detective

He scribbled on his desk alone at night. His chief didn’t see the point. “Go home, it's all over.” Frankly, he didn’t know why he kept on trying. There didn’t seem like much of a reason to. When the chips are down, they’ll all turn. Show you who they really are. His office was short staffed. Somehow, they still paid people. The governments continued to pretend nothing was happening as people began to loot stores. Some of the people he had known, people who had sworn to uphold the law, were now looting and rioting and robbing. Against what? To what end? If the world was indeed going to end, like they claimed, like everyone saw, then why did you want to succumb to the lures of capitalism? Why wouldn’t you want to hug your family. Pull them closer. He wished he’d had more time with them before they had been stolen from him. But then he wouldn’t have become this. He looked all around at the papers strewn on his desk. What was the point of all this? He knew the answer before he thought of the question. It kept him busy. It kept him distracted. So he dove deeper and deeper into it. Who was this man? He put a pen to his lips and mused for a while. The man in question was known as azazil, a resident of Lahore. All roads lead to Rome, yet somehow this person kept on popping up. He’d been known to the authorities for running a smuggling operation. At least one good thing had come out of those. Long before they’d given up, governments had started openly sharing information with one another. The access was still there. Azazil had been known to the pakistani intelligence community as the financier and the brains of the beggar peddling trade. He had been a little catty. Thought of himself as some real world messiah. But he was the enabler. He had been very high profile, very good at keeping low profile, and that had suited pakistani intelligence very well. They could use him when they needed him, and it had seemed that they were going to. But then, the oddest thing happened. He disappeared. Disappearing only happened in novels and Hollywood, it did not happen in the real world. No one could just pop off the grid. But he had. No trace. No body. No dna. Nothing. He was gone. They had tried to track him, but it had been in vain. No one knew. It was said that if anyone would have known how to stop all that was happening, or at the very least provide some clues, it would be him. If, he allowed himself to think, if all this was natural. It didn’t seem like it. He was afraid to use the super- word but it seemed very much like that to him in moments of weakness. He would, on such occasions, steel himself and remind himself of what his mentor had said, “everything has an explanation.”