The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

and Bangladesh, countries whose tech users were hungry for relevant content. Living in extended family systems gave these users deep pockets and made them early adopters of technology. Then there was the billion-dollar Muslim market. Jia’s company understood their needs instinctively.

New business was always carefully scrutinised before being taken on. Users were given unique invite codes to websites only after vetting procedures had been carried out. As the clean money stream flowed in, it laundered the black money that flowed alongside it.

Clients that were trying to break into emerging markets across South Asia found themselves in a multilingual, highly skilled hub, working with men and women with chameleon-like abilities to switch cultures. Eventually, what had started as a front organisation soon became a lucrative business.

It was only six months before employees were being headhunted by multinationals, start-ups and Silicon Valley’s biggest exports. Jia was clever. Because dirty money secretly holds hands with clean, she encouraged the men and women to take up the offers, knowing that they were planting the seeds of a powerful network. The Company celebrated their success. The plan to expand the network and make it global in the next ten years was right on track. No one asked questions. The police stayed away; the streets were being cleaned. The unemployment figures were going down. No one knew what was really going on. They were running the country’s biggest drugs delivery operation all from the centre of this city.

Jia had agreed with Idris that the best place to hide something was in plain sight. ‘The best cons are the biggest ones,’ she told her cousins. ‘The ones that everyone can see but can’t prove. People won’t believe we have the guts to be so brazen. They’ll see it and ignore it. And the ones that won’t, we buy them. Buy enough people and they’ll drown out the voice of dissent.’ By the end of the year they were cleaning money for international syndicates and some of the world’s biggest crime families.

But she also never lost sight of the endgame. ‘If someone wants to get clean, let them, help them. We’re not in this forever. We’re in this to help our people get clean and get out. That is how empires are built.’

They built their new empire tall and high and with walls of steel to guard it. Its reach spread from the small-time client to the highest echelons of society, and they worked hard to get there.

Its success helped relieve the pressure that had been coming from the Jirga to exact badal on Nowak for what he did to Benyamin and for her father’s murder. Jia had not forgotten what was owed, it was just that her priorities were elsewhere. Reshaping the family business was a matter of urgency – it had been left far too long. Revenge, however, was a dish best served cold.

CHAPTER 34

As soon as Jia stepped through the door of her London apartment, calm descended and the responsibilities of her new-found life slipped away. It had been her sanctuary for a long time. More than a year had passed since she made Pukhtun House her permanent residence. She had few regrets about it, but as she walked through the hallway and into her bedroom, she realised she missed the freedom of this life.

She’d kept the apartment as a bolt-hole but hadn’t been able to visit often. Work stole all her time, but this week Maria had forced her to leave. ‘It’s half-term, I can come with you,’ she’d said. ‘We’ll spend a few days together, try the Darjeeling Express Biryani Supper Club and take in a show.’

‘Although maybe not on the same day,’ said Jia. ‘I can’t imagine anything worse than turning up to a West End show smelling of salan.’ It wasn’t the offence taken by others that worried her. The lingering aroma of curry on clothes and fingertips, no matter how expensive the hand soap, made her anxious. You only had to have had someone hiss ‘Smelly Paki!’ at you once for it to leave its brand on you forever.

Maria and Jia had taken the train to King’s Cross, enjoying Northern Rail’s hospitality of English breakfast tea and moreish shortbread. Jia felt the tension leave her shoulders as she lay her burden down in the presence of her sister. They had an unspoken agreement never to discuss the family business, but everything else was on the table. Relationships, the state of the city’s schools, Elyas, Ahad and their mother were all topics they covered in the two hours ten minutes they were on the train.

‘Mama seems even quieter than usual,’ said Jia, as the dining-car attendant refilled her teacup and walked away. They were in first class, the carriage busier than Jia had expected. She wasn’t bound to travelling during school holidays, and it crossed her mind that she never had been.

‘It’s her age,’ said Maria.

‘She leaves the room when I walk in.’

‘You know what she’s like.’

‘You’re right. It’s like I’m an extension of her, as if she can say and do whatever she likes to me without consequence. She was never like that with Zan.’

‘Zan was golden,’ said Maria. ‘The way Mama talks about him, as if he was some saint.’

‘She adored him, but I don’t think she likes me.’ This was the first time it occurred to Jia that it was possible for her mother to love her and not like her. Perhaps Sanam Khan could sense what Jia had become, or knew what she had done, but it was more likely to be something else, something simpler.

‘You have lived a completely different life to her. She stayed home and looked after Baba, raised us. She sacrificed everything for her husband, and gave no thought to how people should treat her. You and I, we draw clear lines about how we expect to be treated. She just doesn’t understand that.’

Jia knew her little sister was right: their mother didn’t understand them and never would. Much of their love