Conflagration

Chapter 13: Consequences

Location: Police HQ

Aryan lowered himself into his chair, absently rubbing his fingers across his tired eyes. He had not had much sleep the previous night and even though the job Jaggu's boss had given had gone off without a hitch, he couldn't find it in himself to be happy about it. Thanks to him, half of kilo of cocaine had been safely delivered to street dealers today morning.

He ruthlessly shut down the errant thought of the number of lives that would be destroyed by the drugs he had delivered. For the greater good, he repeated the mantra, promising that one day the ring leader and his cronies would pay for they damage they were doing.

Picking up his phone, he dialed the number of Editor Sharma. He didn't trust Imlie to follow through with the compliant against her seniors; recalling the instant disdain she had shown for the idea, but no one was stopping him from speaking his mind.

"Hello, Rajesh Sharma speaking"

"Mr Sharma, ACP Rathore here. I wanted to talk to you about your sting operation at Jhankar Bar yesterday"

"Yes Sir, is there a problem?"

"Did Ms Imlie Mishra not talk to you?"

"She hasn't come to the office today Sir. Said she was sick and taking the day off"

Aryan frowned, she had seemed perfectly fine yesterday night when he had dropped her off.

He quickly explained to Mr Sharma what had happened during the sting, emphasizing the danger Imlie was in and how the BT team had basically abandoned her, ending with how he was disappointed that BT had not deemed it necessary to inform the police about the link between the bar and drugs.

"Mr Sharma consider this a warning if you must, I won't take kindly to you or your paper interfering in police matters. We have the mandate to maintain law and order and I will not hesitate to book you under IPC 201 if you or your paper withhold information this critical. You also will not print or publish any material regarding Jhankar Dance Bar and drugs in your paper. It's an active police investigation." he said in a hard voice.

"I apologize Sir." Rajesh stuttered, vacillating between horror at what could have happened to Imlie and anger at his team. "I was told that there would be minimal danger and the team had a well thought out plan to mitigate any risks. I will thoroughly investigate this incident and I assure you this will not happen again. We will hold off on printing anything until I hear from you."

Disconnecting the call, Aryan rang his desk bell summoning the peon. "Ask Constable Shinde to check with Traffic Control room on the status of a Aditya Kumar Tripathi brought in for drunk driving yesterday night" he instructed.

Pushing all thoughts of Imlie and her problems aside, he started going through the photos captured by his pin camera from yesterday night. The cyber cell had been able to identify a few people from the bar with criminal pasts. Pulling up the photo of Jaggu's boss, he scanned the details that the cyber cell had managed to find.

Name: Balwinder Mahate aka Boss

Age: 48 years

Priors: Assault, robbery, racketeering, drug dealing

Jail Time: Tihar (3 years), Thane (2 years) and the list went on. It did not seem that Balwinder had spent more than a couple of years in any jail despite the gravity of charges against him.

"Sir" Constable Shinde had arrived while he was engrossed in Boss's file.

"Yes Shinde?"