Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
canister across the room. 'Why don't you shoot the whole fucking
lot in one go and save everyone a lot of trouble?'
Dragging Sophie with him, Ray ushered me from the room.
'I cannot leave 'im,' Sophie said in the lift.
'That's why I'm
taking
you,' Ray told her, smoothing a strand of
hair back on her head. 'Because you can't stay with him either.
Anyway,' he hissed out a laugh. 'Old Franco's in for a big surprise.'
He paused to make sure he had maximum attention. 'That wasn't
junk.'
'What wass eet?' Sophie jerked her head up to stare at him with
terrified eyes.
'Pharmaceutical mescaline.'
He handed Sophie over to Debbie, with orders to fly her to Zurich,
put her in a clinic. When she was cleaned up - he wasn't sure . . .
maybe send her home?
'Nah,' he decided. 'I'll meet you both in Geneva early next month,
all right?' He patted Sophie on the head as if she were a child. 'I like to
see what I'm paying for.' He told Debbie to buy her some clothes -
good ones - get her hair done, her face done, get the lot done. 'Then,'
he added enigmatically, 'who knows? I might find you another life.'
The next evening Ray and I were in New Delhi. Very early the
following morning we touched down on the tarmac at Amritsar,
capital of the Punjab. While waiting for our baggage to travel the
ten yards from aeroplane to terminal, I noticed something that
puzzled me. As I studied a board announcing flight schedules, I
discovered that the tiny airport, scarcely inundated with domestic
traffic, also had one international flight every week: direct to and
from Birmingham, England. This seemed highly unusual. It was
only when Sikh separatism, and the wave of terrorism associated
with it, became worldwide news in the 1980s that I remembered
and understood what this stray scrap of information meant.
Rumours and allegations abounded about exactly where and how
Sikh separatists were obtaining all their funding and weapons.
Britain and Canada topped the list of suspects. A direct flight from
Birmingham, a city with a huge population of immigrant Sikhs, to
Amritsar, a city hosting nothing but Sikhs, would have simplified
