that found it more efficient to allow an outsider to process claims and perform other administrative services. Given that back-office tasks were easily outsourced to India, ResQ had built up a strong team in Gurgaon. At that time the company had been known by a different name.

The company’s NYU-educated CEO, Jai Thakkar, had realized India presented an opportunity to offer medical insurance at significantly lower premiums, and he had succeeded in putting together an investor consortium to buy out the founders. He had changed the name of the company and then put into action his plan to offer low American insurance premiums linked to medical services in India. Thakkar’s idea had worked wonders and ResQ was now one of the most profitable insurance companies in the US, with the bulk of its operations in India even though the majority of its customers lived in America.

Santosh exited the elevator on the seventeenth floor and entered a world of soft carpets, deep leather sofas, and understated elegance. He felt slightly intimidated, partly owing to his disheveled appearance.

He passed another security check. Two more armed guards with wands. This time he was asked if he was able to walk without the cane. He agreed that he was. In that case, could he collect it after his meeting with Mr. Thakkar?

Next came Thakkar’s secretary, who surveyed him with a snooty air then led him through corridors to a large corner office with views of the other towers in the business district.

Thakkar was on the phone but hung up when he saw Santosh enter. He rose from behind his desk to shake Santosh’s hand. “I had a call from Denny, the CEO of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, saying that I had to see you,” he said, friendly enough.

Santosh nodded. “Thank you for meeting me,” he said as he sat. “I was hoping you could help me understand the economics of medical tourism.”

He glanced at the credenza that ran along one side of Thakkar’s desk. On it was a photograph of Thakkar along with Mohan Jaswal. “Where was that taken?” he asked.

“NYU alumni meet,” replied Thakkar, the word “alumni” like the buzzing of a bee due to his nasal twang. “Both of us attended but many years apart. He went first to attend a program on journalism during the period that he was posted there by the Indian Times. I earned my MBA from NYU several years later. We became friends because of the alumni association.”

Santosh kept his expression neutral, not wanting to register a reaction. Thinking, Thakkar and Jaswal. Friends.

Thakkar looked like the typical Indian-American on Wall Street. Well educated, groomed, and urbane. Indian residents deridingly called them ABCDs — “American-Born Confused Desis,” the word “desi” implying Indian descent. Thakkar’s parents had moved from Delhi to America in the seventies but there were enough family ties in Delhi for him to call it home.

“So, coming back to my question,” said Santosh, “I was wondering whether American clients come to India simply on account of lower prices for procedures or because they are able to obtain vital transplant organs that they would be unable to procure back home.”

Thakkar’s face fell. He recovered quickly, though. He was used to dealing with difficult questions from the press and the regulators. “India has become a preferred destination because of the excellent doctors, modern infrastructure, plentiful and qualified nursing staff, and lower prices. Recent technology upgrades and modernization of facilities have made India’s hospitals very attractive to foreign clients.”

Thakkar’s cell phone began to ring. He looked at the number flashing on the screen. “Excuse me for a minute,” he said, getting up from his chair. “This one is urgent.” He gestured for Santosh to remain seated while he took the call in the adjoining conference room.

Santosh got up as soon as Thakkar left and walked over to the desk phone. Looked at the last call, memorized the number, and then texted Neel to run a trace on it. Then he went back to his chair, sat down, and waited for Thakkar.

“I have just one more question to ask,” he said when Thakkar returned.

“Fire away,” smiled Thakkar.

“Why have you beefed up security in the building? Not frightened, by any chance, are you, Mr. Thakkar?”

The smile slid from Thakkar’s face for good. Shortly afterward, Santosh was shown from the office.

Chapter 58

Gali Paranthe Wali was a narrow street in the Chandni Chowk area of Delhi that was famous for the multitude of shops selling parathas — or stuffed bread, a culinary favorite of North India.

Nisha found herself in a shop no bigger than a closet, along with one of her college friends, Abha, now a senior columnist for a tabloid. She wrote the lifestyle column.

Abha, a strikingly beautiful Punjabi woman, ordered parathas for both of them without bothering to consult Nisha. They quickly sat down on two of the empty chairs in the shop and waited for their lunch.

Nisha would have preferred to meet at the newspaper’s editorial office but Abha was researching an article on the street food of Delhi and had requested Nisha tag along. Nisha had obliged. Not because she particularly savored the food but because Abha always knew the latest gossip in Delhi. Which businessman was down on his luck, which man or woman was having an extramarital affair, which politician had indulged in an outrageously corrupt deal... there was nothing she wasn’t up to date on.

Their food arrived. Stuffed with potato, peas, and cauliflower, the piping-hot breads were served along with sweet tamarind and mint chutney. Abha tucked in. How does she manage to look so good with all that junk going into her? wondered Nisha.

“What’s the matter?” asked Abha, stuffing another delectable morsel in her mouth with her glossy-pink-nail-polished fingers. “Why aren’t you eating?” Nisha reluctantly took a bite.

Nisha continued nibbling as they chatted. First about themselves, then their kids, and then the entire world. The conversation veered to politics. “What’s happening in Delhi these days?” asked Nisha.

“The Lieutenant Governor is pissed off.”

“Why?” asked Nisha.

“It seems that Chopra’s daughter was engaged to Jai Thakkar, the CEO of that insurance company ResQ. The creep broke off the engagement after a few romps in bed with her.”

“Big deal,” said Nisha, licking tamarind chutney off her fingers. “It’s quite common these days to have terminated affairs and broken engagements.”

“True,” said Abha. “But Chopra is old school. You know, ‘family honor’ and all that. He’s vowed to set Thakkar right. You watch — that Thakkar will get into trouble one of these days. He’s been going around town bad-mouthing Chopra and his daughter. News is that Chopra sent him a chopped-off tongue as warning. I did a little snippet for the paper without mentioning names the other day.”

“Thakkar is quite powerful himself, right?” asked Nisha. “I’m told that ResQ is among the most profitable insurance companies in the States. He was on Guha’s Carrot and Stick the other night.”

“True, but you can’t live in Delhi and piss off the Lieutenant Governor. For the life of me, I can’t understand people these days. And that Ajoy Guha is another thing — he’s like a leech. Once he latches on he doesn’t let go of the story until he’s sucked every drop out.”

“Committed, eh?” offered Nisha.

“He lives for it. I don’t think he has much else. Tragic marriage,” said her friend. “The show is the perfect outlet for him to vent all his frustrations. There are also some pretty unsavory rumors about that new Health Secretary, Amit Roy. So high and mighty, yet the word is that he likes them young...”

Chapter 59

Amit Roy stood in the wings of the school assembly hall, tired after what had been one of the best nights of his life. Images of the terrified girl still vividly played on a loop inside his head and he felt, not just euphoric, but exalted somehow, sensing a change within himself, as though his disconnection from a society that despised his kind was at last complete. What happened to him now was an irrelevance. He was at one with himself.

Oh, but first, there was this rather boring duty to attend to. Prizegiving at the Vasant Valley School. Yawn.

On stage, the principal made his announcement. “We have a special guest with us today. Mr. Amit Roy is the Principal Secretary in Delhi’s Health Department, and he is here to tell you about how each one of you can contribute toward making Delhi a healthier city. Please welcome him with a round of applause.”

Roy walked on, adjusted the microphone to his height, and spoke, his Adam’s apple bouncing. “I am delighted to be here today in order to award the prize for the best essay on the topic ‘Delhi’s Health: Is It Only the Government’s Problem?’ We received over five thousand submissions from across schools in Delhi but the winning one was from Vasant Valley, so you should be very proud of your school.”

He waited for the applause to die down and then spoke briefly about air pollution, availability of clean water, sanitation, and all the other difficulties the country’s capital was still grappling with, and what ordinary folks could possibly do to play a positive role.

“And that brings me to the end of my talk,” he said, eyes scanning the room. “I shall now announce the winner of the state essay competition.”

The children waited with bated breath. After all, the winner was one among them.

“And the winner, for her essay entitled ‘Health Care, Fair and Square?’, is Maya,” said Roy. “Maya Gandhe.”

He stood back as the auditorium erupted in applause, and from the crowd stood Maya Gandhe.

And the moment he saw her, Amit Roy decided this event wasn’t such a drag after all.

