The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

to help. The little girl from Bradford, the boy from Luton, or the teenager in Ilford – who steps up for them when they need a job, or an internship, or money to finish their education? No one. And no one will, except us.’

And she told him her plan, and he listened, nodding at her every word. Things were about to change.

CHAPTER 33

The plan was simple, and was operational in just four weeks. They took the brightest and the best, the youngsters who couldn’t get ahead because of their skin tone or the way they spoke, or because they just didn’t know how to get to the place they wanted. The rude boys, the dropouts and the misunderstoods. The artistic, the creative, the risk-takers and shortcut-makers. The broken men and women the extremist mullahs wanted to lure away with false promises, twisted surahs and skewed images of pop culture, only to abuse them and turn them into instruments of mass destruction.

And they built their empire, a brave new world, alongside the old, a world that stood on the foundations of the past but was slicker and digitised. Jia’s rules were clear. ‘They have to be here because they want to be,’ she said. ‘Not because they have to. That’s the only way they’ll stay loyal. If they’re with us under duress they will succumb to a better offer or be seduced into disloyalty. We can’t take that risk.’

They did what they set out to do. They trained them, gave them a place to go, a place where they were understood, valued and their skills known. They were given a salary, their taxes were paid, and under the table they were handed a cut from the job. Students enrolled in the educational arm and the press loved it: they were ‘helping the disenfranchised’.

‘Who in their right mind would name a drug-dealing business after an illegal substance?’ Malik asked.

‘We would. And we have,’ said Idris. The name was his idea: the Opium Den. ‘They may know what we’re doing, they may eventually gain some understanding of it, but they will never prove anything. We’re smarter than they are, and so are our people. They like to underestimate us, so let them.’

Jia always knew the venture would succeed but the speed at which it did surprised even her. Then there was the sideline business…

Jia had instructed Idris and her team to take the old mills that stood off Canal Road and redevelop them. Situated across from the shopping precinct and the hotel known for its hourly knocking-shop rates, it wasn’t the sort of place you’d expect a successful tech company to build its headquarters. But it worked and it thrived. She put Benyamin in charge of the day-to-day running of the organisation’s buildings. It meant he had a significant role but very little to do with the illegal operations. She needed him to stay safe and out of harm’s way. At least for now.

After decades of being reminded that they belonged to an underachieving and unemployed community, the people of this city had stopped trying to climb out of the black hole in which they found themselves. Those who did were pulled back in by the weight of others wanting to hide from their misery. But when ‘The Company’ (as those who worked for the Opium Den referred to it) told them they deserved better and gave them better, they grafted. Jia made sure her employees got everything they needed. The Khan’s philosophy of trust and loyalty became the cornerstones of the Opium Den.

There were two sides to the business, legitimate and illegal. The illegal arm disrupted the country’s drugs market. There were few rules other than: ‘Get it done, do it right and don’t tell anyone.’ The young developers devoured the work. They were hungry for opportunity and starved of validation. The Company gave them a place to belong and a sense of achievement. Their cultural background was an asset, not a problem to be managed or a box to be ticked. Their time spent late-night web-surfing for pot and porn was paying off; they had developed an extensive knowledge of the darknet. It allowed them to build a modern drugs marketplace that gave buyers anonymised access to any illegal substance they wanted. It was an eBay-like set-up, and payment was taken using Bitcoin and other virtual currencies through a system similar to Paypal.

Drugs and consensual sex was what they sold. Akbar Khan’s death had turned Jia’s monochrome life various shades of grey. She cast aside her belief in the rule of law, leaving the balance of sin and virtue to God. He could sift and sort and allot after she died. But while she lived she knew that the good she did outweighed the bad. Children were fed, women slept soundly and men had self-esteem, and that was all that life came down to in the end. If heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana helped rich men sleep and poor men exist through another day, then who was she to stop it? Then there was the simple question of economics. Someone was going to supply, so why not them?

There were, however, lines that Jia and her men were not willing to cross. Clients demanding weapons were told ‘no’, clients demanding paedophilia were told ‘sure’ – and then their virtual lives were hacked into tiny pieces, evidence handed over to the authorities, and their actual lives destroyed.

The Company’s reputation for secure and high-performance delivery soon turned it into a world-class organisation. In the beginning, clients brought their legal business with them to mask their illegal purchases, but when the firm began delivering slicker products than its competition, and solving unsolvable tech problems, it found itself with new and lucrative accounts that were only interested in its software development skills. They built niche apps, taking a chance on ideas that mainstream venture capitalists would pass on. From social media to salah, their cultural knowledge gave them insight into the markets of India, Pakistan