Saboteur

by RV Raman

  There was little more Vibha could accomplish by querying databases. A more detailed assessment was now required to unravel the finer details of the modus operandi behind the suppression of orders, but that could only be done by logging into the system and conducting forensic audit – something she couldn’t do.

  She had just closed all the windows on her laptop when her desk phone buzzed. It was Darshan, calling her to his cabin. While Vibha was there, Darshan engaged her in a work-related discussion for fifteen minutes, before sending her back to her desk to fetch a report.

  As soon as she had left his cabin, Darshan picked up the mobile phone she had left on his desk, switched it off and tucked it away at the back of his bottom drawer, behind a stack of papers. He continued the discussion on her return for another twenty minutes, before concluding the meeting.

  ‘My phone!’ Vibha exclaimed suddenly, as she was gathering up her papers at the end of the meeting. ‘Now where on earth could I have put it?’

  She looked around her, but couldn’t see it anywhere in the vicinity.

  ‘Again, Vibha?’ Darshan teased.

  Vibha’s tendency to misplace her phone had made her the butt of many a joke at the data centre.

  ‘I thought I had it with me,’ she said in confusion, sifting through the mess of papers on Darshan’s desk.

  ‘When was the last call you made or received?’ Darshan asked.

  ‘At lunch, when I was at the food court. I spoke to –’ She bit off her sentence. The last conversation had been with Vishwanath.

  ‘Did you leave it there?’ Darshan asked, seeming not to notice the way she had cut herself off abruptly. ‘If not, it may be on your desk.’

  Twenty minutes of searching in the office and at the food court didn’t yield any results. Nor did calling her number from another phone.

  ‘Why would it be switched off?’ she demanded of nobody in particular.

  ‘That’s what happened when my phone was pinched,’ Darshan commiserated. ‘The thief switched it off immediately so that the phone couldn’t be located.’

  ‘Someone stole my phone in the office?’ Vibha asked incredulously. ‘When there are security cameras everywhere?’

  Like in every other data centre, most areas here were under surveillance. It was a requirement for the data centre to qualify for the highest level. Security – both physical and digital – was paramount.

  ‘Unlikely.’ Darshan shook his head. ‘You may have left it behind at the food court.’

  ‘I don’t know… I asked the people there when I went downstairs. Damn it! Next time, I’m going to get myself a cheap phone.’

  Earlier, when she was closeted with Darshan in his cabin, much had been happening in the basement car park, where Vibha’s car was parked in a reserved slot in a far corner, next to Darshan’s large SUV. Two men had driven up in Darshan’s SUV, slipped a jack behind a front wheel of Vibha’s small car and jacked it up. To all appearances, they were changing a wheel, one with a punctured tyre.

  When the front of the car was fully jacked up, one of the men had slid under it with a pair of cutting pliers. In the next thirty seconds, he had cut several wires before emerging from under the car. The other man had quickly lowered the car and put away the jack.

  Nothing short of reconnecting the wires would now make Vibha’s car start when she came downstairs an hour later.

  Elsewhere, neither Dhruvi nor Nilay had been able to reach Vibha’s mobile phone. Darshan had left instructions with the front desk that he and Vibha were not to be disturbed. Repeated calls to her mobile didn’t get through. At 6 o’clock sharp, the front-desk girl left and the telephone switchboard went into automatic mode. While searching for Vibha’s phone, Darshan had quietly pulled out the wire from Vibha’s desk phone to prevent it from ringing, should a call come through to her extension.

  From the other end of the city, Dhruvi’s Innova, with lights flashing on top and siren blaring, was racing towards the data centre. As were Nilay and Gautam in separate cars. Both of them were now a couple of kilometres from the data centre.

  It was close to 7 p.m. when Vibha wound up for the day and made her way to the gloomy basement area. Widely spaced lights created small pools of illumination here and there. The tall, stout pillars standing between them cast eerie shadows. Less than a third of the parking slots were occupied at this time of the evening, as she walked nervously out of the lift.

  Dark, claustrophobic areas with low ceilings always gave her the willies and the long walk from the lift to her parking slot in the far corner was one part of her daily routine that she liked the least. It always made her feel uneasy. The roar of air rushing through the large air ducts leading to the central air conditioning muffled her footfalls and many other sounds.

  Of the two men who had immobilized Vibha’s car, one was in the driver’s seat of Darshan’s SUV, posing as his driver. The other man, whom Puneet would have recognized as Nathan, was nowhere to be seen.

  Vibha hurried to her car, pulling out her car remote as she went. Approaching the vehicle, she pressed a button on her remote. Nothing happened. She pressed it again. The car showed no signs of life. She tapped the remote with the palm of her other hand a few times and tried again. Still nothing.

  By this time, she had almost reached her car. She tapped the remote hard against her laptop bag and pressed the buttons repeatedly, throwing nervous glances at the stranger who seemed to be Darshan’s new driver. When no amount of shaking and tapping the remote helped, she inserted the key into the driver’s door and opened it.

