Brutal (11 page)

P
rakash’s
back was aching now. He had been squatting in pitch darkness since an hour. The visitors had left the warehouse, locking it again. But Mrinal and he had decided to wait for some time before moving out. From the corner of his eyes, now adapted to the darkness, he could see the silhouette of Mrinal sitting beside him. He wondered what the guy was thinking.

“Shall we call the police?” Mrinal whispered.

“Not until our lives are in danger,” Prakash replied. “I want to see what these people are up to.”

“Once we are in danger, we might not live long enough to call the police.”

That’s true, thought Prakash, but decided to ignore him. He knew that ideally they should be calling the police. A crime had been committed or was to be committed. But the journalist in him implored him to wait and unravel the whole mystery first. He was too close to regress now. If they called the police, these foot soldiers would be charged with a minor felony and then let go on bail.
That would be frustrating.

He was curious to check out the man in the adjoining room, who had not made any sound since then.

“I’m going to check out the cages. Need to find out who’s the guy,” Prakash whispered. “You move out of this place. Be there in our car.”

“Don’t be crazy. They’ll kill you if they catch you.”

“I have done this before. So don’t worry,” Prakash said, trying to assure him. But the truth was, he had never dared to do such a thing in past.

“Then I’ll wait here in this room till you come back,” Mrinal protested.

“No. You have to move out. At least one of us should be safe,” he argued. “To call for outside help if needed.”

Mrinal thought for a moment and then said OK. It sounded logical.

Both of them moved out of their hiding place, careful not to stumble on the iron rods and make any noise. Once they were on the ground, Prakash gave a thumbs-up signal to Mrinal to move on. He stood there as he saw Mrinal climb over the back gate and then get down on the other side.

He now lighted his torch and walked into the ‘cage’ room. He saw a body lying on the floor of the first cage, facing the backside wall. His slender body was covered with a yellow T-Shirt splotched with bloodstains and a pair of tattered blue jeans. He had curly hair, radiating from his scalp like strands of coir. The man’s hands were tied behind his back with induction tape.
Is he dead or alive?

“Hey, are you OK?” he whispered to the man.

No response.

After asking the same thing thrice, he saw some movement in the man’s body. He groaned, waking up from unconsciousness. With great effort, he turned his body towards Prakash and got into a sitting position. His face was smeared with dried up blood and mouth had been taped.

Before the man could say anything, Prakash pressed a finger on his lips and said, “Shhh. I am not one of them… If you agree not to make any sound, I will untie you.”

The prisoner nodded and wriggled towards the grill. He grimaced as Prakash removed the sticky tape from his mouth. Then he turned around, projecting his tied hands towards him.

But Prakash did not untie him.
Not so soon.

“First tell me who you are,” he said. “Then I’ll do something about this tape.”

The prisoner turned around to face him again. He kept looking at Prakash with a frown, studying him.

“Look. I’m a journalist. I’ve been following these men for long,” Prakash said, trying to convince him. “I can help you.”

“Why have you been following them?” The man finally spoke. His voice was croaky.

P
rakash weighed his options
.
How much should I tell him?

“I am investigating a case. You know about Nitin Tomar, the murderer of eleven children?”

“He is dead.”

“You know about it, then. My investigation has led me to this place. Now, are you going to tell me who you are… or do you want me to leave you here just like that?”

“My name is Kunal Chaubey. I think I can help you with some answers.”

“You know something about the Nitin Tomar case?”

“I know things which will make your jaws drop,” he said. “But first let me out.”

Prakash wanted to interrogate him further, but it struck him that he was in enemy land.
Need to move.
He sliced the tape behind Kunal and studied the lock in the grill. It was a large padlock.
Will take time to saw it and cut.

“I will have to cut the lock,” Prakash said, taking out his Swiss knife. It had a small saw in it. He started sawing on the shackle.

It took about half an hour for the shackle to be cut. Prakash’s hands were quivering with fatigue. Cautiously, he swivelled the cage door to let Kunal out. He was walking with a limp.

“Can you climb?” Prakash asked, eyeing his hurt legs.

“Yes. With some help.”

Both of them hurried towards the backside door of the warehouse. Prakash told Kunal to climb first. He propped him up to let him hold the pointed tops. The metal door creaked under Kunal’s weight. With a thrust he reached its top.

There was a noise on the front gate of warehouse. Someone was coming.

“We need to move out fast,” Prakash said in panic. “Hurry!”

Kunal ignored his pain and jumped over to the other side.

It was now Prakash’s turn. Not a second was to be wasted. The front gate of the warehouse was opening. He hauled himself up the door and jumped to the other side.

The next moment, he heard someone shout and raise an alarm.

The duo dashed into the sugarcane field. Kunal was running with a limp, trying to catch-up with Prakash.

As Prakash approached the place where they had parked their car, he yelled, “Start it, Mrinal! They are coming!”