Chapter 60

Santosh walked through the congested by-lanes filled with vendors selling kebabs and waited for the man to appear. Neel had double-checked the records and confirmed that the cell phone number dialed from Thakkar’s desk phone belonged to someone called Iqbal Ibrahim, whose residential address was near the Jama Masjid.

As it turned out, Ibrahim was praying in India’s most famous mosque, the Jama Masjid. Built in 1656 by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, the mosque was vast. Three great gates, four towers, and two forty-meter-high minarets constructed of red sandstone and white marble overlooked a gargantuan courtyard that could accommodate more than twenty-five thousand faithful for prayer.

Neel had given Santosh a photo of Ibraham he’d managed to retrieve from a database. He’d also supplied Santosh with the latest gizmo he’d developed. It was a pair of regular-looking eyeglasses that accommodated a camera and mic capable of transmitting to the Private Delhi office.

Reaching the mosque, Santosh put on the glasses. He noticed a crowd of people exiting. Prayers seemed to have ended. Then, after ten minutes, Santosh saw a man who resembled the picture he had. He continued staring in his direction, knowing that the camera would be relaying the image to Neel. Santosh watched as the man walked toward him, removing his prayer cap as he approached.

Santosh took a few tentative steps in the direction of the man and held out his arm for a handshake. “Mr. Iqbal Ibrahim? Could I have a few minutes of your time?” he asked.

The man smiled at him. “Please don’t be formal, Mr. Wagh,” he said courteously. Santosh had half a second to register the fact that the man knew his name, because Ibrahim’s statement was accompanied by an almost imperceptible nod of the head. A baton slammed into the back of Santosh’s head and he crumpled to the ground, his cane and phone falling along with him, the handset shattering.

Chapter 61

Jack had a stopover in Dubai on his way from LA to Delhi. Unfortunately, his Emirates flight from Dubai to Delhi had been delayed. The result was that he arrived at terminal three of Indira Gandhi International Airport almost two hours after the scheduled time.

He cleared immigration, collected his single suitcase from the luggage carousel, passed through the green channel of customs, and emerged expecting to be greeted by Santosh. Instead he saw another familiar face: Nisha.

He rolled his baggage cart toward her, pecked her on the cheek, and asked, “Where is he?”

“He had to meet someone,” said Nisha as she led Jack toward the parking lot where her car awaited. “He asked me to do the honors instead.”

“My lucky day,” said Jack with a smile.

They stowed the suitcase in the trunk and took their seats inside. “Where to?” asked Nisha. “We’ve booked you at the Oberoi Hotel.”

“No, not yet,” replied Jack. “We had better go directly to the conference. My session starts in ninety minutes. In the meantime, fill me in on this case.”

They set off, and as Jack relished the sights and sounds of Delhi once more, Nisha explained their theory.

“And it is just a theory at this stage,” she clarified when she had finished.

“Give it to me as a percentage.”

“Santosh is almost certain.”

“Shall we say ninety percent?”

“We could.”

“So, you’re ninety percent certain that some kind of war has broken out over an organ-harvesting operation. That about sums it up?”

“It does.”

“Do we know who’s involved?”

Nisha blew out her cheeks. “Well, now it gets really interesting. As you know, Ram Chopra and Mohan Jaswal are at war anyway — a political war, I should add. Chopra’s name is connected to the house in Greater Kailash where the bodies were found, and we think he’s been doing deals with a medical corporation called Surgiquip, run by Samir Patel — the recently deceased Samir Patel. Somewhere in the mix we have an insurance company called ResQ — a company run by Jai Thakkar, a friend of Jaswal’s, who’s fallen out with Chopra.”

Jack cleared his throat. “You realize you’re going to have to run this past me again when I haven’t just stepped off a plane.”

Nisha laughed. “Yeah, I understand. Okay, look, the short version is that all the signs point to Chopra, but Santosh feels it’s a bit too convenient.”

“Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one.”

“Tell that to him.”

“Either way, it sounds like there’s a mountain of political dog shit we need to avoiding stepping in. How is the police investigation proceeding?”

She shrugged. “At the moment it feels as though the police couldn’t care less. As you know, the general feeling is that Sharma is running things in a way that benefits Chopra. And if Chopra is involved in the organ-harvesting scheme...”

“If they’re fighting we could just leave them to it. Let them all kill each other and let God sort it out.”

Nisha gave him a sideways look. “Do we want to do that?”

Jack chuckled. “Tempting though it is, no, Nisha, I suppose not.”

Chapter 62

The morgue of the Delhi Memorial Hospital was like most other morgues in the city: understaffed and overstuffed.

Located in the bowels of the hospital, two-thirds of its area consisted of a refrigerated section that contained individual drawers kept at a constant temperature of four degrees Celsius, while the remaining third was made up of a stark autopsy room tiled entirely in white, with two stainless steel operating tables in the center. A scale for weighing body parts hung from the ceiling over each table, much like a butcher’s shop, in addition to a trolley that held Stryker saws for ripping bone, suturing materials, knives, and scalpels.

A hosepipe fitted with a washing nozzle was at hand to sluice blood and tissue down the drain and into the septic tank. Unfortunately it wasn’t used often enough. There was always a long queue of gurneys waiting with bodies that needed to be autopsied or refrigerated.

Patel’s mutilated body was wheeled into the morgue along with another gurney. Patel’s body was transferred to a surgical table, waiting to be dissected like a laboratory rat. The autopsy technician placed a block of wood under the corpse’s shoulders, making it look as though it was sitting. He then made an incision from the top of one ear to the top of the other and pulled the skin from the top and middle of the head down over the face. Patel’s face was now grotesquely inside out. The technician used the Stryker saw to cut the skull and expose the brain for tissue sampling and weighing.

In the meantime, the second body was uncovered and placed on the nearby surgical table. The autopsy technician took a quick look. He knew who it was. He had received a call from Ibrahim about him. Whenever Ibrahim needed to eliminate someone without having the headache of body disposal, he would send the case to him.

“I don’t have time for this one right now,” he said, putting on a casual face. “Put him in the refrigerator and I’ll deal with him later.”

The assistants wheeled Santosh Wagh into the refrigeration chamber, opened one of the refrigeration drawers, placed him inside it, and slammed the drawer shut.

Chapter 63

They were in the Private Delhi conference room.

“Where is he?” asked Jack.

Nisha tried Santosh’s cell phone once again. A message indicated that the phone was either switched off or outside the coverage area.

“What did he go out for?” asked Jack.

“He had several meetings lined up,” replied Nisha. “One was with Thakkar, the CEO of ResQ. He also had a meeting with someone called Iqbal Ibrahim near Jama Masjid.”

“I have some bad news,” said Neel.

“What?” asked Nisha.

“I tried to find the IP address of the person calling himself Dr. O. S. Rangoon,” said Neel.

“Wouldn’t he have been using a proxy server?” asked Nisha.

“Exactly,” replied Neel. “He was using a proxy server to hide his IP address from the administrators of the systems that he was posting on. But all individuals who hide behind proxy servers always leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs. I tried following the breadcrumbs.”

“And?” asked Jack.

“Dr. O. S. Rangoon used a single proxy server to mask himself. I figured that if I could access the proxy server logs, I would be able to find his connection requests to the target server.”

“Go on,” said Nisha.

“The proxy server is located in Russia. Usually such companies would demand a court order to reveal their logs but the idiots had left their own server exposed and I was able to access their logs.”

“Excellent,” said Jack. “You have the source IP?”

Neel nodded. “It belongs to Iqbal Ibrahim, the man Santosh went to meet. Dr. O. S. Rangoon and Ibrahim are one and the same.”

“But the phone number Santosh asked us to trace — which turned out to be that of Ibrahim — was not the same as the number listed on the website by Dr. O. S. Rangoon,” argued Nisha.

“He’s obviously using two phone numbers,” said Neel.

“Is Santosh’s RFID chip working?” asked Jack. “I’m authorizing you to track it.”

All employees of the Private organization across the world were required to be fitted with a small locator chip embedded under the skin of the upper back. It enabled the Private team to locate them during emergencies. In order to prevent misuse, only Jack Morgan had the power to authorize tracking.