  The car siren, which should have blared at the intrusion, remained silent. Growing increasingly nervous, Vibha inserted the key into the ignition and tried to start the car. No response. The car was dead.

  A minute after Vibha had left the office, Darshan followed her down to the deserted basement car park.

  ‘Car not starting?’ he asked, walking up to Vibha’s car, parked next to his own.

  ‘It was okay in the morning,’ Vibha mumbled. ‘Looks like there’s an electrical problem. Your driver thinks the battery is gone.’

  ‘Let the car be here for the night,’ Darshan suggested. ‘I’ll drop you home. We can get someone to look at the car tomorrow.’

  As an unsuspecting Vibha got into one of the two middle-row seats, Darshan took the seat beside her next to the opposite window. The driver climbed into his seat and started the car. The doors locked automatically with an ominous series of clicks and the vehicle began pulling out of the parking slot.

  Hardly had the SUV pulled out than running footsteps echoed in the basement from the direction of the lift.

  ‘Vibha!’ yelled a familiar voice, making her jerk her head around towards its source.

  It was Nilay. He had just come down to the basement and was running pell-mell towards the SUV, gesticulating wildly.

  ‘Vibha!’ he shouted again. ‘Stop! Get out of the car!’

  With the windows up, Vibha could hear his voice, but was unable to decipher his words. She pressed the button on the door’s armrest to lower the window, but it didn’t respond to her touch; the window stayed stubbornly immobile. After three attempts, she tried opening the door. But in vain.

  She realized with a sudden feeling of dread that the driver had locked the windows and engaged the door’s child lock. She turned fearfully to Darshan, sitting next to her. Her eyes fell on the long, black object in his hand.

  A gun.

  ‘Don’t even try to get out,’ he warned, his voice soft, his face a mask.

  At the same time, a man who had been hiding under a rug behind the rear seats threw off his cover and straightened up. Nathan. He had a long-bladed dagger in his hand, which he held against Vibha’s throat without uttering a word.

  The driver gunned the engine and raced the car towards the exit ramp. Nilay, who was standing between the SUV and the exit ramp, stepped into the driving lane and stood there with his arms spread wide.

  ‘Nilay!’ Vibha cried. �
��No!’ A sob burst through her lips and she lunged forward at the driver.

  The keen edge of Nathan’s dagger bit into the side of her neck. Vibha gasped in pain as the dagger cut into her flesh, leaving a gash, a quarter of an inch deep. A moment later, Darshan’s free arm came slicing down on her hands, knocking them away from the driver.

  ‘Don’t move!’ he barked.

  The SUV was approaching Nilay now. Vibha watched, petrified, mindless of the blood pouring down her collar. Nilay’s mouth was open, his eyes wide.

  An instant before the SUV was upon him, Nilay leapt aside and the large vehicle roared past him in third gear, making for the exit.

  Vibha turned as the SUV passed Nilay to see her husband rising and pursuing the vehicle on foot. She watched helplessly through the rear window as the car pulled away from him. She felt the SUV turn and ascend the ramp, still moving swiftly in third gear, far too swiftly.

  She had just jerked her head around to face forward and the SUV was about to emerge from the ramp, when a large white car darted into its path. A splintering crash sounded, followed by the screech of tortured metal. Vibha was thrown forward into the backrest of the front seat.

  Two airbags exploded from the dashboard. The one to the right slapped into the now blinded driver’s face. Simultaneously, Nathan, who had been leaning forwards between the two middle-row seats with the dagger in hand, flew forward and crashed, head first, into the dashboard between the two airbags.

  Dazed from the impact of the collision, Vibha slumped to the floor between her seat and the one in front of her. Meanwhile, Nilay raced up the exit ramp towards the vehicles that had just crashed into each other. He reached her door, yanked it open from the outside, and pulled her out, his face wrought with anxiety and fear.

  While Nathan lay senseless, the driver, his seat belt jammed, was struggling to extricate himself. But Darshan’s seat was vacant.

  From the outside of the ramp came a tall running figure, ignoring the large white car and making for the SUV.

  Gautam.

  He and Nilay had arrived at the data centre simultaneously and discovered that Vibha and Darshan had just gone down to the basement car park. While Nilay had rushed to the basement, Gautam had called his driver and directed him to block the exit ramp from the basement with his white Audi. The Audi had arrived there in the nick of time. The driver of the Audi, dazed but largely unhurt except for a couple of bruises and a bump on his forehead, was now stepping out unsteadily from the wrecked car.

  ‘Is she okay?’ Gautam called out to Nilay, sliding to a halt as he saw Vibha bleeding in her husband’s arms. ‘Dear Lord!’ he exclaimed and spun around to locate Darshan.

  Wielding his gun, Darshan was backing down the exit ramp into the basement.

  ‘Darshan!’ Gautam called out. ‘Stop. It’s all over. Drop the gun.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Darshan answered slowly, his voice sounding eerily calm and echoing in the basement. ‘It’s over for me. But is it over for the Purarias?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gautam began taking small steps towards him.