Mrinal started the car and both of them quickly entered it.
Go. Go. Go.
He pushed the accelerator and they sped off. Prakash looked at the rear-view mirror. He saw the headlights of a car coming towards them.

“They are after us and closing in!” Prakash yelled. “Drive fast.”

He thought about the places where they can go before their pursuers caught up with them. Wandering into a side-alley could throw up a dead end and they might get cornered. The best defence seemed to be in getting into a residential area and abandoning the car.

“Let’s get into a busy area where we can disappear into an alley,” Prakash said.

Mrinal kept driving at a high speed, keeping the followers in pursuit. The car was now in an area with a lot of commercial and residential buildings on both sides of the road. He took a sudden left in an alley and kept going.

“I don’t know where I am going,” Mrinal muttered.

Prakash didn’t say anything.
I don’t have any better ideas.

Mrinal zipped through a maze of interconnecting bylanes and avenues. They were surrounded by flats and apartment buildings now. Prakash looked behind. Their pursuers were no longer in view.

They got into a dark alley with barely enough space for two vehicles to pass side-by-side.

“Let’s stop here and get out,” Prakash suggested. “We can hide in the basement of one of these houses.”

Mrinal slowed down in response. But before he could stop the car, his face was flooded with the light from a car coming from the opposite direction. The man sitting on the front passenger seat looked like a walrus, his long moustache drooping beyond his jaws. He had projected his hand out of the window, holding a pistol.

Their pursuers had showed up right on their faces.
Shit!

“Don’t stop!” Prakash screamed at the top of his voice. “Even if you hit their car, don’t stop!”

Mrinal pushed the accelerator hard, keeping their car to the left side of the road. A collision seemed unavoidable. But at the last moment, the other car veered to their right. The bodies of the two vehicles sheared against each other, with headlights and mirrors getting smashed. Mrinal did not lift his legs from the pedal till their car had completely moved clear of the other car.

In their rear-view mirror, they could see their pursuers stopping their car. Walrus-man opened his door and rushed out clutching his arm. He was hurt from the collision, but still aimed his pistol at their car. Mrinal pushed the throttle to its maximum in response. The man fired two shots before they were out of his view.

No one from the trio uttered a word till they had driven for a few minutes. “Are you alright, Mrinal?” Prakash asked, his voice stuttering.

Mrinal nodded. His hands on the steering were trembling.

“And you?” Prakash asked Kunal, turning around.

“Got saved by inches,” Kunal said, holding a puff of foam in his hand. There was a gaping hole in the rear seat.

T
here was bright light everywhere
. Seema tried opening her eyes, but they burned. She was lying flat on the cold marble floor. As she tried to lift her torso, a throbbing pain inside her head made her dizzy.
Have they drugged me?

With some struggle, she made herself sit and then studied the room. It was cubical in shape with a low-height ceiling. Everything was white – the walls, the ceiling, the air-conditioning ducts, the floor and even the door. The room was filled with an overpowering, almost blinding dazzle. It was as if a halogen-lamp had been lit inside a room made of mirrors.

Her eyes paused at a small white-coloured cylindrical device mounted at a corner of the ceiling.

A fucking camera! I’m being observed!

R
oshni Lodge was
a small dingy hotel they found in one of the alleys leading up to the Grand Trunk Road. Prakash looked at the building. The first floor seemed devoid of any lights, suggestive of vacant rooms. While he went to its reception, Mrinal took off with the car in search for a place to hide it. Prakash booked one of the bigger rooms to accommodate all three of them. He also told the receptionist to order dinner for them.

In about fifteen minutes, all three were inside their room. There were two beds, with stained and yellowed bed sheets lying over them. An additional mattress was tucked into a wooden almirah. It felt damp and smelled of cigarette smoke. In a moment, they realized that even the curtains, the sheets and the bathroom, reeked of cigarette smoke.

Bloody hell! What was it? A smoking room?
Prakash walked towards the lone window in the room and opened it to let in some air. He looked down. The road below was dark and silent.
No vehicles.
He wondered where they would run if cornered. He turned around and looked at Mrinal and Kunal. They looked shell-shocked, sitting on one of the beds and staring at the floor.

“Where did you park the car?” he asked Mrinal.

“Found a dark alley.”

“Did you cover it with something?”

“Yes Sir! I covered it,” Mrinal replied with a touch of anger and irritation in his voice.

Prakash said nothing. Mrinal had good reasons to be worked up.

“I’m sorry for putting you through all this,” Prakash said apologetically. “I’ll ensure you leave safely tomorrow morning.”

“I’m going nowhere till I hear this man out,” Mrinal spat, pointing towards Kunal, who lifted his head up.

Prakash eyed Kunal with a questioning look.
Spill your guts buddy. We don’t have all night here.