Neel logged into a laptop that generated an email to Jack. Jack clicked on the authorization link and entered his password.

“Can’t locate it,” said Neel after a minute. “He could be in a basement or a vault, preventing the signals from being picked up.”

“He took his spy glasses with him, Neel,” said Nisha. “Don’t those glasses have GSM? Can you track the signal?”

“No luck,” replied Neel after a minute. “He’s definitely in an area without signal.”

“Did the camera in his glasses send in any feed?” asked Nisha.

“Let me check,” replied Neel, quickly accessing the secure server of Private Delhi from his notebook.

Jack and Nisha hunched behind Neel to look at the video footage that had been sent in by the glasses to the server. The first ten minutes were uneventful. Santosh had simply stood, waiting for Ibrahim, near the Jama Masjid. The footage showed hundreds of worshipers emerging from within the mosque after prayers.

The footage soon focused on one particular man, removing his prayer cap as he walked toward the camera. “Mr. Iqbal Ibrahim? Could I have a few minutes of your time?” — words spoken by Santosh and recorded in the audio.

The words of Ibrahim had also been picked up: “Please don’t be formal, Mr. Wagh.” Ibrahim was smiling. Suddenly the camera jerked. The view seemed to oscillate all over the place until it settled on the blue sky above.

A few seconds later, Ibrahim’s voice could be heard again. “Put him in the van and give him a high dose of midazolam,” he said. Two burly men lifted Santosh and placed him inside a black van. “Inshallah, it should be sufficient to keep him asleep for four hours. Also, discard his broken cell phone.”

One of the men could be heard asking if he could keep the walking stick for himself.

Then Ibrahim’s voice: “He doesn’t need it. Dead men can’t walk.”

Nisha froze. Did that mean...?

“He can’t be dead,” said Neel.

“Why?” asked Nisha.

“Midazolam is a sedative,” said Neel. “Why sedate someone who is already dead?”

Nisha sighed with relief. “Let’s review the rest of the tape.”

The audio was punctuated by the sound of a van door being slammed shut. The next forty minutes were blank because a white sheet had been placed on top of Santosh, covering the glasses he was wearing. The audio contained traffic noise and honking.

The Private Delhi conference room remained silent as Jack, Nisha, and Neel watched the video intently. Then there was the sound of the van door being opened. The sheet was removed as a couple of orderlies peered over Santosh’s face. They only seemed interested in removing valuables from his person — watch, pen, wallet, shoes, and eyeglasses. The video blanked out as one of the orderlies pocketed the camera glasses. The moment he folded the glasses, the transmission had stopped.

“He could be anywhere,” said Neel. “That’s anywhere within a forty-minute radius of Jama Masjid. And that’s a lot!”

“Just play the last bit again,” said Nisha. “The orderlies who removed the stuff were wearing white shirts with a logo on the pocket. Can you zoom in on the shirt?”

Neel tried but it was of no use. The image was just a pixelated mess. “Let me try something else.” He left the conference room for his lab to have a go with SmartDeblur, a software program that could partially restore and enhance blurred images.

“Thank God you’re here, Jack,” said Nisha as they waited in the conference room. “I just hope Santosh is safe.”

“The man knows how to look after himself,” said Jack. “Stop worrying.” He was not very convincing.

“He obviously received a blow from behind,” said Nisha. “But that doesn’t explain why he remained motionless in the van. I’m praying he isn’t...” The word “dead” was still on her mind but she was unable to bring it to her lips. Neel’s observation about the midazolam had given her hope.

Neel came back a couple of minutes later. “I’ve successfully zoomed in on the shirt logo,” he said, handing Nisha a printout. “The logo says DMH.”

“Delhi Memorial Hospital. Let’s go,” said Nisha, running out.

Chapter 64

Santosh opened his eyes. He blinked a few times, struggling to see, but his world remained dark. What’s happened to me? Have I gone blind? Or am I dead?

His body was wracked with an involuntary tremor. He realized he was shivering. It was freezing cold. He tried moving his arms but his body seemed to be confined within a tightly restricted place.

He tried to wiggle his feet. He was able to but just for a few inches in either direction. His back felt frozen solid. It seemed to be resting on cold metal. He desperately wanted to curl up into a fetal position but there simply wasn’t any space to do that. The realization suddenly hit him: I’m in a morgue.

Santosh attempted to calculate how much time he could survive inside the refrigerated coffin. He remembered reading somewhere that body heat is lost twenty-five times faster in cold water than in cold air. Most morgues are kept at around four degrees Celsius. At that temperature in water, a person would survive around an hour. Theoretically, he had several hours left provided he remained conscious and kept some movement going.

He succeeded in lifting an arm but there was simply no way to bend it. There was a metal ceiling above him that was only a few inches above his nose. He touched it with the back of his hand. It was just as cold as the floor on which he lay. He touched his thigh with his hand. He was pretty certain he was naked even though the freezing temperature had reduced the sensation in his body. Then the panic attack set in.

He suddenly felt a hot flash in his toes. Then his fingers. To shut down the loss of heat from the extremities, his body was inducing vasoconstriction — a reflexive contraction of blood vessels. But the muscles required to induce vasoconstriction had failed. It was causing warm blood to rush from the core to his extremities.

Santosh tried screaming but couldn’t be sure whether any sound was emerging from within him at all. His body seemed to have slowed down to a point where no physical activity was possible. The sounds that did emerge were slurred, almost as though he were under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He felt dazed. Disoriented. Confused. The effects of hypothermia had begun to set in.

He tried getting his mind to remain focused. He knew that if the hypothermia became severe, it would eventually slow down his respiration and heart rate, making him lose consciousness before the onset of death.

He attempted to recall what had happened before he’d passed out. He had met Ibrahim and had then received a blow behind his head. They had obviously brought him here later. But why was he in a morgue? Had he been assumed dead? Or were they trying to kill him by freezing him? Which morgue was he in? Did Nisha or Neel know he was in trouble?

Santosh felt suffocated. It wasn’t claustrophobia — it was his lungs giving up. He felt himself slipping out of consciousness. He imagined he was back in the hospital after the car accident in which he had lost his wife and son. Then he was back inside the Tower of Silence, battling Assistant Commissioner of Police Rupesh Desai, with the vultures circling overhead. The scene quickly changed. Santosh imagined he was at an Alcoholics Anonomous meeting. The members had surrounded him and pinned him down to the floor. They were attempting to forcibly pour whisky down his throat.

Santosh sensed his pulse slowing as he slipped into an abyss of darkness.

Finally, there was no pulse at all.

Chapter 65

“Hello.”

Maya Gandhe stood at the school gates, her school bag slung over her shoulder, a copy of her essay in one hand and her prize, an iPad, in the other. Heena was late but let’s face it, Heena was always late and, on this occasion at least, Maya didn’t really care. Friends filed past her on their way to school buses or for lifts home, teachers inched past in their cars, and every single one of them gave her a wave and a smile.

This is what it’s like to be famous, thought Maya. Being new at school had been hard — she and her mother had only lived in Delhi for three months — but now it was as though everybody knew who she was; as though she were a friend to them all.

And that, decided Maya Gandhe, was a great feeling, especially when it was earned — a result of her essay proposing, or at least arguing in favor of, a fairer health care system for all. People didn’t know her name because she was good at sport or pretty or any of the normal, boring reasons. They knew her name because she’d used her brain.

Mom would be proud, she knew. Very proud. And Dad? Well, wasn’t that funny. It wasn’t as if she’d stopped thinking about Dad. More that the thought of him had temporarily changed. Instead of his absence being like a darkness, it was as though he was looking down on her.

Looking down on her and smiling. Proud.

And now Mr. Roy, the Principal Secretary, the very man who had commended her on her essay and presented her with her iPad, had drawn up in his Audi, the window purring down.

“Hello, Maya.”

He didn’t have a very nice face. It was as though the smile he wore didn’t quite fit, but even so, it was Amit Roy, and he was... well, he was important.

“Are you waiting for a lift?” he said brightly, like someone trying really hard to be friendly.

“My nanny’s coming.”

He looked around. The crowds had thinned out. They were now the only people at the school gates. “It doesn’t look like she’s here.”

“Oh, she’s always late,” shrugged Maya.

“Why don’t I give you a lift?”

