Rising Tiger: A Thriller (56)

“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


NEW DELHI

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 discovered The 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 Rings was 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, Kūdō, 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.

He learned to be patient. He learned to control his breathing, his emotions, and, most important—his thoughts. Because only by conquering himself could he hope to conquer his opponents. And he had plenty of them.

Within a year of haunting various dojos, he began to compete in matches. But not just any matches. He began to fight in nonsanctioned, underground competitions.

He was only a teenager and even in underground Tokyo, honor was still observed. He was only allowed to fight other teenagers. The bouts acted as a novelty before undercard matches in the lead-up to the night’s main event. However, they were incredibly popular, with some teen fighters developing cultlike followings. Durrani wasn’t one of them.

He lacked the showmanship, the personal magnetism necessary to attract a following. Even as a teen he was cold—disturbingly so.

His mother blamed it on having to uproot and move so often. His father disagreed. He believed that the boy might have antisocial personality issues. The embassy doctor helped them to find a psychiatrist. The doctor prescribed medication.

Durrani took the pills for a couple of months and studied their effects. He paid particular attention to which changes in his personality his parents were most pleased with. Then he stopped taking the pills. He had never liked how he had felt on them.

Instead, he worked at toggling the traits his parents liked, on and off, like a light switch.

He realized that he could convincingly project any quality or emotion that was called for—empathy, kindness, sorrow, warmth, friendship, even love. It didn’t matter that he didn’t feel any of it. All that mattered was that he could use these things to get what he wanted from other people. It was, in essence, his “superpower” and he maximized it to his advantage.