The Kashmir Trap Read Online Free

investigation.”
    Juliette was still caught up in the whirlwind of the day before, when she’d headed for the Apollo Hospital after Bernatchez’s phone call. The bombing had happened in the northern part of Delhi along the banks of the Yamuna, he told her. Their car had been booby-trapped . Pity that was all they knew for the time being. “David’s dead, David’s dead,” she kept repeating as she ran through the hospital corridors, as though the mantra could somehow bring him back. Then she saw a familiar face, Dr. Rangarajan. She knew his smell, the timbre of his voice, gravelly as though he were always on the verge of coughing or clearing his throat. He held her tight for comfort with the words one always says at times like that, but she heard none of it. Then a thanedar in a uniform and moustache with an officer — also moustached — showed up and Rangarajan cleared off. The officer was in charge of the preliminary investigation and had Juliette tell them absolutely everything, even if, at first glance, it seemed utterly banal.
    She felt like answering, “It doesn’t matter. Nothing does anymore. He’s dead.”
    â€œMadame, he is still alive.”
    Juliette could have kissed them, both of the moustachioed cops. She wanted to see David, yes, absolutely, but she couldn’t. Just as she started screaming, Bernatchez ran toward her with Vandana and Mukherjee and took her hand, vowing to catch the cowards and to make sure the Canadian government would never let these monsters get away with it. She couldn’t have cared less about them or any other government, of course. All she wanted was to be with David, alone.
    â€œYou’re both heading straight back to Canada,” Bernatchez told her.
    There were a doctor and a nurse aboard the Gulfstream supplied by Worldwide Air Ambulance Service and Dr. Mitchell from the High Commission, whom Juliette had never met. Neither one was very chatty, which suited her, since she was in no mood for conversation. She was numb from the sedatives and sealed inside a flying clinic. Through the porthole, she watched India drift away, perhaps forever: first little pinpoints of light, then nothing … total blackness.
    What was it the Mahabharata said: “All the creatures of the night crowded round me, deformed and terrifying …”?
    For the first time on board the plane, a longing for cocoa, an irresistible urge to bite into a piece of chocolate — maybe because I’m pregnant , she thought. Maybe it was just the sedatives she’d taken. Why now, all of a sudden? It was as though her brain had decided to come to her defence and keep her from thinking about what had happened to David. This yearning had nagged at her all night.
    Now at the end of the corridor of the intensive care unit at the Montreal General, she was sitting in a little room rigged up on the ninth floor, munching a Toblerone as though her life depended on it.
    â€œHe’s still fighting, fighting hard.”
    Juliette turned her head toward a shadow engulfed in the blinding light from the downtown buildings that shone through the open windows.
    Dennis Patterson.
    Without a thought, she threw herself into his arms. She wanted to seem brave and stop crying, but it was too much for her. With every new visitor, the pain rose in her face, a torrent she couldn’t control. Patterson waited it out, then took her aside. He was bigger than she or David, and he held her by the shoulders like a fragile, delicate rose. As old as Bernatchez, but having aged better than the former pro football player, he was visibly proud of his white hair, and his bushy eyebrows made him look like a retired Santa.
    â€œI know he’ll get through this. Dr. Dohmann’s an exceptional neurosurgeon.” He sounded like a get-well card: sweet, sonorous, pious wishes, when what she really wanted was the truth and some explanation, here and now.
    â€œWhy? Why