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Within the four office walls, however, Vandana Dasgoswami didn’t seem so sure of herself, more like a startled young girl as she cast a nervous eye on Max. No point putting up a front with her. No need for a cover like with Bernatchez. Her friend Juliette had communicated directly with her from Montreal and explained who Max was, that he’d soon be in Delhi under an assumed name (“It’s complicated. Don’t ask.”), and would need her help. Vandana was clearly afraid and needed reassuring, warming up in a sense, as soon as possible. She was indispensable to him.

“The flowers were from you?”

“Excuse me?”

“On David’s desk.”

She seemed even more ill at ease, sad and stressed too. Max mentioned David’s visit to Genghis Khan the day before the bombing, which she didn’t know about, but his relationship with Imam Khankashi was public knowledge. They met regularly after his stay in Tihar.

“Tihar?”

“The biggest penitentiary in India,” she explained. “Ten thousand prisoners. The imam was held for a year without trial and in dreadful conditions, as you can well imagine. He was suspected of every crime you can think of, naturally. Technically, David didn’t work in the consular service, but he managed to find a lawyer and get him a fair trial.”

It finally clicked for Max. The imam had Canadian citizenship. “Eight years in Downsview, Ontario, before coming back after the Ayodhya Massacre.”

She was going too fast for him, so Max asked her to begin again, slowly, beginner-style. Vandana explained that India was a layering of civilizations, one on top of the other, with mixed results, but in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, the stratification had solidified. In the fifteenth century, a mosque had been built at the legendary birthplace of the god Rama. Sure, it was wrong, but history was history. It was either move on or be constantly at war. The Hindus, however, were not about to let things go, and Ayodhya became the symbol of a cause and a rallying-cry.

“Then, in December 1992, all hell broke loose. A bunch of Hindu crazies took apart the Babri Mosque stone by stone. But that wasn’t enough for them. Next, they emerged from the dust cloud that remained and headed into town, pillaging and massacring to their hearts’ delight. Sectarian violence then spread all across the country.

“The Islamic Hizb-ul-Mujahideen was bent on vengeance,” Vandana continued, “and attacks occurred all over, especially in Kashmir. Back in Canada, Genghis Khan didn’t miss an opportunity to spew his hatred of Hindu nationalists. He was the perfect target, the ideal bad guy, and easy to scoop up.

“He was in prison on and off. The last time was in the fall of 2001. Alone, isolated, and helpless, he had no illusions about Indian justice, least of all the hope for a trial. He was bound to lose anyway, and he was already paying through the nose to the RSS guards.”

“RSS?”

“Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an association of national Hindi volunteers, extremists — fascists, in fact. They are paramilitary and have existed since 1925 — one of them killed Mahatma Gandhi. They’re fanatics who get off on trashing Muslims whenever they can, and aren’t ashamed to look up to the way Hitler tried to solve ‘the Jewish question’ in Europe.

“With thirty million militants, they’ve supported the Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Vajpayee, were in on the founding of it, in fact, and the government appreciates their support big-time,” Vandana said. “Benign neglect and willful blindness, complicity, as a matter of fact, and all it wants from the BJP it gets. The RSS spreads terror with impunity wherever it goes. The Ayodhya Massacre couldn’t have happened without the connivance of local authorities.

“Once Genghis Khan was free, the RSS pressure never let up. The one in charge of neutralizing him was Sri Bhargava. He’s the most violent member of the RSS, and he has no political ambitions,” she said. “His sole objective is simply to kill all Indian Muslims, or at least throw them out of the country, starting with Genghis Khan.

“In Hindu mythology, Durga is a merciless goddess on the warpath against ignorance; hence Bhargava’s name for his outfit, Durgas, even more radical then RSS. And this gougat won people over. Hindus saw him as the answer to Islamic terrorists, a kind of James Bond of ‘Hinduness.’

“As a result, all over the country, Bhargava and his Durgas took control of the terrorism. They used Islamist methods — bombs, martyrdom, et cetera, without ignoring the old methods, such as boycotts of Muslim shops, demolition of mosques, or pogroms in Muslim neighbourhoods. They even opened dozens of specialized schools — shakhas — focused on anti-Islamic doctrine, which followed the lead of madrassas, Qur’anic schools that sowed the seeds of radical Islam across Pakistan and elsewhere: similar methods, indoctrination, even misinformation.”

“Genghis Khan versus Agent 007; extremists in a struggle to the finish … would this Bhargava go so far as to kill a foreign diplomat?” Max had gradually been building toward a theory. “If David was buddy-buddy with Imam Khankashi,” he continued, “James Bond might have found out and wanted to teach him a lesson. See what I mean? Maybe not just him, but also the other Western diplomats who might be tempted to side with the bearded boys.”

Vandana recoiled slightly. She was sick about this whole thing, and it showed. Despite a very professional effort at masking it, she felt terrorized, too. Her position at the High Commission and her Western clothes made one forget she was Indian, that she lived here. She had a husband, family, perhaps children, all perfect prey for extremists. Max had read somewhere the story of a Hindu grandmother disfigured by acid simply for offering a glass of water to a Muslim labourer. Acid in the face was also the reward bestowed by an enraged Islamist on a young girl for wearing jeans on a bus in Srinagar.

“What files was David working on the last few days, apart from visiting the imam?”

Vandana sighed. She’d already been asked this a dozen times by Josh Walkins of the RCMP and his Indian colleagues. “Active and current files, I forget which,” she responded wearily. “He was preparing to leave for Montreal … the conference.”

“Lots of meetings with colleagues, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Did he make any phone calls, receive any visits?”

“Phone calls, but no appointments that I remember. I took care of it at Mr. Caldwell’s request. The few days in Delhi before his departure weren’t enough to finish up the Kathmandu files along with the run-up to Montreal.”

Kathmandu again.

This trip had been playing on Max’s mind. He put himself in David’s place — having to go home in the middle of the night after preparing the Montreal conference. Endless meetings with Bernatchez, Caldwell, and company. There were a thousand details to attend to and time was running short. The investors had to be reassured, fussed over, and given tender loving care; a huge job. Still, David had to go to Kathmandu in the shadow of the mountains … with Vandana along, too. Two fewer pairs of hands to do Bernatchez’s bidding.

That didn’t take into account Béatrice’s impromptu visit. David hadn’t seen his mother for months, and yet he chose that very moment to leave town.

Odd.

“Kathmandu — what exactly happened there? What did you do?”

“Meetings and get-togethers.”

“What about?”

“A literacy project we’ve been on for months with CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency.”

“Even during a civil war?”

“The situation’s calmed down a bit,” she replied unconvincingly.

Max sensed she was hiding something, but what was it? He’d felt it from the beginning. A professional liar himself, he knew how to spot an amateur who’d never make it to his level of the game. The ones with no talent for it, like Vandana, didn’t have the skills for his kind of work.

“You’re right,” she said, changing the subject, “I left the flowers.”