The attempt to ambush Khader’s party in Pakistan

The attempt to ambush Abdel Khader Khan’s party in Pakistan was Abdul Ghani’s effort to destroy Khader and council members outside his faction in one stroke. The plan failed because Khader had friends in Pakistan who warned him, but its concealed betrayal shaped the later revenge carried out in Bombay. Its full significance emerges retrospectively, as Lin learns both who exposed the party and what Khader had charged Nazeer to do if he did not return.

Background and the Pakistani tip-off

The attempt is recalled after Lin and Nazeer have met again in Bombay. Sanjay identifies Abdul Ghani as the person behind the tip-off to the Pakistani police. Lin agrees that the conclusion is evident: Ghani was Pakistani, had influential connections there, and had previously told Lin about the reach of those connections. The disclosure turns a police raid into something more deliberate than a danger the party simply happened to encounter. Someone close to Khader had supplied the means to locate him.

Lin also looks back on why the betrayal had escaped his notice. He had liked Ghani and felt flattered by the attention Ghani gave him. Ghani had been his patron on the council after Khader, and had invested time, energy, and affection in their friendship. At the time of the raid, Lin’s attention was also caught up in shame and revenge. He remembers sitting with Khader and Khaled Ansari to hear the Blind Singers, then reading Didier Levy’s letter and resolving to kill Madame Zhou. These recollections do not change the evidence against Ghani; they expose the personal attachments and preoccupations that had kept Lin from interpreting it.

The intended ambush and Khader’s escape

According to Sanjay, Ghani intended the Pakistani police operation to kill Khader, Nazeer, Khaled Ansari, Lin, and the council members who were not with him. The plan was therefore aimed beyond Khader himself: it would remove Ghani’s opponents from the council together, making the raid an attempted purge as well as an assassination plot. Khader’s friends in Pakistan warned him, allowing the party to escape the trap. The warning is the decisive reversal in the episode: Ghani had arranged to use local police against the group, but Khader’s own connections in the country prevented the plan from succeeding.

Sanjay suggests that Ghani understood from the party’s escape that his position had become precarious. Yet, as he recounts it, Ghani made no immediate move against the group in Bombay. He waited, hoping that Khader and the others might be killed in the war. That delay links the failed operation in Pakistan to the wider conflict without establishing that the ambush itself took place on a battlefield. Ghani’s strategy depended first on police action, then on the possibility that war would finish what the failed trap had not.

Khader’s instruction and Nazeer’s retaliation

Khader did not want the truth about Ghani made public at the time. As Lin understands Nazeer’s account and checks his interpretation with Sanjay, Khader had instructed Nazeer to keep the betrayal secret. He also gave him a conditional order: if Khader died in the war, Nazeer was to return to Bombay and avenge him. The instruction makes the ambush more than a thwarted attack. Even after the party escaped, its consequences remained suspended in Khader’s plan for what might happen if he did not survive.

Sanjay confirms that Nazeer’s interpretation is right. He then describes the retaliation as completed: Ghani’s remaining supporters were dealt with, and none remained in Bombay; they were dead or had fled. The account gives the outcome in collective terms rather than detailing individual encounters. It nevertheless establishes the chain from Ghani’s betrayal, through Khader’s private instruction, to the removal of the opposing faction from the city. Nazeer’s revenge is presented as the fulfillment of a charge made under the expectation that Khader might be lost.

Later disclosures and narrative significance

A later account from Nazeer broadens the picture of Ghani’s connections. He says that Ghani had many friends in Pakistan’s secret police, the Inter-Services Intelligence, and describes links between that service and Iranian intelligence, SAVAK, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Mossad. Nazeer’s account also connects Ghani to a separate trap near Crawford Market, involving Iranian men and an attack in which Nazeer was shot. That later episode should not be confused with the Pakistani ambush: it reveals further dimensions of Ghani’s network, while the Pakistan account concerns the earlier effort to expose Khader’s party to the police.

The episode reaches the reader through a delayed explanation rather than a scene of the attempted ambush itself. At the reunion, Nazeer speaks in a language Lin does not fully understand; Lin translates what he thinks Nazeer has said, and Sanjay confirms it. That exchange makes the disclosure depend on both interpretation and verification. It also reframes an earlier escape: survival in Pakistan had not proved that Khader’s council was secure, because the danger came from within its own ranks. The eventual retaliation closes the immediate factional struggle in Bombay, while the account leaves visible the cost of the betrayal: trust within the council had become inseparable from secrecy, war, and revenge.