“You guys have won a terrific bunch of enemies now,” Kunal mocked.

“Who are these men?” Prakash asked. “Who are you?”

“Where should I begin?” Kunal closed his eyes for a few moments, diving into an abyss of memories.

Then he began, “You must have heard stories of people going berserk and massacring innocents. Happens in the United States most of the times. The Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 for example. A student carries a gun to his college. Kills 32 people in cold blood. Two years prior to that, in a similar incident in Minnesota, a 16-year old kid killed his family at home and then drove his grandfather's police vehicle to his school. He killed seven people. I remember another incident in Connecticut in 2012. A 20-year old kid first shoots his mother. Then he goes to his school and massacres 26 people. Guess what’s common between these incidents, other than the fact that they were cold blooded massacres?”

Prakash was filled with a sense of foreboding. He looked at Mrinal’s face, which looked sombre.

“How do you know so much about these incidents,” Mrinal interjected.

“Because I’ve been a part of one such incident.”

Mrinal shivered. He did not dare ask the next question. Prakash did the job.

“You were an eyewitness, a survivor or…”

“I was the killer.”

Prakash looked at him in silence. Holding his breath, he said, “You can carry on. I can’t make any guesses at the beginning of a story.”

“OK,” Kunal said calmly. “What’s common between these incidents is that the killer in each case was on anti-depressant drugs prescribed by psychiatrists. Some of these drugs have a history of inducing violent behaviour. A few have also been linked to homicides and suicides.”

“So you’re saying that these incidents resulted from depressed people taking some psychiatric medication?” Prakash asked.

“Yes. The Virginia Tech shooter was on Varenicline, a drug eleven times more likely than other drugs to induce violence. So was the Minnesota killer. The Connecticut shooter was also suspected to be on an anti-depressant.”

“You pop a pill and then shoot people! Just like that?”

“It wasn’t that simple earlier. You needed to be severely depressed to become violent. You needed to have a history of stimulation with violent video games, movies and news of massacres.”

“That’s scary. But what do you mean by ‘earlier’?”

“It means that now some people have created drugs which can induce extremely violent behaviour in a very spontaneous manner. A couple of hours is what takes the drug to result in homicidal tendencies. You will have terrible dreams where you cannot realize what’s real and what’s not. And you need not have a history of exposure to violence. A small external stimulus is all it takes to turn into a killer.”

“What kind of stimulus?”

“It can be anything. A malevolent thought buried in your mind, a gossip on some violent happening, a sudden reminiscence of a bloody incident in the past…. Even a picture or a poster depicting violence.”

Prakash was stunned.
What is this world coming to?
He recalled that Nitin Tomar was also seeing a psychiatrist. A chilling realization began taking shape in his mind.

“Did Nitin Tomar also take such a medication?”

“What Nitin Tomar took was a drug about hundred times more potent than Varenicline or Fluoxetine. They call it NB-67.”

“More than a hundred times! That’s… that’s terrifying,” Prakash exclaimed. “If what you are saying is true, then this drug accounts for Nitin’s behaviour that day. He was seen chatting happily with other teachers a few hours before the killings. The drug turned him into a demon. But isn’t it illegal? How can such a drug be available in the market?”

“The drug is not in the market. It cannot come into market unless it is approved by the drug regulating authority of a country. In US, it’s the FDA. For us, it is the Drugs Controller General of India,” Kunal said. “NB-67 is a molecule under research. And Nitin was a guinea pig.”

“You mean Nitin was a clinical trial subject?”

Prakash had a fair understanding of clinical trials. He had once done a story on how the huge pharmaceutical companies conduct clinical trials in India without fully complying with the regulations. Many a time, it led to patient deaths through severe side effects and adverse events.

As per the law, before a medicine is brought out into the market, it has to be proved that it is safe to use and effective to treat the medical condition in a specific category of human population. For that, the molecule is first tested on animals, the process being known as a pre-clinical trial. If it is successful in animals, the molecule is then tested on human subjects. This process is known as a clinical trial.

“He must have been told so by his psychiatrist,” Kunal said. “In reality, it was a completely illegal activity. In an authentic clinical trial, one needs to spontaneously give details of any adverse event, that is, any harmful side effect to the drug regulating authority. But no such thing happened in this case. The people behind this drug were running their clinical trials knowing exactly what the drug was going to do to the subjects.”

“Why do you say so? It might have been a mistake on their part which they are now trying to hide.”

“I say so because they tested it on me eight years ago. They clearly saw the deadly results, but didn’t stop at that. They tried it many times after that, on different people, with possibly enhanced potency of the drug. The latest is the case of Nitin Tomar.”

“What did you do eight years ago?”

