The gunshots had alerted the local police, who reached the scene, rounded up everyone—Tanya, her colleague, the cab driver, the two men—and took them to the police station. One of the men was Varun. He told the cops that he had slept through the evening and got up past midnight. The room service at the hotel they were staying in had shut shop for the day so he and his friend had stepped out to grab a bite.
By the time the cops let everyone go, it was 6 a.m.
Tanya had not seen Varun since then. Until today. She was overjoyed.
Varun came up to the door and smiled at her. ‘We bought more than we could smoke last night. All of us are leaving tomorrow. I mentioned it to Leon just in case anyone needed it.’
‘No problem. Come on in.’ For some strange reason, Tanya was relieved that Varun was not a drug dealer.
Varun politely turned down the invitation. ‘There is this Nigerian gentleman who will take it from me in case you don’t want it. He supplied it to me.’ Tanya looked behind him. The Nigerian was waiting for them to conclude the deal. ‘But you know how they are. If I give it back to him, he will only give me half the price that I paid. Isn’t it criminal?’
Tanya smiled. The deal was done, the money paid to Varun, and the Nigerian packed off. Tanya and Varun decided to head to the beach to catch up on life after their Rio adventure.
‘When are you headed back to Mumbai?’
‘Tomorrow morning. All of us stayed back for one last party before going back to our boring jobs.’
‘And I spoilt your party.’
‘On the contrary, Varun, you didn’t. I am so excited to see you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes! Aren’t you? After so long . . .’
‘Yes, I am.’
And he turned. Tanya was looking at him intently. He was irresistible. She walked up to him and kissed him, flush on his lips. He stepped backwards. She persisted. Kissed him again. This time, he kissed her back. Delicately, he lowered her on to the sand. The sea water crept in under her, tickling her as it flowed back into the sea, drawing out sand from underneath. There was no one around. She wrapped her hands around him and pulled him towards her. Her tongue parted his lips even as she tore off her clothes. Her lust-filled eyes implored Varun to do the same. She was lying naked in front of him. Varun paused for a moment, considering the appropriateness of what Tanya wanted him to do. She reached out and tugged at his trousers. Varun dropped his pants and slowly pushed her back on to the sand. He lowered himself and entered her gently. She moaned. He didn’t need a second invitation. He kissed her harder . . .
When they were done, the only sounds audible were the heavy breathing of two souls and the sea waves lapping passionately against the shore.
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7
Washington DC
Gillian Tan’s assassination reverberated in the corridors of Capitol Hill. The sophisticated attack shook the Obama administration. After all, Gillian had been handpicked by Barack Obama to drive American foreign policy in South Asia.
Special Agent Adrian Scott was nervous as he paced up and down the hallway outside the meeting room on the third floor of the Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. It had long been home of the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. The Gillian Tan case was his and the White House was breathing down his neck to show results.
A young woman stepped out of the conference room and called out, ‘Agent Scott, you may come in now.’
‘Thank you.’ Adrian straightened up, stretched his arms, freed his jacket sleeves, and tweaked the lapels of his jacket. A shrug of his shoulders, and he was ready to walk in.
His boss, Robert Brick was waiting for him in the conference room. He was standing next to the glazed window, and speaking in hushed tones with someone whom Adrian couldn’t recognize because his back was towards him.
‘Ah! Agent Scott.’ Brick acknowledged him. Adrian nodded nervously.
The person Brick had been talking to turned towards Adrian. It was Mike Hendricks, the chief of staff of the President of America.
‘Meet Mike Hendricks.’
Adrian had met him before. He nodded and extended his right hand for a handshake. He couldn’t help wonder what Hendricks was doing here. He knew that Mike Hendricks and Gillian Tan would have looked through each other if they had walked past each other in a corridor. They were political adversaries vying for the President’s attention all the time. His phone beeped. Quickly, he put it on silent mode.
‘The President is getting edgy . . . we don’t have a lot of time.’ Mike looked at Adrian pointedly.
‘Sir.’ And after a pause, he added, ‘I’m aware it’s a sensitive case.’
‘Good,’ Mike said. ‘Then we don’t need to waste time on that realization. What do we know so far?’
Adrian fumbled through his papers, pulled out a docket and handed it over to him.
‘Run me through it.’
‘This is the chronology of events on that day, sir.’
‘Hmm . . .’ Mike nodded. ‘I’ve been briefed over a dozen times on this.’ He was waiting for more. ‘Tell me what’s not in here.’
Adrian nodded. ‘It was a cycle bomb. Hidden in the saddle bag of a bicycle placed right next to the road that Gillian would take that day.’
Mike was flipping through the docket. ‘I’m listening. Don’t stop.’
‘An 8-kg bomb. Detonated by the interruption of a beam of light.’
Mike looked up for a moment.
‘Infra red,’ Adrian continued. ‘The beam was activated by the pilot car. And when Gillian’s car crossed it, the beam detonated the precision bomb. Gillian didn’t have a chance. The car is beyond recognition.’
‘Wasn’t it armoured? It isn’t easy to bomb one of those.’ Mike Hendricks tried to pick holes in the logic.