“Oh...” faltered Maya, “I’m not allowed...”

“Of course. Of course not, Maya.” He smiled his awkward smile. “Very sensible indeed. But you see, that puts me in a very difficult position, because I can’t in all good conscience leave you standing here. And besides, I was rather hoping you could read me your essay.”

“But haven’t you read it?”

His smile faltered a little, and later she would remember that moment, and think it was the moment his mask slipped. But for the time being nothing could ruin her sunny mood, and in a blink his smile had returned. “Ah, but I’d like a personal reading from the author, especially one whose ideals are so close to my heart.”

And so it was flattery that compelled Maya to get into the passenger seat of the Audi. That and the assurance that they would encounter Heena on the way.

He drove, taking directions from Maya and talking at the same time. “Remind me of the title of your essay?” he said.

“‘Health Care, Fair and Square?’” she answered proudly.

“Exactly. I was impressed to read such an egalitarian treatise from such a young mind.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what egalitarian means. Or treatise,” she said.

“It means you have a very fair mind,” he explained. “It means you believe everybody should have equal rights, regardless of their status in society, young or old, rich or poor.”

“I do,” she said boldly.

“And you get that from your parents, do you?”

“Yes,” she said, and pictured them together, Mama and Papa, feeling a great rush of love for them that threatened to bring her to tears right there and then.

“They must be very proud. What a shame they couldn’t make the prizegiving. Perhaps they will be at home, will they?”

“Later on, my mom will get home. Not my dad.”

“I see.”

The car slowed. “Do you know,” said Roy, “I seem to be more familiar with this area than I thought. I could take a right turn here and get you home more quickly.”

Maya was nervous about the idea and was about to say so when she caught sight of Heena on the street and before Roy could stop her was lowering the window and calling out to her.

From the corner of her eye she caught sight of the expression on Roy’s face.

That mask slipping again.

Chapter 66

The Lieutenant Governor, Ram Chopra, was sweating ferociously on his treadmill, feeling every single cigar and glass of whisky. God, these workouts hurt.

He was watching TV at the same time. Carrot and Stick, and Ajoy Guha was warming up for a sensational disclosure. Referring to notes through wire-framed glasses, Guha wore a determined look, like that of a soldier prepared to die in battle.

The words “Viewer discretion is advised” scrolled across the foot of the screen.

Oh yes, thought Chopra. What’s all this then?

Guha cleared his throat and said, “We at DETV have always believed in the primacy of the truth, no matter how it may affect anyone. Today we bring you footage that we have accessed through a source that shall remain unnamed for reasons of security. The footage is explosive, and we have had to blur out and mute portions of it in order to play it on national television. The person shown in the video is Mr. Amit Roy, the Health Secretary. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a man responsible not only for our hospitals and hygiene but also for the welfare of families. What you are about to see will shock you, and indeed you should not only be shocked but also outraged. I for one am absolutely sickened by it.”

The studio and Guha’s blue jacket and red tie disappeared from view and a video of Roy sitting on a bed inside a small room appeared. He seemed to be ripping the clothes from a frightened little girl and forcing her to sit on his lap.

Chopra watched, and then switched off the TV. He stopped the treadmill, reached for his phone.

“Sharma,” he said a moment later, “were you watching Carrot and Stick?”

The police chief chuckled. “I was indeed.”

“I take it that Guha’s informant is you?”

“And I take it that the next call you make will be to Jaswal?”

“I’m glad you’re on my side, Sharma,” said Chopra.

Sharma laughed some more. “In the meantime, I’ll see to it that Roy is arrested, shall I?”

Chopra thought. “Yes, but wait an hour or so, would you?”

“And why would I want to do that?”

Chopra draped a towel around his shoulders, using a corner to wipe sweat from his brow. “Well, what would you do in Roy’s position?”

“Me?” said Sharma. “I’m no pedophile.”

Chopra sighed. “No, Sharma, I know you’re not, but just for a second try stepping outside your own rather limited mind and using something we like to call deduction, or imagination, if you prefer. What would you do if you were a pedophile who had just been exposed? If you were Amit Roy.”

“I’d kill myself.”

“Exactly. And it might just be more convenient for all concerned if he were to do exactly that. Let’s give him time to fall on his sword, shall we?”

“Consider it delayed,” said Sharma. “By the way, while you’re on the phone: Kumar.”

Chopra grinned. “The dear departed Kumar, may he rest in piss.”

Sharma sniggered. “The very same. You asked me to look into his interest in the Greater Kailash house, remember? Why he wanted the whole thing hushed up? Well, I’ve done as you asked, and it looks as though he may have been on the periphery of something going on at the hospitals.”

“He was the Minister for Health and Family Welfare. You’d expect him to be slap bang in the middle of everything going on at the hospitals.”

“Without spelling it out on an open line, I’m talking about something on the side — something with corpses as the end result. A certain donation enterprise, shall we say. You’re aware he didn’t really commit suicide, I take it?”

“It’s the worst-kept secret in the city. I’m told that social media is having a field day with the deaths of Kumar and Patel. All kinds of conspiracy theories. They were lovers, is the latest one.”

“Naturally,” growled Sharma. “But even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, and it seems that Kumar and Patel may have had a financial relationship. Now, of course, I’d be willing to pursue this on the off chance that it leads right to the door of Jaswal, but I have a feeling that you, too, had certain business dealings with Patel of Surgiquip.”

Chopra slumped on the bars of his treadmill. Why the fuck is it these things always come to haunt you? “I may have had, yes,” he hissed, without wanting to say more on the phone. “What of it?”

“Well, your name can be linked to the house at Greater Kailash. You can be connected to Patel. You don’t want to find yourself ending up as collateral damage if and when the details of their little side business come out, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“So we can’t just start making arrests. You see what I mean?”

“I see what you mean. And thank you for your counsel, Commissioner.”

“It’s my pleasure. And going forward?”

Chopra draped the towel over his head and stepped off the treadmill. “Going forward, I plan to make life hard for Jaswal. And as far as you’re concerned, if you could continue with — discreet — investigations into what the fuck our friends with scalpels are up to, that would be very much appreciated too.”

He ended the call. Collected himself. Thanked God again that Sharma was on his side.

Then dialed Jaswal.

“What do you want?” came the reply, loaded with enough venom to make Chopra’s next question redundant.

“I was just wondering if you’d seen Carrot and Stick this evening?”

“What do you want, Chopra?” came the even more bile-filled reply.

“Well, given that you appointed a pedophile as Health Secretary, what I want is for you to tender your resignation immediately.”

Chapter 67

“What a lovely apartment,” said Roy, stepping inside. Maya skipped ahead happily; the childminder, Heena — a dried-up, middle-aged shrew if ever he’d seen one — was fixing him with the latest in a series of disapproving looks as she moved to switch on the radio and start making tea.

I’m going to have to do something about that bitch.

“Well, thank you very much for seeing us home, Mr. Roy,” she was saying, trying to get rid of him, dismiss him as if he was the hired help. “I’m sure we needn’t take up any more of your valuable time.”

“Oh, there’s no rush,” he said to her. “I’m very keen to hear our little social healer read me her essay.”

“Oh, I’m sure that can be arranged at another time, Mr. Roy,” said the middle-aged shrew, adding pointedly, “when her mother, an ex-police officer, is present.”

His phone was ringing. A text message arrived. And then another one. He pulled the handset from his trouser pocket and stared at the screen, blanching. “You’re on the news,” said one text. He dismissed an incoming call, but another one came. Another text message. This one said, “Die, pedo.” Another that said, “You better run.”

They know, he thought. The whole world knows.

And it wasn’t despondency or shame he felt, but once again a kind of exaltation. He knew now that he would need the sleeping pills he’d kept for an occasion such as this, because there was no way he could live in a society that despised his kind. But even so, he greeted the thought of his death, not with fear or resignation, but with a serenity. His suicide would not be a passing so much as an ascendancy. He would rise. His tormented soul would finally be at peace.

His being filled with joy at the thought, he failed to notice what was happening in the apartment. The news was on the radio, the lead item was the very public disgrace of Amit Roy, and the first he knew of it was Heena shrieking, “Maya, get out of here now!”

