Page 64 of Rising Tiger

“This is nothing to make fun of,” the man protested. “You promised me that if I helped you, you would protect us.”

Harvath looked at the ex-cop with a smile. “That is what you promised. You said that if—”

“I know what I said,” Vijay replied, checking his watch. “Give me another hundred dollars.”

Pulling the bills out of his pocket, Harvath peeled off another hundred and handed it to him. “I’m going to need a receipt for that. And from earlier.”

Vijay ignored him and handed the money to Pinaki. “Go home. Pack a suitcase for yourself and one for your mother. Then I want you to take an autorickshaw to the Jaipur Junction railway station. Go inside, get something to eat. When you have eaten, use a different exit and walk to the Radisson hotel. Then take a taxi to the Fairmont hotel. There will be an envelope with a keycard and a room number waiting for you at the front desk. Go to the room and stay there until I contact you. Do not tell anyone where you are. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Pinaki. “I understand.”

“Good,” said the ex-cop, as he closed the trunk. “Now hurry up. Get going.”

As they watched the man jog off, Harvath asked, “How are you going to get them into the Fairmont? It’s booked solid.”

“They’re taking your room and whoever it is that you’re working for is going to pay for it. It’s going to take me a day or two to figure out what to do with them. In the meantime, you and I are headed to Delhi.”

“And what about the name Kumar gave us? It looked to me like you recognized it.”

“I recognized it all right,” said Vijay.

“So you know him?”

“Yeah, I know him,” the man replied. “I’m the one who pushed him off the building.”

CHAPTER 34

NEWDELHI

Basheer Durrani was odd by Pakistani standards.Different. Unlike many of his ISI counterparts, he had actually spent time outside of Pakistan. Lots of it.

The son of a Pakistani diplomat, a large portion of his formative years had seen his family moving from country to country, diplomatic outpost to diplomatic outpost.

Thanks to his father, he was a citizen of the world. Thanks to his mother, he was a citizen of Pakistan—a true and devoted son.

She kept him honest in his religious practices, devoted in his politics, and educated in his responsibilities to his homeland. No matter how far abroad they traveled, he always felt deeply connected to Pakistan.

His mother was exceedingly well-read, and she shared her love of reading with him. Her taste in literature, however, was considerably one-dimensional.

From leading theorists of violent jihad such as Sayyid Qutb, to political arsonists like Niccolò Machiavelli, she was, in the truest sense, an extremist. And if, as the saying goes, strong mothers raise strong sons, can it not be expected for extremist mothers to raise extremist sons?

She was a poised and polished diplomat’s wife—stunningly capable for the daughter of a struggling textile merchant from Lahore. In her future husband she had seen a man of ambition, a man of potential.

It wasn’t until after she had married him that she realized he had no aspirations beyond the diplomatic corps. Despite his immense potential,he had no desire to enter national politics. He was a bitter disappointment to her. It made her doubly determined that their son would not be.

While his mother had lit a passionate flame inside him for Islam and the maintenance of a true Islamic republic, he had also been taken by the martial arts, particularly the way of the samurai, via several years spent living in Japan.

There were plenty of embassies in Tokyo’s Minato district, including Pakistan’s. There were also a ton of corporate headquarters, such as Honda, Mitsubishi, Nikon, Sony, and Yokohama. Foreign company headquarters like Goldman Sachs and Apple were also there. Durrani hated it.

He hated it, not because his mother detested capitalism, but because all of the glass and steel obstructed the real Japan.

He had discoveredThe Book of Five Rings,by the Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, in the embassy library and had read it so many times within his first months there that he could recite it by heart. Written in 1645, that was Japan to him—pretty much anything up to the seventeenth century. After that, traditional Japan quickly began to recede.

The Book of Five Ringswas Durrani’s on-ramp, his gateway drug, not only into traditional Japanese culture but also its more esoteric martial arts.

Wandering far afield of the embassy, and utilizing his burgeoning knowledge of the language, he began navigating Tokyo’s best dojos—often to be found in the city’s roughest neighborhoods—and in those dojos he absorbed a wide array of art forms.

He studied Nami ryu, Kudo, and Kyokushin. He mastered the skills that would make him a superb intelligence operative—humility, hard work, and a keen attention to movement and detail.

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