‘Indeed it was,’ Adrian agreed, ‘but the assassins were trained. They targeted the most vulnerable part of the car.’
Mike nodded.
‘The Misznay-Schardin effect—that’s what they used,’ Adrian continued.
‘Hmm . . . a blast that expands in one direction.’
‘Absolutely, sir. In such cases, a broad sheet of explosives is detonated. Unlike with traditional explosives, where the blast expands in all directions, in the case of an explosive sheet, the blast spreads perpendicular to the sheet. And if there is a hard, impenetrable object on one side, the blast deforms the explosive sheet into a projectile and propels it into the perpendicular direction on one side.
‘The cycle was placed in such a manner that it rested on hard rock, while the road was on its other side. When Gillian’s car triggered the blast, a copper plate attached to the explosive was projected towards the car. The bomb didn’t have the precise engineering to have moulded the copper liner into the shape of a bullet but it propelled the plate at 2.5 km per second, enough to penetrate any armoured car.’
‘Misznay-Schardin . . . been a while since I heard of it. Haven’t seen it being used lately,’ Robert muttered.
‘Quite uncommon, I must confess. In fact, a bit ancient,’ Adrian added, ‘though there are a few groups that have been known to favour it.’
‘And those would be?’
‘A few defunct Hungarian militant groups. The Red Army Faction—West Germany’s most prominent left-wing militant group. The last known attack was in 1998.’
‘Any clues?’
Adrian shook his head. ‘The road that Gillian normally travelled on was apparently blocked for repairs. I checked with the County Road Administration Board. No such work was sanctioned. The only reason the road was cordoned off and dug up was to set up the trigger mechanism. No one really saw who they were.’ After a moment’s pause, he added, ‘The worksite was completely sanitized. No clues at the blast site. Even the cycle that was used . . . its origin untraceable.’
‘How is Nikki?’
Mike asked.
‘She has taken it quite bravely. She has given her statement to the FBI.’
‘Hmm . . . so we have nothing to report to the President.’
‘We will definitely have something for you soon, sir. We are hopeful.’
‘Be sensitive towards Nikki and Gloria. They are very close to the first family,’ Mike instructed.
‘Yes, sir. We are keeping them involved and informed of the investigation. Even when we scanned the premises for clues, we did it in Nikki Tan’s presence.’
‘Good. Thank you. That will be all.’ When Mike Hendricks said this, Adrian got up and walked out of the room. As he opened the door, he glanced at his phone. He had overshot his time. Four missed calls. Two messages.
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8
Washington DC
Adrian was shivering with nervous excitement when he got out of the meeting. The case was bigger than he had imagined. Was this the career-defining case he had been waiting for all along?
He checked his mobile and returned a call. His secretary answered. ‘You were trying to reach me, Mona?’
‘Oh yes. It was Tony. He came looking for you. I’m connecting you now.’
‘Hey, Adrian . . . Where the hell have you been?’
‘In a briefing session with the President’s chief of staff. Tell me someone died that you had to call me so many times.’
‘No. The guy who had to die, he died a few days ago.’
‘That’s a terrible joke, Tony.’
‘Where’s your sense of humour, Adrian?’
‘Fuck you, Tony. Why did you call?’
‘There is something I need you to see. Sending the email to your mobile. Take a look.’
The message came in: Cycle Job done. Confirm transfer of bitcoins.
‘What was that, Tony?’
‘Since the murder, we’ve been watching all the agencies that could have had a vested interest in killing Gillian. British Intelligence picked up a significant increase in chatter on lines between New York and a few hubs in the Indian Ocean. This is a message they intercepted. It was being sent from a server in Latvia to a server in the Indian Ocean region. From there we lost it. So our assumption is that it’s intended for someone in that region.’
‘What’s the connection?’
‘Gillian was the President’s advisor for foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia.’
‘That in itself doesn’t say anything. Does it?’
‘It doesn’t. But it’s the other visual clues that got me excited,’ Tony rebutted. ‘The message says cycle job. In other words, the cycle that blasted Gillian’s car.’
‘Okay.’ Adrian sounded sceptical
‘Yes. Cycle job done. The next part of the message says confirm transfer of bitcoins. Compensation for the work done? It’s too much of a coincidence.’
‘It’s possible that what you are saying is right, Tony. Do we have a tag on the location where this mail originated?’
Tony shook his head. ‘No. These guys are not idiots.’
‘It’s TOR again?’ Adrian sounded angry.
TOR or The Onion Router was a free network for facilitating online anonymity. By directing Internet traffic through an anonymous network managed by volunteers across the world, TOR encryption made it possible for the Internet user to conceal his location and identity.
The ‘onion’ in TOR referred to the method of encryption, wherein any message or information transmitted over the network was encrypted and bounced over numerous nodes before reaching its final destination. Every node in the router would decrypt one level of encryption, with the final node decrypting the last level, thus delivering the data to the final destination in its intended form. No node would know the initial source or the final destination. It was almost impossible to unscramble any information sent via TOR. Newspapers called TOR the ‘king of high secure, low latency Internet anonymity’.
