Page 69 of Rising Tiger

Drinking the sweet French wine from Bordeaux was like consuming liquid gold, right down to the price tag. But, as far as Nicholas was concerned, price didn’t matter. Life was too short to not drink fabulous wine.

He carefully uncorked the bottle and poured a dram of the beautiful nectar into a more than two-hundred-year-old Baccarat crystal glass recovered from a Russian shipwreck in the Black Sea and sold to him at auction.

It was all incredibly extravagant, but it was something that he felt he deserved. He owed this to himself. He had worked so hard, had come so far. If the parents who had abandoned him could only see him now—living in a castle, a beautiful pregnant wife upstairs, sipping wines worth thousands of dollars and drinking them from glasses that once belonged to royalty—wouldn’t they be surprised? Shocked even. Though they had cast him out, their little boy had done well. In fact, he had done more than well. Despite everything being stacked against him, he had triumphed.

But that kind of recognition, that closure was never going to happen. His parents, he had discovered, were long since dead. He had no siblings, nor other living relatives. He was alone in the world, or at least he would have been had Nina not come along.

He tucked the bottle of Sauternes back into the fridge, set the glass on the cart, and signaled for the dogs to walk with him.

He entered the elevator, the doors closed, and the carriage was beginning to rise, when he felt the same, painful symptoms he had the night before. The damn weapon could penetrate the stone.

As his knees began to go weak, his dogs started howling. Upstairs, Nina had to have been feeling it as well.

He pulled out his phone and swiped to the app he had built, which was connected to the antipersonnel devices he had hidden throughout the woods. Placing his thumb atop the biometric scanner, he detonated everything.

The sound from the explosions reverberated across the estate. Tremors shook the elevator. Then it was quiet. Even the dogs had stopped howling.

His plan had worked. He had stopped the attack.

That was when he heard the most horrific sound in the world.

Nina was screaming.

CHAPTER 37

NEWDELHI

“G-Company,” Raj said, projecting the arrest records and photos of the men Asha had killed that morning.

G-Company was the name that Indian media had given to the organized crime syndicate of mafia boss, drug kingpin, and wanted terrorist Zakir Rahman Gangji.

Gangji, the son of one of Delhi’s most storied and honest police officers, had been on the wrong track since his early teens. His life in crime had begun in the late 1970s, when he had gone to work for a local smuggler.

The relationship had been profitable and amicable until years later, when, angry about police crackdowns, the smuggler had insulted Gangji’s father.

Two days later, backed up by a crew of trusted confidants, Gangji and his men attacked the smuggler, along with his chief deputies, and beat them to death with soda bottles.

India had never seen such an attack. It catapulted Gangji to the head of the smuggler’s organization and sent shock waves through the criminal underworld. The “Soda Pop War,” as it would come to be called, made Gangji a celebrity in the gangster culture and the mere mention of his name inspired fear throughout India and beyond.

Soda bottles became G-Company’s trademark and members wielded them with a viciousness that was unparalleled. Heads were bashed in, throats were cut, and faces were slashed. In some of the most extremecases, Gangji had ordered bottles to be fully inserted into a victim’s rectum and then shattered—causing a slow and agonizing death as they bled out.

Even those who made it to the hospital and survived lived in constant pain, as it was impossible for even the best of surgeons to locate and remove every shard of glass. “Cross G-Company, and you’ll be shitting razor blades for the rest of your life,” was a common warning among the criminal classes.

“Why would G-Company want anything to do with me?” Asha asked. “RAW would love to get its hands on Gangji for the Bombay bombings of the 1990s, but that was before my time. I’ve never worked a case that involves him.”

Raj nodded. Gangji, a Muslim, had been behind a string of car bomb, scooter bomb, and suitcase bomb attacks in retaliation for a mosque having been illegally razed by Hindu nationalists. Over the course of two hours, twelve bombs had gone off.

Gangji had targeted the Bombay stock market, several banks, multiple hotels, the Air India building, and a passport office. Two grenade attacks also occurred.

In the end, 257 people lay dead and more than 1,400 were injured. While multiple G-Company members involved with the plot were either put to death or received sentences of life in prison, Gangji had never been apprehended.

He was said to have fled abroad. There were rumors that he was living in the Pakistani port of Karachi. Other intelligence pointed to Dubai. Still more reports suggested the Saudis had given him sanctuary.

The most persistent rumor was that Gangji hadn’t left India at all. Instead, he had flown in one of the world’s best plastic surgeons, who had totally transformed his appearance, right down to changing his fingerprints.

It was the stuff of Bollywood movies, of course, but for G-Company to continue to be a successful, feared organization, the threat of its founder hiding just around the next corner needed to live on.

“We believe,” said Raj, indicating himself and Gupta, “that in addition to everything else Gangji’s organization is into, they’re upgrading their kidnapping and murder-for-hire operations.”

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