“Please,” he pleads. “I speak to one guy, only by phone. And I don’t have his name.”
“Is his number in here?” Hala brandishes the phone. Hassan shakes his head.
“We only got handsets we could throw away.”
Annoyed with the lack of progress, Hala fishes in the pockets of her combat pants and produces a bunch of plastic cable ties. Efficiently, coldly, without looking at him any further, she binds Hassan’s hands together. Then she does the same to his feet. Once that’s done, she takes out a knife and makes a big show of testing the sharpness of the blade. Sweating, Hassan starts to pant and beg, fearing that he’s about to be executed.
“I have an address,” he bleats at last. “That’s all. They sent me there to collect my uniform and ID, and the location of the school.”
“So, give me that address,” Hala commands.
Hassan dictates it to Hala. She looks it up on her satellite map, and only when she’s cross-referenced streets nearby with Hassan’s description and recollection does she accept it as correct.
“Who did you meet there?” I ask. “Who gave you the ID and uniform and stuff?”
“Nobody. The place was empty. Everything was ready and waiting, in a plain bag, right outside the entrance. I picked it up and left.”
Hala steps away, frowning, and I nod. We both feel like we’ve gotten all we can from Hassan. He relaxes slightly.
“Can I go home?” he asks.
“Sure, but you must be exhausted,” I tell him. “We’ll send someone to collect you.”
Tapping quickly, I send Riya an explanatory text message that includes a location pin drop to where we are now. Within a minute, my phone rings.
“What the hell are you doing?” Riya asks by way of greeting. “How did you find this guy?”
“We can catch up later,” I say, ignoring her tone, which is not remotely happy. “Right now, I need to know how long it will be before you can get a police car over here to pick him up?”
She disappears for a moment and I can hear sounds of conferring in the background, instructions called out in Hindi.
“Ten minutes,” she says, and I hang up the call. Hala stares Hassan down.
“If you say one word to the police about us, or this meeting—I will go after your son and daughter. Understand?”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Good. I’m sorry,” she says.
“For what?” he asks.
She leans down and wrenches his twisted ankle so it’s properly sprained. He yells in pain.
“For that. It’s only in case you get free of the ties.”
With a final tug to test the plastic binding his limbs, Hala nods at me and we hurry out of the shack and into the streets beyond, where we disappear into the crowded lanes of the slums, just as the sounds of police sirens begin to approach.
9
OUR NEXT FOCUS IS TO get to the address that Hassan spilled. It’s in the south of the city, some distance from here, and it’s rush hour. But we need to move now. There’s a good chance that the police may interrogate that same address out of Hassan and then we’ll be stuck in a race with the cops to look for evidence.
Hala takes the urgency seriously, pushing her motorbike deeper into the traffic, weaving her way past cars, rickshaws, and buses, and across one busy junction after another. On the back of the bike, I hang on tightly to Hala’s waist while I send Caitlin the address so she can meet us there.
“Christ, this is not an actual chase. You don’t have to drive like that,” I squawk as Hala turns hard and low to the ground. We skim in front of a gaudily painted truck, so close that I can feel a whoosh of air touch my arms as we pass it. But I have a feeling my complaint is lost under the long protest of another truck’s horn. The sound fades fast as Hala weaves ahead. I lean into curves with her, trying to keep the bike stable.
The address Hassan provided takes us into an industrial area, an assortment of warehouses and storage facilities that is pretty quiet now that night is beginning to fall. Not that it seems as if much activity goes on here at any time. There are very few parked trucks or vans. Hardly any people. Streetlights are nonexistent.
“Coming toward you now.” Caitlin’s voice comes in on the comms.
I glance over my shoulder, where her headlight sweeps the street as it moves closer. Caitlin’s bike pulls up and rides alongside us. Just a few hundred feet ahead, I point to a squat blue warehouse that sits in a lot sealed off with chain-link fences. No company logos or names are visible. Security cameras sit on top of the fence posts. Big red signs warning of private security and alarms are posted everywhere. We ride around to the back and park up in a dark alleyway, out of sight of the road before we get off the motorcycles.
“Okay, so the fence we can manage, but what about the cameras?” I ask.
“You tell us,” Caitlin returns. “Are they hardwired?”
I scan them with my zoom lens. “Wireless.”
“So kill them,” Hala says.
I’ve already pulled my tablet out of my backpack and started working. I use my usual software to perform a passive sweep of the wireless environment. There’s a signal coming from inside the blue warehouse, and using a bit of code, I can