Roy came back to himself. He saw Maya come flying from her bedroom into the front room, a worried look on her face. “Heena, what’s wrong?”

“We’ve got to get out of here — he’s a monster.”

“Wait,” he said, rounding on Heena. “There’s been a terrible mistake.”

“You can tell that to the police. Maya, come over here, sweetheart, stay with me.”

“No,” said Roy. He advanced on Heena, who pulled Maya to her, placing herself between Maya and Roy as he moved toward them.

“You stay away from me,” she warned.

But her voice shook and she was stepping backward, going into the kitchen.

“I can explain,” said Roy, “really I can. You don’t need to be afraid, either of you.”

He snatched a knife from the knife block. Flipped it to hold overhand.

“Get away,” screeched Heena, and she too tried to reach for a weapon, grabbing blindly for something, anything, from the counter, protecting Maya to the last, keeping herself between the man and his prey.

Even when Roy buried the knife in her chest.

Her mouth dropped open. Roy pulled the knife free with a wrench and then stabbed again, pitilessly, enjoying the pain and defeat in his victim’s eyes, her lungs filling with blood, her eyeballs rolling back.

“Don’t worry, Maya,” he called over the loud gurgling sound Heena made as he stabbed her a third time — feeling blood drizzle his face, Heena dropping to her knees before him. “Don’t worry, my darling.”

Chapter 68

The audio of Guha’s Carrot and Stick program was played on radio stations belonging to DETV. Nisha heard it in Neel’s Toyota as they rushed toward Delhi Memorial Hospital to find Santosh.

“Is everything all right?” asked Neel.

“No...” said Nisha distantly, thinking. “It’s just that Roy was supposed to have been in Maya’s school earlier today, awarding a prize for the essay competition.”

“I’m sure she’ll be okay,” said Neel.

“Can’t hurt to be sure,” said Jack.

She checked her watch. Maya should have reached home by now. But when she called there was no answer. She tried Heena’s cell phone, then Maya’s. Neither answered.

She told herself it was nothing. A coincidence.

Ten minutes later they screeched to a halt in front of the Delhi Memorial Hospital. Jack and Neel rushed inside, making a beeline for the morgue while Nisha clambered into the driver’s seat to park the car.

She steered one-handed, trying Heena’s and Maya’s numbers.

She needed to know her little girl was safe.

Chapter 69

Jack and Neel bypassed the elevators and took the stairs to the morgue in the hospital basement. The autopsy room and the refrigeration chamber were lined with gurneys, on each of them a covered body.

Jack held his kerchief to his nose as the stench hit him but his experience with corpses made Neel oblivious, and he began drawing down sheets to see the bodies beneath, moving quickly from one to the other until an orderly came running over. “Hey! Who are you?” he demanded. “You’re not allowed in here.”

Jack turned to him. “Does a thousand rupees change your mind?”

The attendant looked wily. “It might.”

“Good.” Jack reached for his wallet. “Then how about I give you a thousand now and another thousand when we leave just to make sure we’re given the executive treatment. And if you wouldn’t mind keeping anything you see to yourself, that would do nicely too.”

With a nod the assistant pocketed the cash and stepped aside.

In the meantime, Neel had finished checking the gurneys. “He’s not here.”

“Must be in the refrigeration chamber,” said Jack, motioning Neel to follow him through a door leading to the freezing units. One by one they tried the drawers, until they found what they were looking for.

Chapter 70

With no answer from Heena or Maya, Nisha abandoned plans to park the Toyota and instead pointed it toward Vasant Vihar and home. Her heart was racing wildly, her hands clammy. Would such a situation have occurred if Maya’s father were alive? He was the one who had always taken care of Maya whenever Nisha would be late.

Nisha cursed herself for not being around for her poor baby. She narrowly missed a pedestrian who was crossing the street without bothering to look left or right, and slammed her hand on the horn to let him know he was a prick. She pressed her foot on the gas and broke two red signals along the way.

“I feel so lonely. You’re always working. But at least when you were late, it was Dad who would tuck me into bed. Now there’s only Heena in the house. The apartment feels so cold and empty.”

But then again, wasn’t she overreacting? Forming worst-case scenarios when she had no reason to be so fearful? Roy might be a predatory pedophile, but he wouldn’t be the first and he certainly wouldn’t be the last to visit a school. The simple fact of him presenting a prize at Maya’s school meant nothing.

And yet Nisha couldn’t lose the nagging feeling that something was wrong, something was seriously wrong. Why weren’t they answering their phones? And if she was overreacting? Well, she’d laugh about it later. Call it motherly concern. What were a few red traffic lights when you were worried for the most important person in your life?

The Toyota tires complained as she pulled into the parking area in front of her block. Dark now, most of the apartment lights were on but not hers. Both units on either side of her ground-floor apartment were lit up. Hers was dark.

Heart hammering, telling herself that maybe Heena had taken Maya out for an ice cream, maybe the two of them were paying a friend a visit — still desperate to be worrying unnecessarily — Nisha crashed out of the car, leaving the driver’s door open as she fumbled with her keys and almost collided with her own front door.

It was open. On contact it creaked slowly inward and maybe it was a smell, maybe it was just gut instinct, a mother’s instinct, but she knew something was wrong, and never in her life had she wished so much for a gun in her hand.

“Hello? Heena? Maya? You in there?”

The hallway yawned emptily at her. Beyond that, their living room. From there came a noise, a rustling, slithering sound, followed by something like a gasp or a hiccup.

“Hello?” she called, moving faster now, along the hallway and into the front room, where training and instinct made her crouch to present a smaller target.

The lights in the room were off. She noticed a lamp lying on its side on the floor, signs of a struggle that made her want to cry out with anguish. From the kitchen doorway was a faint glow of light within.

And then she saw what lay on the kitchen floor. She saw the blood. She heard the gurgling sound that Heena made.

In a second she was over to her, kneeling down, fumbling for her phone, trying to do so many things at once. Check the pulse. Oh God, so weak. Evaluate the injuries. Three, maybe more, stab wounds. On the floor nearby was Nisha’s own bread knife, gleaming with Heena’s blood. Stem the blood. Call an ambulance. Check that whoever did this — Roy — was no longer in the apartment. And most of all, find Maya.

Blood bubbled at Heena’s mouth. Her eyes rolled and went in and out of focus as she struggled to stay conscious. One clawed hand reached to Nisha.

“He took her. The beast took her,” she managed.

“Roy? Roy took her?”

Heena nodded weakly. “Go get her, Nisha,” she breathed. “Go and save your little angel.”

“Stay with me, Heena,” urged Nisha. “Stay with me.” She had her phone to her ear, calmly giving instructions to the emergency services. But it was too late. Heena’s hand that held her jacket relaxed and splashed into a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. Her eyelids fluttered then closed. And when Nisha checked her pulse, there was none.

Chapter 71

Nisha sat on the kitchen floor, head swimming, momentarily stunned into inaction. For perhaps twenty seconds she wondered if she was up to this task — if life had finally given her a challenge she could not meet.

And then with a curse she shook the thought out of her head. She stood up. Her head was clear. Her only priority was to kill the bastard who had abducted her daughter and get her baby back. At that moment Nisha was the embodiment of Shakti — female power.

She scrolled to the browser of her phone, Google-searched “Amit Roy, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare,” and clicked the link for the ministry. Once it had loaded, she clicked on the “Contact Us” link. On that page were the email IDs and phone numbers of the senior officials of the ministry.

Roy’s name was the first one on that page. It was followed by an email ID, office phone number, and residential phone number. She copy-pasted the residential phone number into a reverse lookup website and waited impatiently for the result to pop up.

And she had it. New Moti Bagh. She looked at the map on her phone. Sixteen minutes to get there at this time. In the distance she could hear the sound of sirens and she knew that by rights she should remain behind for the ambulance but she couldn’t. Time was all that mattered now. She dashed to the bedroom, reached to the back of her bedside table, and found her old .38 police special. She clipped it to her belt as she scrambled outside, back into the Toyota, and a moment later she was pulling out into traffic.

“I’m coming, baby,” she said. “I’m coming.”

Chapter 72

Nisha drove the car recklessly as she crossed Rao Tula Ram Marg on her way to Moti Bagh. She would have preferred to take the shorter route via Hare Krishna Mehto Marg but roadworks blocked the way. She cursed her luck and followed the longer route.

