Baitha hai, sir, baitha hai!’(‘‘‘He is sitting there, Sir, he is there!’’’)( The Netting of Punjab CM’s assassin) continues....

I first visited Adhchini Village, where the second informer and Satish Jha with his team were waiting. The Gurudwara was recced by us discreetly and it was decided that the man, if spotted and identified by the informer, would be picked up not from inside the holy place for obvious reasons, but at a safe distance away.

Those were the days when mobile phones had not yet arrived in India. To make matters more difficult, the CBI, primarily an anti-corruption agency, had no wireless network of its own. Thus, there was no way the team under Satish Jha could stay in touch with me as I intended to head the other team to be deployed in Arjun Nagar. So I left Satish and his three officers in a government jeep, with a driver and the informer, after wishing them Godspeed and the best of luck.

The other informer and I then reached Arjun Nagar, an unplanned, haphazard semi-pucca residential area with houses packed close to each other. He pointed out a ground floor apartment in a congested by-lane to be kept under watch. It was possibly the terrorist’s place of stay where he could surface.

The location was such that it seemed impossible to find a place from where to mount a watch. With great difficulty, we found an open plot of land with a four-foot boundary wall close to the entrance to the lane. I collected my Team-2 and we all sat in the open ground hiding behind its low walls.

To be continued…