“I slaughtered three of my friends in Bandhavgarh National Park. We had gone there for a party at night. I was on NB-67, administered to me by a psychiatrist named Dr Avneesh Chauhan. The drug did not have any immediate effect on me. But in an hour or so, I started feeling dazed. I still don’t remember exactly why I attacked my friends. There was a point when I saw terrible dreams with my eyes open – demons trying to take me into another world. I tried to resist and break free but couldn’t. I had to kill them. One by one.”

No one said anything for a full minute. The atmosphere in the room suddenly felt suffocating, as if the lingering smell of smoke had got into their brains.

“When did you come back to your senses?” Prakash asked.

“I found myself lying beside a boulder the next morning. A bloody axe was lying near me. Having only a fleeting memory of what I might have done, I rushed back to the place where we had built our bonfire. I saw blood everywhere. Flies were buzzing over large patches of blackish clotted blood,” Kunal said, closing his eyes in regret.

He added a few moments later, “But shockingly, I found no bodies. I wondered whether I had buried them somewhere, but couldn’t recollect at all. I sat there and wept, feeling disgusted with myself. Felt like committing suicide. Somehow I managed to reach the place where we had hidden our bikes. Guess what I saw? There were no bikes either.”

“Are you saying that the whole incident was a clinical trial?”

“Yes. They were watching me, monitoring me. They wanted to see the impact of NB-67 on people. When the killings were done, they disposed off the bodies and took away our bikes.”

“Did you see anyone following you or watching you that night?”

“After days of wracking my brain, I recalled a small incident which had gone unnoticed that night. A shining object had momentarily caught the beam of Ratan’s torchlight in the jungle. He said it seemed to be a person wearing a goggle. We brushed off his statement. I thought it must have been an owl or some animal. Later, I realized that it must have been a man wearing night-vision equipment.”

“This is shocking. Who are these people?”

“I don’t know. I tried to locate Dr Avneesh Chauhan. He had been referred to me by another doctor. But I never found this Avneesh guy again. He was gone.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“Because I was shot at by these people,” Kunal said, gritting his teeth in anger. “I was feeling extremely guilty. So the night after the killings, I called up the local Police station from an STD booth. The man told me to wait till the police came to pick me up.”

He continued, “I waited for an hour. I saw a van stop at a distance. The men who came out of it were in army attire, but looked dangerous. One of them located me and they started running after me. Wary of their intentions, I ran into the jungle. They kept firing while chasing me.  One of the slugs got me in the thigh. But I didn’t stop. I kept running till I was completely lost from them. I never again attempted to call the police.”

“So, these people tried to finish you off because their experiment was done.”

“Yes.”

“You said that you know of many more such experiments?”

“Over these eight years, I have followed many such incidents where there has been a massacre and the killer goes missing or is dead. For example, random killings in schools, colleges and in the military, unexplained violence at home, incidents like those. I found a partner in a psychiatrist named Dr Kalyan Ghosh. He had a history of activism against big pharmaceutical companies whose drugs had serious side effects. I found his name in a newspaper article and contacted him. He was stunned on hearing my account. Together, we decided to expose these people and began investigating. Over the years, we came across a few cases where NB-67 or its more potent successor could have been used,” said Kunal and took a deep breath. “But, somehow the wrong guys got wind of what we were trying to do. Since then, both of us are living in mortal fear.”

“Where does Dr Kalyan Ghosh live?”

“I don’t know. He went into hiding about two years ago, fearing for his life. In recent times, he used to live in a state of constant paranoia, rarely sharing any detail with me. If he is alive, I guess he would be investigating independently now.”

Prakash looked into Kunal’s eyes. “You have really gone through terrible times. It’s tough imagining me in your place.”

Mrinal chipped in with his own question. “So how did you come across the Nitin Tomar case?”

“I wasn’t aware of the Nitin Tomar massacre till it actually happened. The death of Mohammed Afroz and the Mujahid hogwash prompted me to come to Ambala and do some research on my own. But these bastards got me.”

Prakash nodded and said, “We also suspected Mujahid-e-Bashariyat of being a phoney outfit.”

“Yeah. That’s an easy way to hide their footprints. Blame it on the Jihadi,” Kunal said.

“Does the name Dr Varun Gupta ring any bell?” Prakash asked. “He was Nitin Tomar’s psychiatrist.”

“No. But I am sure the name is a fake. Who knows, he might be the same guy who gave me NB-67.”

“A psychiatrist with different names – Avneesh Chauhan, Varun Gupta…”

“Yes.”

Prakash shook his head in disbelief. He looked at Mrinal who seemed lost. He himself felt dizzy with all this information.

“One final question,” he said. “Who are these people? What is their motive?”

“That’s what I am trying to find out. Our pursuers are small fish. They don’t know who their bosses are. We need to find out the big fish and what exactly do they want to achieve with NB-67.”

“We will,” Prakash said.
But first I need to verify your story.

He walked towards the window, took out his mobile phone and googled ‘Bandhavgarh mass murders Kunal Chaubey’.