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.