I’ll kill him if he’s touched her. So help me.

A cab in front of her refused to yield in spite of her repeated attempts. Nisha switched the headlights on full beam, jammed her hand on the horn, and overtook it, avoiding grazing it with just a couple of millimeters to spare. The man in the car shouted obscenities at her. He tried to chase her but was unable to keep up.

She wondered whether she should call Jack or Neel but decided against it. Santosh’s death was a body blow to everyone. She was on her own.

Like a tigress protecting her cub.

Chapter 73

Jack looked at the corpse.

It was Santosh.

He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Santosh’s knees were slightly lifted off the ground and his arms were bent at the elbows. He had obviously been attempting to adopt the fetal position in order to fight the bitter cold as he died.

Beside him, Neel was staring at his dead boss, a vacant expression on his face.

“Hey, bud, you okay?” said Jack, and put his hand to the other man’s upper arm.

It was as though the contact spurred Neel into action. “Help me,” he said.

“Help you what?”

“Get the body out. Please, quick — time is of the essence.”

They maneuvered the corpse onto a gurney and in the next instant were wheeling it out of the morgue.

“What are we doing, Neel?” Jack asked as they went at full speed to the elevator.

“Follow my lead,” said Neel. “I’ll explain when we get there.”

They loaded the trolley into the elevator and Neel pressed for the fifth floor — the Intensive Care Unit. When the doors opened they were greeted by a doctor about to step into the elevator.

“What’s going on?” he demanded, eyes flitting from the two men to the corpse on the gurney. “Where do you think you’re going with this body?”

“He’s not dead,” said Neel.

“He looks dead to me.”

“He’s not. His arms are slightly bent at the elbows,” urged Neel. “Just try straightening his arms.”

The doctor looked from Neel to Santosh, took hold of a hand, and tried to straighten the arm. It bounced back a few inches.

“You see?” said Neel. “Dead muscles cannot contract. He has severe hypothermia but he’s not dead.”

The doctor was nodding his agreement. “Okay, right, we need to take him to an ordinary room,” he said. “Intensive Care is kept freezing cold to prevent infections. We need to crank up the temperature of the room.

“Nurse!” he called. “Let’s put him in 1016 and get me an electric blanket. We’ll need heat packs for his abdomen and groin.” They wheeled Santosh toward the designated room. Neel and Jack followed, disregarding the rules that prevented visitors — no way in hell they were going to leave Santosh now.

“What the fuck’s going on, Neel?” whispered Jack. “Santosh has no pulse.”

“He’s gone into forced hibernation,” explained Neel. The doors of the treatment room swished shut behind them. “There was limited oxygen inside the refrigeration unit. The combination of freezing temperatures and low oxygen resulted in suspended animation — a sudden halting of chemical reactions.”

They watched, feeling suddenly useless as nurses covered Santosh, cranked up the central heating of the room, and slipped an oxygen mask over his face. Hot-water bottles were placed under his blanket and heart and blood pressure monitoring equipment was hooked up.

“There are plenty of examples of humans who appeared frozen to death,” said Neel, to reassure himself as much as Jack. “They had no heartbeat and were clinically dead but they were successfully revived after spending hours without a pulse in extremely cold conditions.”

Chapter 74

Amit Roy passed through the gates of his house, glanced in his rearview, and saw them slide shut behind him. The Audi came to a stop haphazardly on the gravel in front of the house, and for a moment he simply sat there, panting, trying to process the sudden turn of events.

And the feeling — this feeling: giddy, dizzy, a great rush of profound internal energy. Having barely recovered from the unexpected euphoria of killing the old woman, he now had the little girl to look forward to, all the while basking in the knowledge that she, his last victim, would be his best; that he would ascend in such superlative circumstances.

His one problem was lack of time. It had been an hour or so since the broadcast. Sharma would no doubt be dispatching his men to execute a high-profile arrest, complete with news footage as he was led in cuffs to the squad car. His gates would keep the press at bay for the time being, but they wouldn’t deter cops with a warrant.

Meantime he emerged from his reverie with the realization that his phone was still ringing. Had it ever stopped? Looking at the screen: no. There were twenty-five missed calls. God knew how many text messages.

“Well, fuck you!” he cried, then stepped into the chill night and slammed his phone to the gravel, stamping on it again and again. “Fuck you!” he screamed at the sky, grinding the phone under his shoe, alive with the thrill of his emancipation. “Fuck you, all of you, every single one of you!” he bellowed, his voice cracking with the effort.

And then he went to open the trunk.

Inside cowered Maya Gandhe. Having killed the interfering childminder, he had grabbed the girl and carried her kicking and screaming out to his car, thrown her in the trunk, not caring if the Gandhes’ neighbors saw what was happening. It hardly mattered now, and though she’d mewled and thumped at the trunk lid all the way home, as with his cell phone he’d simply tuned out the noise.

Now she screamed again, in shock and fear, this time at the deranged apparition looming over her, this terrifying man who responded to her cries not with reassurance or even anger, but by joining her, so that for a moment they both yelled into the night until the sheer strangeness of the situation tipped her over into silence.

Now he reached in and yanked her bodily from the trunk, a demented strength to him as he manhandled her into the house, leaving the Audi on the gravel drive, its engine still running.

In the kitchen he bundled her to the floor and she screamed with new fear and pain as he reached into a kitchen drawer for a knife and a roll of tape. From his inside jacket pocket he took her essay.

“You’re going to read to me now,” he said, red-faced and gasping for breath. “You’re going to read to me, do you hear?”

And despite everything, some fast-receding chink of light in Maya hoped this was all he wanted: just for her to read.

But now he was backing her into the front room. His eyes were wide and foam flecked his mouth. Indicating a chair with the knife, he made her sit and then began to tape her to it.

“Please, please, don’t hurt me,” she pleaded. “Please, please let me go back home now.”

“No... no, I can’t do that,” he told her, spraying her with saliva. “You’re staying here with me; we’re both going up together. We’ll ascend together in union, don’t you see?”

“Please, please — I’ll read my essay.”

“Fuck the essay!” he roared, and screwed it up and cast it to the floor. The light inside of Maya died.

Now the monster stood. The low light in the room skimmed along the blade he held. He shrugged off his suit jacket and with his other hand reached to his belt buckle.

“Together,” he was saying. “Together.”

And then from behind him came a movement.

Maya saw it. “Mama,” she called, but it wasn’t Nisha. And as Roy swiveled to see what was happening, the sight of the new arrival did nothing to reduce Maya’s terror. It was a man dressed all in black. Face covered by a balaclava. He carried something that Maya thought at first was another knife but then realized was a syringe. And he stepped forward and plunged it into Roy’s neck.

The Principal Secretary’s trousers fell to his ankles as he raised a hand to the side of his neck and then dropped to his knees.

The man in the balaclava stepped smartly away to allow Roy’s body to fold to the floor, before turning his gaze on Maya.

Maya was paralyzed with fear. “Please don’t hurt me,” she whimpered.

“No, no,” said the man, his tone gentle. He reached down and placed the syringe on the floor, held up his hands to show he was no longer armed. “I won’t hurt you, I promise. Is this...?” He reached for her essay, the screwed-up bits of paper belonging to another life now. “Is this yours?”

She nodded furiously.

He looked at the title page. “‘Health Care, Fair and Square?’” he read. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was putting on some kind of voice, as though he needed to clear his throat. “You wrote this?”

Again she nodded.

“There is hope, then,” he said. “A hope that lies with the young. Do you mind if I take it?”

She shook her head.

“Thank you.” He pushed the essay into his back pocket. “I look forward to reading it. I have a feeling I will like it. Now, I’m afraid I’m going to have to move you to another room in order that you don’t witness any more unpleasantness. I will let you go afterward, I promise. Trust me.”

Chapter 75

Lying on his front, Roy regained consciousness. The first thing he saw when he raised his head was that the girl was gone. Her seat was empty. Bits of severed tape were curled on the floor. He registered that his shirt had been taken and his trousers were around his ankles. At the same time he tried to raise himself from the floor then realized his hands were somehow pinned to the boards, outstretched on either side of him.

