It was one of his other entries that had led me to my meeting with the mysterious bomber in Dharavi a couple of weeks earlier. I’d tracked Bikas down by following Eric’s references to debates at the Marxist Union, a student organization at the University of Bombay. My predecessor had a fascination for left-wing politics, which, according to Flaherty, had earned him the nickname “Eric the Red.”

The secretary of the Marxist Union—a guy named Gopal—remembered Eric well. A smart fellow, but a little too interested in scoring with the female comrades. He made them uncomfortable. That jibed with what Willy Smets had told me about him. I asked if there was anyone named Bikas in the Union. Gopal said there had been, but he left their merry band of revolutionaries at about the same time Eric Nielsen abruptly disappeared.

I handed Gopal my card and asked if he knew where to find Bikas. He regarded me warily, maybe because I was American and, therefore, the natural adversary to his ideology. But he said he’d try to locate him. A few days later, I received a call in the office. It was Bikas. We set up the interview in Dharavi, and I took the pictures of him.

The thing about Bikas was that he wasn’t too smart. Couldn’t resist bragging. He talked way too much and showed none of the discretion an admitted revolutionary/terrorist on the lam should.

“No one will recognize me with my face covered,” he’d told me that day in Dharavi.

True enough. For the pictures I took when he was wearing the scarf. But it slipped off his face for a brief moment as I was packing up to leave, and—yes—I got off one shot of him in profile. He didn’t notice.

That frame could get me killed if he ever knew it existed.

Now, I retrieved the notebook from the drawer. Flipping through the pages near the end, I noticed Bikas’s name again, this time with a location, “Oval Maidan.” The Maidan was the parade ground near the High Court and the university. I wondered what that was about. But just as soon, I forgot it. There, at the bottom of the same page, after some notes about cricket, was Willy Smets’s name.

“What’s that you’re reading?” asked Janice, Frank’s secretary. She was standing above me.

I closed the notebook and placed it facedown on the desk.

“Some old dispatches,” I said. “Trying to catch up.”

A shapely, middle-aged divorcée who’d come to Bombay five years before to start a new life away from her ex, Janice had told me she’d always been fascinated with India. And when the opportunity arose at UNI, she’d jumped at it. We enjoyed our morning and afternoon tea breaks together on most days.

“What can you tell me about Nielsen?” I asked.