February 23, 2001Chief Executive's Office, Islamabad2345 Hours
The ceiling fan didn't simply rotate.
It counted.
Every few seconds the blade caught a loose edge in the housing and produced a faint metallic click—subtle, repetitive, maddening—like a metronome built for men who lived on deadlines and deniability. The rest of the room was quiet in the particular way government buildings were quiet after midnight: not peaceful, but emptied out—stripped of witnesses.
Outside the window, Islamabad lay beneath a thin winter haze, streetlights smeared into soft halos. The city looked innocent from this height, as if it didn't know what was done in its name. Somewhere down on Constitution Avenue, a lone patrol vehicle crawled past like an afterthought.
Inside these four walls, innocence had no jurisdiction.
The air carried two smells: high-grade tobacco and hot toner. Not the cheap, bitter cigarette smell of guards outside a gate—but expensive leaf, burned slowly, as if leisure could be manufactured by money. And beneath it, the electric tang of a laser printer that had been spitting paper for three hours straight, heating plastic and ink until the air itself felt slightly charged.
I leaned back in the leather chair, its weight and softness meant to imply permanence. My uniform collar pressed against my neck like a reminder that this was not my natural skin. Somewhere in my bones, the old IAS habit insisted: a costume only works as long as the audience believes in it.
On the desk lay a single translucent folder.
It wasn't stamped Top Secret.It wasn't branded with the melodrama of National Security.
It was marked in plain, bureaucratic English:
PROJECT TRANSPARENCY: LOGISTICS AUDIT 2001
And because it wasn't theatrical, it was terrifying.
Across from me, General Mahmood sat with the rigid posture of a man trained to endure long wars and longer silences. His face was carved into that familiar expression of senior command—worn patience disguised as control. He had the eyes of someone who had seen too much to be shocked, but not enough to stop hoping he was wrong.
To Mahmood's left, Shaukat Aziz sat with a spreadsheet laid open like scripture. He didn't smoke. He didn't need to. The numbers did the same thing to him that nicotine did to other men—kept the world sharp enough to cut with.
He tapped a Montblanc pen against the paper, a quiet, restless percussion that matched the fan's clicking as if the room had decided to create its own soundtrack.
For a moment I watched them both—two different species of power: the soldier and the banker. One counted bodies. The other counted zeros.
I let the fan click twice more, then spoke.
"Enough thinking."
The words landed cleanly. Not loud. Not angry. Simply final.
"The theory is confirmed," I said. "We are not being attacked by a country."
Mahmood's eyes narrowed. Shaukat's pen stopped tapping.
"We are being liquidated," I continued, "by a cartel."
That word—liquidated—did more than describe. It reduced the chaos to a balance sheet. It made the blood on the border feel like an entry in a ledger: Losses: Acceptable.
Shaukat glanced down at his spreadsheet and circled a figure with deliberate calm. "The Waziristan–Dubai–Delhi triangle," he said, voice controlled but edged. "Sir, the money moving through this narcotics pipeline is enough to fund three private armies."
He looked up, and the banker's gaze was colder than any general's.
"If we cut this," he said, "we don't just stop drugs. We stop the patronage system that keeps our rogue generals—and their… partners in Delhi—alive."
He didn't say "Shiv Bhakt" like an insult. He said it like a label on a file: a type of actor, a category of leverage. Ideology, for Shaukat, was simply another method of laundering cash.
I stood, and the leather chair gave a small exhale as if relieved to be unburdened.
I walked to the wall map—Africa and Asia—pinned behind glass. The kind of map foreign offices loved: clean lines, clean colors, no mention of hunger or graves. Maps never show what power does. Maps show what power claims.
I stopped at a familiar scar.
"Look at Sudan," I said.
Mahmood's eyes followed my finger.
"Do you know what the Gulf learned there?" I asked. "That you don't need to conquer a place. You only need to keep it messy enough that the gold stays cheap and the auditors stay dead."
The words tasted unpleasant in my mouth—not because they were dramatic, but because they were true.
"They want us," I said, "to be two rabid dogs locked in a cage. India and Pakistan. Salivating. Lunging. Never stopping long enough to see who is selling the cage."
Shaukat's mouth tightened. He knew the model. He lived inside it.
"They sell us the collars and the muzzles," I continued. "They sell us security contracts. They sell us consulting. They sell us outrage."
I turned back toward them.
"They want the devil in the turban and the devil in the saffron to keep screaming at each other so nobody looks at the bank statements in Dubai."
Mahmood shifted in his chair. His caution arrived like an old reflex—automatic, professional, necessary.
"But Sir," he said, careful with every syllable, "if we move on the Waziristan labs now… the generals involved will claim we're attacking Jihad. They will trigger mutiny. They will frame it as treason against faith."
He didn't exaggerate. He didn't need to. Mahmood had spent a lifetime watching men weaponize ideology whenever the truth got too close.
I smiled—thinly, without warmth.
"No," I said.
And that single word changed the geometry of the room.
"We aren't attacking Jihad," I continued, voice almost amused. "We are attacking—" I paused just long enough to let them feel the blade hidden in the dullness— "Non-Standardized Industrial Effluents."
Shaukat blinked once. Mahmood didn't blink at all.
That was the trick.
You didn't fight the deep state with speeches. You didn't fight cartel money with heroic raids. Those things created martyrs. Martyrs were fuel.
You fought them with paper.
You buried them in compliance. You strangled them with definitions. You made their defense sound like corruption.
I walked back to the desk and slid three prepared orders toward them. The paper edges were crisp. The ink was still slightly warm.
"First," I said, and my voice shifted from strategist to administrator—the tone that made ministries obey without understanding why.