And then he saw the nails. Driven through both hands, deep into the wood. Blood ran from the backs of his hands and dripped to the floor. And almost as though it had been lying in wait ready to get him, the pain pounced and tore through his body, making him scream through bared teeth.

“Oh God,” he whimpered when the pain had died down. “Kumar, Patel, and now me. You’ve come for me.”

“Very astute of you. Yes, I have. I have come for you. You are my next, but by no means my last.”

“But why?”

“Really? You have to ask?”

“Kumar and Patel were in it up to their elbows, noses in the trough. But not me.”

The pain in his hands was white hot and searing, and yet he had the feeling it was merely an aperitif.

“How? Tell me how Kumar and Patel were corrupt?”

“You know!” screeched Roy. “You already know! Isn’t that why you killed them?”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Because Kumar helped fund Surgiquip and awarded them contracts in return for a backhander. He and Patel were in it together. Like I say, noses in the trough.”

“And ResQ?”

“ResQ and Surgiquip are in bed together. But it’s them, not me. I had nothing to do with it.”

The intruder crouched. He placed something on the floor that when Roy twisted his head to look he saw was a field roll. Nimble fingers untied and spread open the fabric. Scalpels glittered beneath. Roy whimpered.

“You had nothing to do with what?” asked the man in black.

“You know.”

“Say it.”

“I’m in too much pain. I can’t think straight.”

“Say it.”

“Will you let me go if—”

“Say it.” The man in black placed the heel of his palm to where the nail pierced Roy’s right hand and applied pressure. The searing pain intensified.

“All right, all right, I’ll say it! Organ harvesting. Illegal transplants. Whatever you want to call it. Patients having their organs removed then sold on. You know that. You know that. But I promise you, I had nothing to do with it.”

“You had nothing to do with it, yet you knew it went on. You did nothing to stop it.”

“Nothing yet!’ squealed Roy. “I was biding my time. Change can only come from within.”

The man in black chuckled drily. “I can’t believe you’re honestly telling me you would have tried to change things.”

“I could have. I would have. Let me go and I’ll prove it. We’ll join forces.”

“Oh yes? Just as soon as you do something about this pesky child-abuse allegation, eh? I don’t think so. If not for that then for two other reasons: one, because they are greater in number and way, way more powerful than you could ever hope to be. And two — and given what I’ve just walked into, I think this is probably the most important — because you are a deviant more interested in serving the perverted pleasures of your own flesh than helping the city you are appointed to serve. Each man on my list deserves to die, Amit Roy, but none of them deserves to die more than you.”

Roy’s eyes were wide as a gloved hand reached to select a long-handled scalpel. The hand was out of sight and he heard the cutting before he felt the pain, the scalpel piercing the flesh of his back as the man in black diligently began to peel the skin away, exposing the scarlet, fatty tissue beneath.

The pain exploded in stars in front of his eyes. Pain so fierce and intense it was all-consuming, so white and blinding it was almost perfect. Then, as the man in black went to work on his upper thighs and Roy understood that his death — from blood loss, or bodily trauma, or whatever else his attacker had in store for him — was just moments away, he accepted that this celestial pain was in fact his ascendancy in action.

And so, as the man in black pulled off his balaclava so that Roy might recognize the face of his killer, he embraced his death and went to it willingly, knowing that ultimately, and agonizing though it was, the pain of his death was preferable to the pain of his life.

Chapter 76

Black wrought-iron gates at the entrance to Roy’s home brought Nisha to a skidding halt, and she scrambled out of the Toyota, looking for another way in.

Nothing. Just a keycode panel, intercom. Sensor.

Fuck it. She dived back into the Toyota and reversed twenty yards or so, offering up a silent apology to Neel as she revved the vehicle, making herself low in the driving seat, before jamming her boot on the accelerator.

The Toyota shot forward and hit the gate. The bonnet crumpled; the airbags deployed. She looked up from her low position in the driving seat, pawing the airbag out of her way to see that the gates were a twisted mess — not exactly open but wide enough apart for her to get through.

She squeezed through and ran along the approach road toward his driveway. Tasteful lights glowing from within the borders lit the way. On his drive she saw Roy’s car, engine running, doors open. Now the gun was in her hand as she hit the front door, found it open, dropped to one knee, and held the .38 two-handed.

“Roy, you in there?” she called. “Maya?”

To her left was the kitchen. Through that Nisha had sight of what looked like a front room and in there was a body.

A body and an awful lot of blood.

But an adult body.

Slowly she rose, keeping her center of gravity low and staying balanced as she took two quick but careful steps into the entrance hall. The gun barrel moved with the quick darting of her head as she covered her angles and checked blindspots.

“Maya!” she called, hearing the desperation in her own voice.

There came a noise. From her right.

“Mama, it’s me” — and Maya appeared from a side room, a tiny, shaking, frightened thing, but alive and unharmed.

“Oh my God, baby, are you all right?” Nisha rushed for her and gathered her up, tears of relief streaming down her cheeks.

“Yes, Mama, I’m all right. The good man came and saved me from the bad man.”

Instantly Nisha was alert again, gun up. “What good man? Where?”

“He’s in there.” Pointing back toward the room she’d just left.

“Stay there, honey, stay there,” said Nisha then hit the door, rolling into a study and coming up once again with the .38 in two hands. The window was open and in the distance she could see a man in black running back down along the drive toward the gates.

In a second she was out of the door, down the entrance hall, and out of the front door, scrunching on the gravel, finding the fleeing man in her sights as she took a wide-legged, two-handed stance and shouted, “Freeze! You in the black! Freeze or I’m putting you down!”

From behind, Maya screeched, “No, Mama, don’t hurt him!” and Nisha found herself with a split-second decision to make as the running man veered off the approach road and into the undergrowth: should she fire on the man who’d saved her daughter? Hurt him? Risk killing him, even?

Or let him go?

“Freeze!” she shouted again, uselessly. The moment was gone.

She had let the killer go.

Nisha lowered her gun, trying to tell herself the only thing that mattered was Maya, trying to convince herself that she hadn’t just allowed a serial killer to escape.

Chapter 77

The nurses assured Jack and Neel that it would take up to twenty-four hours before they would know whether Santosh would pull through.

Together, the two Private men left the treatment room, trudged out into a waiting area, and took a seat, reluctant to leave just yet: the quintessential American, complete with stubble and polo shirt open at the neck; the sharp-dressed young Indian man — side by side, each lost in his own thoughts.

Not for the first time Jack asked after Nisha. Where had she got to?

Neel shrugged. “Perhaps she’s still looking for us in the morgue.”

At the same time his eyes traveled to a TV mounted on the opposite wall. The news was showing. Live coverage of the sensational Roy revelations. In the foreground a journalist with a microphone delivered her report, evidently live from Roy’s home. As they watched, the reporter turned to indicate what looked like a scene of devastation behind.

“Oh my God,” said Neel. “That’s my car.”

Chapter 78

Yamuna Pushta was the embankment on both sides of the Yamuna river, stretching from the ITO Bridge up to the Salimgarh Fort. It was home to a string of slum colonies and clusters of shanties.

Iqbal Ibrahim, aka Dr. O. S. Rangoon, did not bother to get out of the van. All his meetings happened inside. It was his office. Instead, one of Ibrahim’s henchmen walked into the largest hut and informed the slumlord that his boss had arrived.

The slumlord was a shifty-eyed man with a permanent trickle of betel-nut juice at the corner of his mouth. He was master of all the expanse of tin roofs and blue tarpaulins that dotted the Yamuna banks and he ruled his kingdom with an iron fist. Rent had to be paid on the first of each month, failing which a dweller’s meager possessions would be confiscated. If rent remained unpaid after a week, the occupant would be thrown out along with his family. Desperate families would cry piteously as they were thrown out, ready to do almost anything in order to be allowed to stay.

The slumlord quickly gathered his papers and entered Ibrahim’s van. “Al-salaam alaykum,” he said, sitting down on one of the visitors’ chairs offered by Ibrahim, who was wearing a new green skullcap.

“Wa-alaykum al-salaam,” replied Ibrahim. “So, who are your tenants who haven’t paid their rent on time?”

“There are always a few,” replied the slumlord.

