February 20, 2001Joint Protocol Center, Wagah–Attari Border0200 Hours
The room had been built to deny meaning.
No flags. No framed fathers of the nation. No slogans lacquered onto walls. The kind of place where patriotism couldn't find a surface to stick to.
Just steel, fluorescent light, and a table that looked like it belonged in a morgue.
Four chairs sat around it, evenly spaced as if fairness could be engineered with inches. Two microphones were sealed inside transparent housings—tamper-proof, fire-proof, story-proof. And on the far wall, the one-way mirror rested like a cold eyelid. It wasn't there to conceal the truth.
It was there to supervise it.
I sat in the observation booth behind thick glass, my face swallowed by shadow. I could feel the edge of the world in the way the air was conditioned—too dry, too even, too clean. A place where human breath felt like contamination.
General Mahmood stood beside me, tall and silent, the muscles of his jaw working as if he were chewing down an invisible insult.
"They look like they want to vomit," he muttered.
On the monitor, two men occupied one side of the table: Sharma from India's Intelligence Bureau and Colonel Zaid from our side. Their shoulders were aligned like reluctant allies, but their eyes kept drifting away from one another, as if contact might burn.
Across from them sat the man everyone needed to be guilty.
Javed.
Thin, shaking in a way that didn't look performative. His hands were out in the open—protocol—palms up like a man asked to prove he was human.
I thought of Rawalpindi and Delhi watching this feed simultaneously. Two capitals sharing the same image, the same sound, the same lie—if it was a lie.
Across the border, I knew another booth existed at Attari. Another room like this one. Another set of shadows. Brajesh Mishra would be there, a watcher with a lawyer's mind and a strategist's patience.
The Subcontinent had never done this before: stare at the same evidence without first sharpening a knife.
Sharma spoke first.
His voice was low, almost tired—dangerous not because it was loud, but because it didn't waste anything.
"Tell us again," he said. "Who gave you the order?"
Javed's eyes flicked toward the mirror without understanding what it was. People always sensed being watched even when they didn't know how.
"The Major," Javed said, breath catching. "In Rawalpindi. He gave me the explosives. He said—"
He hesitated, as if listening for the next line.
"Stop the peace. Protect the Faith."
A confession that sounded like it had been written by someone who enjoyed hearing himself speak.
Colonel Zaid didn't look triumphant. He didn't even look angry.
He looked bored.
He rolled an unlit cigarette between his fingers—allowed only because fire had been banned from the room. No lighters, no matches. Even smoke had to be imaginary here.
"Javed," Zaid said softly, almost kindly. "Which Major?"
Javed blinked, and I saw it—the drift of a man trying to remember a face that never existed.
"He… he wore a uniform."
Zaid's eyes narrowed. "Name."
"I don't know."
"Unit?"
Javed swallowed. "He… he had a mustache."
Zaid's patience snapped like a wire.
"Everyone in Pindi has a mustache," he said. "You're not describing a Major. You're describing a costume."
Sharma didn't interrupt. He watched, letting the silence squeeze.
Zaid leaned forward. His voice cooled again, controlled. "Let's talk about money. We traced your hawala trail. It didn't come from a military fund. It came from a jeweler in Dubai."
I felt Mahmood shift beside me, a subtle movement that meant the word had landed.
Dubai.
Even the syllables felt like a door opening.
Sharma slid a file across the steel table.
He did it like a man placing a weapon down—carefully, deliberately, expecting someone to reach for it.
"We matched residue from the Wagah blast to the Delhi Metro device," he said. "It's not RDX from a military stockpile."
Mahmood's entire body held still. That particular stillness soldiers had when they heard something that might change history.
Sharma opened another page.
"It's commercial," he continued. "Industrial slurry. The type used in large-scale port construction. Harbor dredging."
The words didn't sound dramatic. They sounded mundane. And that was exactly what made them deadly.
Harbor dredging.
My mind snapped to the Gulf like a compass needle finding its north: contracts, ports, expansions, cranes that never slept, labor camps full of men who couldn't afford to go home. My memory surfaced a name I hadn't wanted to think about since the desert meeting.
Yousuf Al-Falasi.
I didn't say it out loud. Names carried weight in this business, and weight had consequences.
Mahmood stared at the screen as if he could will the truth to change shape.
Sharma leaned closer to Javed.
"You said you were ISI," Sharma murmured. "But ISI doesn't use Dubai harbor explosives. They use what we can't trace easily. And they don't hire amateurs who get caught before the dust settles."
