Page 63 of The Circle of Exile
Silence settled. Atharva shut his eyes. When had he started to lose temper like this? He took a long, deep breath. He had always carried humour in his back pocket, dispelled tense situations with light jokes. Samar had been the serious one. Atharva looked down at him now, presumably in excruciating pain with those raw pink skin grafts that looked like he had come out of some Matrix gas chamber. His face had been spared but the scars did run up to the side of his neck.
“I have been under a lot of stress,” Atharva said. “I did not mean to come here like this and scream at you both.”
“What is happening with the Usama Aziz protests?” Samar inquired.
“That’s way down on my list of problems right now.”
“The blast in PoK?”
Atharva cut his eyes to Amaal.
“He was here with me when we got the news.”
“It is sealed, Atharva.” Samar’s voice was solemn.
“It better be,” he told the man he had trusted with his life once but couldn't trust as far as he could throw him now. He owed Samar three lifetimes for jumping into the wired car meant for his pregnant wife and unborn twins but Atharva was still wary of him, his contacts in Awaami and his past track record.
“I know what it must have cost you to bring her back. I don’t know all the details. But I know enough, and I will take it to my grave. I give you my word.”
Suddenly exhausted, Atharva found the nearest chair and collapsed on it. Seeing the man that was once his friend, beta, unit surgeon, confidante, something inside him gurgled to the fore.
“The CM of Gilgit-Baltistan, Dilshad Khan. He was the senior Mir’s co-conspirator.”
“In the trafficking of kids?” Samar sat up.
Atharva nodded.
“When everything was lost and Sufiyaan died here, like a fool I went and threatened Sayyid Butt with his mother. To scoop information. To get something out of him to trace Iram’s parents. But then Iram’s car got wired. I have a hunch… more than a hunch, that Dilshad Khan ran the mission on Butt’s request. To finish any lingering evidence of their misdeeds.”
“Didn’t he realise that Iram was there in his town for months?” Amaal pointed.
“No. That was my greatest challenge. To take her out of there from under his nose.”
“And did he figure it out?” Samar asked.
“He will, soon enough. These things can’t remain sealed for long. The airport was closed but there is ground staff, engineers, ATC. Somebody would slip up someday. And this man lives off exploiting information.”
“It’s a good thing then that she is never setting foot there ever again,” Samar nodded. “Have you tightened her security?”
“Shehzad is out. I have to get a replacement. For now she doesn’t leave the house, not without me, at least.”
“But she will, at some point.”
“We’ll see then.”
“How is she adapting?” Amaal stepped closer. “With Arth? And everything else?”
His personal life was nobody’s business. So Atharva smiled — “It’s work in progress. But he can wrap anybody around his finger.”
“Ada is coming tomorrow, isn’t she?”
“Hmm,” he pushed to his feet. “That reminds me, I have to tell Altaf about sending a car for her.”
“I will come tomorrow night to meet them all.”
He nodded. Amaal had volunteered to go pick Iram up from Kargil. Captain Husain would have sufficed but she had put her foot down. And he was glad for that. In the state he had found Iram in, he couldn’t imagine leaving her to herself in a car with nobody to talk to for hours at a stretch.
“I will be in the Secretariat by noon. Finish whatever you have with Saba before then. I will not wait another minute to talk to her.”