“Inshallah, we can clear up your dues efficiently,” said Ibrahim, winking.

At a safe distance, the man who had kept Ibrahim under surveillance for several weeks continued to make notes. It was becoming evident to him that Ibrahim was a resource worth recruiting.

The slumlord laughed, his betel-nut spittle splattering Ibrahim’s desk. “What is the exchange rate for a kidney these days?” he asked.

“Two livers,” replied Ibrahim matter-of-factly. “Or three hearts, or four hundred liters of blood. What do you have to offer?”

“I’ll show you, shall I?” grinned the slumlord.

He made a call. Five minutes later two of his men appeared, carrying a younger man slumped between them.

Chapter 79

The young man recovered consciousness from the blow that had knocked him out and realized he was lying on the bed that was part of Ibrahim’s mobile hospital. He had been arguing with the slumlord when one of the thugs surrounding him had delivered a knock to the back of his head. He had lost consciousness and crumpled to the floor. Now in front of him stood a stranger dressed in scrubs, surgical mask, and gloves.

“What have you done to me?” he whimpered.

“Nothing yet,” replied the masked doctor. “We just took some blood and ran a test to check your blood type. I have good news. You’re a match.”

“What does that mean?” asked the man.

“It means that we can now operate on you,” said Ibrahim, emerging from behind his desk, “remove one of your healthy kidneys, settle what you owe to your landlord, and, inshallah, still leave you with a tidy pile of cash — fifty thousand rupees — for the future.”

Fifty thousand rupees. This to a poor man who toiled at a construction site. Work had dried up owing to bad weather and he could no longer pay rent for the mud-and-tin shack he occupied along with his wife and three children.

Fifty thousand rupees.

“Will I live?” he asked.

“Sure,” replied the doctor. “I’ll give you a shot to knock you out. When you wake up it’ll all be over. Just remember that if you tell anyone what happened to you, we’ll find you and we’ll kill you. Is that clear?”

The patient swallowed, eyes swiveling in fear.

“Stop worrying,” insisted the surgeon. “I’ve done this many times. If anyone does an MRI later, they will find that the surgery has been done professionally and that the kidney has been removed with precision.”

The surgeon didn’t bother to reveal that all his surgeries had been carried out without a medical license. He had flunked his final year at med school and was only qualified to perform autopsies. He worked part-time for Ibrahim and spent the rest of his time disposing of corpses at Delhi Memorial Hospital.

The patient nodded. He looked at the bodyguard who was standing at the door of the van. If he tried to get up and run, he knew he would be shot. He had never seen fifty thousand rupees in his entire life. One kidney was a small price to pay for a large sum.

Ibrahim could see the cogs turning inside the man’s head. He knew that the seven hundred and fifty dollars he paid the man would be recovered twenty times over by the time he sold it off. This chap’s kidney was of a rare blood type, and there was a specific patient on the United Network for Organ Sharing database who had been told he would have to wait eight years for a matching kidney owing to his rare blood type. He would pay a handsome price to get it from Ibrahim.

“Will it hurt, sir?” asked the patient.

“Not during surgery,” replied the surgeon. “You’ll be knocked out. But when you regain consciousness, you will have pain in your lower abdomen. That will take some time to go but we will give you painkillers to manage it. We will also transfer you to a guesthouse on the outskirts of Delhi so that you can stay there for a few days in order to recover.”

Chapter 80

“I want to see my daughter now, please,” said Nisha, steel in her voice. “You’ve had more than enough time to interview her.”

Two hours, to be precise. Sharma’s assistant, Nanda, had spent the time reviewing events with Nisha, increasingly frustrated at what he claimed was her lack of cooperation. The truth was, she was hiding nothing. But that didn’t stop the insinuations, the suspicions.

“Now,” she said, slamming a fist to the interview-room table. “I want to see her now.”

Nanda stared at her awhile, just to show her who was boss, that he wouldn’t be ordered around by her. Then with a nod to the duty officer he let himself out of the interview suite and Nisha settled down to wait.

After twenty minutes or so — a decent enough show-her-who’s-boss interval — the door opened once more, this time to admit Maya, followed by Sharma.

The interview-suite chair scraped as Nisha stood and rushed around the table, kneeling to take Maya in her arms. “Sweetie, I’m sorry. There was nothing I could do about that. Were they nice? Were they nice to you?”

“The lady looking after me was nice,” said Maya, then shot a baleful look at Sharma.

“I was doing my job, Mrs. Gandhe,” said Sharma. “Take a seat, would you? My colleague Nanda told me you’ve been about as much use as she has: ‘He wore a mask. He was disguising his voice.’”

“Then what else do you expect? What else can we tell you?”

They were all sitting now, Sharma huge on the opposite side of the table, filling the room with the stink of smoke, sweating with agitation and last night’s whisky. “What I want to know is why when Mommy was pointing her gun at the bad man she didn’t pull the trigger.”

“He wasn’t a bad man,” blurted Maya suddenly. “He was a good man.”

Sharma’s eyebrows shot up. “A good man, eh? Do you want to know what he did to Mr. Kumar, or Mr. Patel, or Mr. Roy? Shall I tell you?”

“Commissioner!” warned Nisha, beginning to rise from her seat.

“Sit down,” warned Sharma.

“He was about to hurt me,” said Maya. Her eyes shone with tears and her voice shook. “He was about to do really, really horrible things to me. I know the kind of things. Things you hear about on the news when children go missing and their bodies are found. Things like that. And the man in black stopped him, and I don’t care if he killed him because it serves the bad man right. It serves him right for what he was going to do to me and what he’s done to other children.”

Sharma sat back. His eyes were hooded. To Nisha he said, “Quite a chip off the old block, isn’t she?”

“She’s been through a lot.”

“Is that why you didn’t take him down? You think he’s a good man, do you?”

Nisha leaned forward. “Listen. I used to be a cop, just the same as you. And like you I don’t discriminate. A killer is a killer.”

“Even if he’s a hit man with a heart of gold?”

“That’s what you think this guy is, do you?”

“What about you? What do you think?”

She sighed and threw up her hands. “Oh, come on! This is getting us nowhere, Commissioner. We’ve told you everything we know. If you don’t plan to charge us with anything, then I’ll thank you to let us go. My daughter has been through a terrible ordeal.”

“Charge you? What did you think I might charge you with?”

“I don’t know. You can think of something. Criminal damage on Roy’s gates...”

Sharma nodded. “Yes. Maybe that. Or maybe aiding and abetting.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, Commissioner. You’re reaching. This is ridiculous.”

Now it was his turn to sit forward. “Who’s employing Private, Mrs. Gandhe? It wouldn’t be Mohan Jaswal, by any chance, would it? You know full well that I report to Ram Chopra and that Ram Chopra and Mohan Jaswal aren’t exactly the best of pals.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“I’d watch yourselves if I were you. That’s all it is. You tell that to your friends at Private. You tell them that I think you, Mrs. Gandhe, deliberately allowed a serial killer to escape. You tell them that the next victim’s blood is on your hands.”

Moments later, Nisha and Maya emerged into reception, where Jack and Neel were waiting.

“Santosh?” she said.

Jack grimaced, looking tired. “Well, first we hoped he was alive, and then we thought he was dead, and then we hoped he might come alive again, and now we’re not sure. I think that’s about the size of it.”

Nisha put her hands over Maya’s ears. “For fuck’s sake, is he alive or is he dead?”

“What Jack’s saying is right,” Neel assured her. “The prognosis is good. We’re hopeful he’ll make it.”

“Thank God,” she said, then shot an apologetic look at them both, particularly Neel. “I’m sorry about your car,” she said.

“Don’t worry about the car, we’ll cover the car,” said Jack. “Also, Nisha, I’ll put you and Maya up in the Oberoi until you feel comfortable moving back into your own home and...” he held out his hands, “there’s no rush, no rush at all. You take your time.”

Privately, Nisha wondered if she and Maya would ever be able to move back into the apartment.

“In the meantime, I think we have another theory to work on,” she said.

“Let’s hear it,” said Jack.

Nisha glanced back to where the desk sergeant sat behind glass, engrossed on the phone. “I don’t think this is some kind of organized-crime war we’re talking about. I don’t think our guy is a hit man; I think he’s a vigilante.”