Javed's lips parted. No answer came.
Sharma removed a photograph and laid it on the table.
Not a general. Not a militant. Not a martyr.
A boy.
Sun-browned, too young to look that tired, wearing the uniform of a construction camp. Eyes half-shut against a light that never forgave.
Javed's face changed in a single second. The practiced hardness cracked and something raw came through.
Sharma's voice softened—not with pity, but with precision.
"Your brother was arrested yesterday."
A lie. I heard it the way one hears a switch click into place.
"The police found contraband in his locker," Sharma continued. "He's looking at a long sentence. Unless…"
Javed's breath broke.
The room's clinical neutrality shattered, not in noise, but in the sudden presence of fear. Real fear. The kind that comes from being owned.
"They said they would kill him," Javed whispered. Then louder, like confession might resurrect the boy. "They said if I didn't do the drama, he would never come home."
His forehead hit the steel table. Once. Twice.
"They gave me the words!" he sobbed. "They told me to say ISI if I was caught. They told me to say Rawalpindi. They wanted the Indians to be angry. They wanted the border to close."
He looked up, eyes wet, pleading not for mercy but for the chance to undo what couldn't be undone.
"They said… they said this would be a spark."
A spark.
That was always how it began. A spark in a crowded place. A spark near a train. A spark near a border gate. And then men with microphones on television begging for war as if it were a cure.
I cut the audio feed.
The silence in the booth returned like a controlled substance—measured, rationed.
Mahmood didn't speak for a long moment. His eyes remained on the screen. His expression was not outrage. It was recognition.
"The Dubai nexus," he said finally, voice low. "They didn't just fund the riots. They manufactured the confession."
"They didn't want truth," I replied. "They wanted momentum."
Mahmood's jaw flexed again. "They wanted us to react."
"They wanted your pride," I said. "And his survival."
I could already see it: headlines, studio panels, retired generals, angry anchors, "unanswered questions," "hard decisions," "no choice but to respond." A machine that ran on grievance.
"They played two states like a cheap harmonium," I said. "Same tune. Different hands."
0300 Hours
Paperwork would come later. Paper was slow. Paper had politics.
I picked up the red phone and dialed without asking permission from the room.
"Prime Minister," I said, not waiting for his greeting. "The confession is a product. The explosives are commercial—harbor slurry. They held the boy's brother in the Gulf to buy his tongue."
There was a pause. I could hear him breathing. Not shaken—thinking.
Then Vajpayee spoke, voice quieter than his public self, stronger than his age.
"So the enemy is not in Islamabad," he said. "And he is not in Delhi."
"He is in boardrooms," I answered. "And he is terrified of our Bazaar."
Another pause. Somewhere, on television screens, men were already yelling. Somewhere, in drawing rooms, people were already choosing hatred because it was simpler than doubt.
"The hawks will call this cover-up," Vajpayee said. "They will say we staged the joint interrogation."
"Then we don't give them a report," I said. "We give them a target."
My gaze dropped to the file waiting on my desk—Suraksha Foundation, labor contracts, investment routes disguised as charity and influence.
"Excellency," I said, "it's time we stop being the Gulf's security guards and become their auditors."
On the other end, Vajpayee exhaled slowly, the sound of a man deciding to step on glass to avoid fire.
"Agreed," he said. "Let the Sanskriti Express continue. We will not be governed by manufactured tragedy."
I hung up and the room felt different—not warmer, not safer, but clearer.
The war was no longer on the border.
It was in permits. In tenders. In subcontractors. In visas issued to "consultants" who arrived with smiles and left behind smoke.
I turned to Mahmood.
"Get me files on every UAE-funded construction project in Pakistan," I said. "Every one. Especially anything tied to ports, dredging, roads—anything that touches industrial explosives."
Mahmood's gaze was still fixed on the screen. "And India?"
"They'll do it their way," I replied. "Quietly. We don't need theatrics. We need pressure."
I opened another folder, already marked, already waiting.
"Tell Suddle to review visas," I said. "Every 'advisor.' Every 'consultant.' Every man who walks in with Gulf money and walks out with our fires."
Mahmood finally looked at me. His voice carried something close to admiration, and something close to warning.
"You're turning this into an economic war."
"No," I said. "I'm turning it into an audit."
I glanced at the interrogation room again—the steel table, the four chairs, the mirror that watched both capitals at once.
"They can't beat armies," I said softly. "So they purchase accidents. They can't invade countries. So they buy men and rent their fear."
I stood.
"And I know how to balance ledgers."