Page 83 of Rising Tiger

“I didn’t have it until now,” the man replied. “I had to ask my mother-in-law for it. That’s her gun you’re carrying.”

Harvath didn’t believe him, not really, but there was a tiny part of him that did. The guy really was achutiya. “Listen, Vijay, you need to think about what you’re walking into. What’s to stop them from taking you out back and putting a bullet in your head?”

“You,” he replied. “And my mother-in-law’s gun.”

“I’m going to tell you right now, if that is what you’re counting on, your movie is most definitely not going to have a happy ending.”

“The minute anything goes wrong, all you need to do is to put two rounds into the ceiling and start a stampede. Everything else will take care of itself.”

“Take care of itself, how?”

“Indians are conditioned to not only call the cops, but to alsolivestream everything via their phones. This place will be getting so much attention, Sayed wouldn’t dare do anything stupid. Trust me.”

It was a heavy gamble and Harvath didn’t like it. If someone had thrown him off a roof, broken lots of his bones in the process, and then suddenly reappeared in his life, he’d kill the guy with a cocktail straw and worry about the fallout later. A stampede of customers waving smartphones in the air wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference.

He didn’t like their odds—he and Vijay against an untold army of gangsters. He wished there was some other way to do this, but try as he might, he hadn’t been able to come up with a better plan. Nevertheless, this felt like a disaster waiting to happen.

As far as Harvath was concerned, his number one obligation was to get Vijay in and out alive. The man had been an absolute prince. It was obvious that he missed his old life as a detective and relished being back on the street cracking skulls, but at some point, enough could be too much. If anything happened to him, Harvath wouldn’t be able to forgive himself.

“Despite my reservations, I’m going to go along with this, but only on one condition.”

The ex-cop made a left turn, adjusted the volume, and replied, “Which is?”

“You make Sayed come to us—however you have to do it. You do not go anywhere with him or his people; not to his office, not down to the basement, none of that kind of thing. We do this out in the open.”

“Agreed.”

The man claimed to agree, but there was something about the way he said it that concerned Harvath. It sounded like he didn’t really mean it.

If Vijay didn’t mean it, they were about to saunter into a shit storm of epic proportions.

CHAPTER 46

Harvath hadn’t thought it possible to hate Vijay’s plan any more than he already did, but as soon as they got within spitting distance of Paharganj, that’s exactly what happened.

Paharganj was the worst neighborhood in New Delhi. It made Jaipur’s Sanganer look like Beverly Hills. When people talked about how terrible parts of India could be, this was the poster child for it. All of it.

Muggers, rapists, pickpockets, drug dealers, beggars… all slithering through a maze of dark alleyways and crumbling buildings. Harvath and Vijay were headed into a snake pit surrounded by an even bigger snake pit.

Known as New Delhi’s “backpacker ghetto” because of its cheap hotels and even cheaper hostels, there was plenty of fresh, young tourist meat for local thugs to feed upon.

The main street was jam-packed with vehicles and the sidewalks were overflowing with humanity. Food vendors cooked over open fires. Stalls selling T-shirts and sandals sat cheek by jowl with travel agencies, which offered scooter and car rentals, as well as budget train and plane tickets.

Vijay found a place to park and pulled over.

After a quick chat with an incense vendor sitting in a plastic chair outside his shop, the ex-cop smiled at Harvath.

“Let me guess,” Harvath replied. “Another hundred bucks?”

After paying off Vijay’s new valet cum security guard, they pushed deeper into the neighborhood, where the congestion only became worse.It would have been impossible to get the Jaguar through. He had been smart to leave it out on the main road.

In addition to the crush of people, honking motorbikes threaded their way through the crowds. Stray dogs, some terribly skinny and riddled with mange, roamed everywhere.

As a dog lover, Harvath hated to see it. According to Vijay there were upwards of four hundred thousand of them in New Delhi alone.

They passed a one-chair barbershop that was so narrow, if you stepped inside and held your arms out, you could span its width and touch both walls at the same time.

The barber was giving his customer a very unique, very kinetic head massage. At first, Harvath thought he was beating the customer. But as he watched the barber shuffle around the chair like a boxer and exhale large gusts of air, he realized something quite different was happening.

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