TOR had become one of the most sophisticated tools used by criminals and drug peddlers to transact over the web. Even the sophisticated equipment and surveillance of the federal agencies was not good enough to crack the privacy that TOR provided.
After reading the email a few times, Adrian realized Tony was waiting for the next set of instructions.
‘If there is any truth in what you are saying, there are too many balls in the air. It could be anything. Muslim fanatics in Af-Pak, Hindu fundamentalists in India, Sri Lankan rebels fighting the government for Tamil liberation, Iranian extremists, Iraqis owing allegiance to Saddam. It could be anything. Where do we begin?’
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9
Mumbai
The phishing scandal was giving Swami a migraine. By morning, over 3 crore rupees had been siphoned off from 150 customer accounts.
When Charan rang him at 5 a.m., Swami made a judgement call and shut down the online fund transfer option on NYIB’s Internet banking facility. He did not see any other way of stopping the carnage. ‘I am happier dealing with customer service issues arising out of the non-availability of online transfers than exposing more idiotic customers to this scam,’ he told Charan. ‘We don’t even know how many more customers have succumbed to this and how many more fraudulent transfers like this will go through.’
From the looks of it, this time around, the phishers had got hold of the entire database of NYIB customers and spammed them with an enticing and extremely realistic offer. In the past, the phishers had used huge bait, often running into millions of dollars. Most customers would not believe it and would promptly junk the mail. This time around, the phishers promised small amounts of money and offered a believable story.
It was around 5.30 a.m. when the conversation ended. Even though he was an early riser, Swami hated being woken up before his scheduled time. Rubbing his sleepy, tired eyes, he walked up to the door to check if the newspaper had been delivered. As he picked up the Times of India, his pulse started racing. The lead news story on the front page read: NYIB’s apathy takes customers for a ride. The article named twenty-two customers who had been cheated. Though it clarified that this was a phishing attack, it slammed NYIB’s security protocol and the safety of Internet banking in general.
Swami collapsed on the sofa in the living room. He was not worried about the phishing scam as much as he was now concerned about the repercussions of the article. The Singapore office, he was sure, would look for scapegoats for the crisis. They had not even been told about it yet.
‘Is everything okay?’ Kalpana had also woken up by then.
Swami briefly told her everything that had happened. He pulled out his laptop and logged in.
It’s always better to be the messenger when the news is bad. Else you are considered a suspect. He had to talk to Singapore before the overzealous compliance folks called them.
His phone rang. He walked to the corner of the room and picked it. ‘Hi, Aditya.’ Only Aditya could have called him that early.
Aditya Rao was a legend in the Indian banking industry. He was credited with pioneering the retail banking business in India, through NYIB. After working all over the world in his twenty years with NYIB, he had come back to India to set up the retail banking business. He had gone on to quit the bank and start his own BPO called eTIOS.
Sundeep Srivastava, his former protégé at NYIB, was now his right-hand man.
eTIOS had grown into one of the most respected BPO outfits in India. Seeing the success of eTIOS and the entrepreneurial skills of Aditya, several of his private equity investors had requested him to incubate a gaming company. Aditya had agreed and that was how Indiscape, the latest gaming sensation, was born. The browser-based gaming company had a website where anybody could log in and play virtual games for free.
Aditya had seen the newspaper article and called Swami. ‘Hey, Swami, what happened?
What is this rubbish? Your public relations team should have scuttled it. In any case, this should not have been front page news,’ he rattled off.
‘What can I say, Aditya? What is done is done. I’m trying to contain the damage now. I can’t even get through to Madhuri. Her phone is very conveniently switched off.’ Madhuri was NYIB’s press relations head.
Always ready to offer advice, especially when it came to his two protégés, Aditya had only one thing to say. ‘Handle this with care. Make sure you protect yourself.’ Even though Swami was not directly responsible for this mishap, anything that happened in retail banking was his baby.
‘Yes, Aditya. Let me call Malvika and brief her. She is one mad woman.’ He hung up.
Malvika was livid. ‘Swami, I can’t be seen running a non-compliant bank.’
‘This isn’t non-compliance! Our customers are expected to be careful too. They can’t be greedy and give away their account numbers and passwords to anyone.’
‘Come on, Swami! Give me a better argument. How did the phishers get hold of our customer base?’
‘Malvika, with so much outsourcing and sharing of data with vendors, all it would take for data to leak is an unscrupulous vendor. For all you know the data could have been stolen from Vodafone’s servers. It’s those of our customers, specifically the ones who have a Vodafone connection and have an auto-debit instruction recorded for their mobile bills, who seem to have been hit.’
‘That won’t fly, Swami. We should have anticipated that this could blow up, and escalated it as soon as the first complaint came in. As it is, wherever I go, people tell me that our Internet banking sucks because it is so slow.’
‘That’s a different discussion, Malvika.’ Swami was getting irritated because she was not focusing on the core phishing issue.
‘In any case, call Singapore and bring them into the loop. Please be ready with what we are going to say to them.’
God is a Gamer Page 3