T: When we were getting into the boat, the waves were quite high. Another boat came. Everyone raised the alarm that the navy had come. In the confusion, Ismail’s satellite phone got left behind.

The line went quiet again and Shekhar turned quickly to Rathod.

‘Share the Mumbai gunman’s number, the virtual number and the multiple handlers’ numbers with the Maharashtra ATS. Request Uttam Saxena, the Mumbai station chief of the Research and Intelligence Wing, who has worked with the Maharashtra Police, to listen to the conversations between the gunman and his handlers. Also, share with the Mumbai CP and the Mumbai police control room whatever information of operational value that can be deducted from the intercepted communications. And ask the navy and coast guard to be on the lookout for the satellite phone on a boat or motor launch which brought these gunmen.’

‘Yes, sir. Sir, we now know how this number came under our surveillance. It was you who authorized the interception of this number and two others around three months ago. You said the tapped numbers could be of help one day. The LeT must have procured the SIM cards for these numbers to give to its suicide attackers in India.’

Shekhar stared blankly at Rathod. Initially, he had no recollection of having authorized the surveillance. Seconds later, it all came back to him.

A senior Jammu and Kashmir police officer, Shrikant Bhaskar, had approached Shekhar around three months ago, giving the latter the opportunity to plant the SIM cards in the LeT. A Kashmir police intelligence department’s operative, codenamed ‘Mongoose’, who had infiltrated the LeT and was able to embed himself in the local unit as a committed terrorist who specialized in supplying logistics for terror operations, had informed Bhaskar about the directive of his Lashkar ‘commander’ to buy thirty-five prepaid Indian SIM cards. Shekhar was delighted to get such an opportunity.

Shekhar had thereafter arranged for three prepaid SIM cards, purchased in Delhi, to get embedded in the LeT. Shekhar had had a hunch that the cards were meant for some big operation of the LeT in India.

Bhaskar was involved in several counter-insurgency and counter-intelligence operations, largely against the Pakistan-based groups in the state, in active cooperation with CTC.

‘If one of those three SIM cards has become active, it means that the Mumbai attack is being orchestrated by LeT’s men on the ground, since the cards were procured by the LeT’s setup in Kashmir for sending to Pakistan,’ Shekhar said.

The actual groundwork for this major breakthrough, which allowed a peek inside the secretive world of the shadowy outfit, and which enabled the CTC, Mumbai Police and other counter-terror agencies such as the Anti-Terrorism and Counter-Intelligence Squad (ATCS) and the Research and Intelligence Wing (R&IW) to listen in to the conversations of the attackers active in Mumbai, had begun around a decade earlier.