  ‘Ask your brother when I am gone. Dilip will tell you the gory details.’

  Darshan brought up his right hand and held the gun to his own temple.

  ‘Darshan!’ Gautam yelled. ‘No! Don’t do it. This is no way to go.’

  ‘No?’ Darshan asked, a strange half-smile on his face. ‘What’s left for me?’

  ‘Please, Darshan. Don’t. I beg of you.’

  In response, Darshan pulled the trigger.

  ■

  ‘How did you and Gautam happen to land up at my office?’ Vibha asked Nilay. ‘That too in the nick of time?’

  The couple was with Gautam in a hospital, where Vibha was recuperating from her wounds. She had received several stitches in her neck and it was now bandaged. Fortunately, the cut was not deep enough to threaten major blood vessels or the windpipe.

  ‘The Inspector called and told me about Darshan,’ Nilay replied. ‘She also said that two of his men would be coming after you at the data centre. When we couldn’t get through to you over the phone, I drove like a madman to reach your office. The Inspector was too far away, on the other side of town.’

  ‘And around that time, I got a call from my father,’ Gautam said. ‘He gave me the most distressing news I had ever received in my life – Dilip, my brother, had deceived us all and done something unpardonable. Father suspected that he and Darshan may have been behind Moin’s death. I took off immediately to confront Darshan at the data centre. I arrived there at the very moment that Nilay did.’

  ‘Why did Dilip do this? He wouldn’t have wanted to sabotage MyMagicHat.’

  ‘Two reasons, Vibha. The first has to do with valuation. If what we have discovered is true, about one-third of the orders in MyMagicHat are fake. That means this nefarious scheme inflated our GMV by at least 50 per cent. At a 2x or 3x multiple, that added as much as a billion dollars to the valuation.’

  ‘A billion dollars!’ Vibha exclaimed in surprise and winced at the stab of pain from her neck wound. ‘A billion dollars, Gautam? How much of that did Dilip get?’

  ‘Dilip held a large stake indirectly through a firm called Copper Twig Investments. None of us – my father, Raj or I – knew about it. By gradually liquidating his stake, Dilip must have put away at least a quarter of a billion overseas.’

  ‘Wow!’ Vibha whispered. ‘A quarter billion dollars! That’s serious money! No wonder he went to such lengths to hide it.’

  ‘And the second reason is this: Dilip is accustomed to recovering his entire investment in a venture in the first couple of years. Finding no other way to do that at MyMagicHat, he resorted to this scheme wherein the 37 IRs pocketed the incentives and marketing cost reimbursement, which were nothing but a way of funding sellers’ discounts. The IRs incurred no cost on the fake orders, as they sold nothing. Yet they pocketed the incentive and reimbursements that could be anywhere between 15 per cent and 30 per cent. Dilip subsequently siphoned it off.’

  ‘I suspect the 37 IRs generated a lot of transactions involving products where the gap-funding was the highest, Gautam,’ Nilay said. ‘That’s what drove us into a cash crunch.’

  ‘Then the cash crunch was not engineered by competitors?’ Gautam asked, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘We’ll know for sure only when we analyze the transactions in the light of what we’ve now discovered. But this is my suspicion. While competitors would have contributed to it by adjusting their prices and delivery times, I always thought it a little unlikely that they could have had such a significant impact. It’s the IRs’ fake transactions that must have accounted for the bulk of it.’

  ‘What did Darshan get out of this?’ Vibha asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Gautam said miserably. ‘My father suspects that he may have had a minor share in the offshore company that invested through Copper Twig.’

  ‘I see… Then it was Darshan who bugged MyMagicHat? Why bug Dilip’s own company?’

  ‘The scheme that you and Nilay have uncovered could work only if all of us at MyMagicHat remained in the dark, especially me. It was, therefore, imperative for Dilip to be sure that we didn’t get the slightest whiff of it. To monitor us, he had bugs installed.’

  ‘KRS Surveillance, the Bengaluru-based security company, had wiped the office clean of bugs,’ Nilay added. ‘But Dilip tricked Gautam into believing that they were a fraud organization and got Agate, a company close to Dilip, to reinstal bugs in the guise of sweeping MyMagicHat again. To enhance their credibility, they “discovered” bugs that KRS had purportedly missed or installed with mischievous intent.’

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ Vibha said, and went on to recount her discussion with Vishwanath and her subsequent inquiry into Cogent India’s databases.

  ‘Nilay suspected as much,’ Gautam said, his face darkening. ‘My father has ordered a full forensic audit into all three systems – MyMagicHat, PRL and Cogent. We shall soon know, bu
t Nilay seems to have figured out how Cogent carried out their deception.’

  ‘Cogent doesn’t run an ERP system,’ Nilay said. ‘Instead, they use a piece of software that Darshan had custom-built. Once the system receives orders from MyMagicHat, it splits them into two. Genuine orders, it passes on to PRL and captures all the details of genuine logistics and payments.

  ‘But it holds back the fake orders and creates fake logistics transactions to give an impression of authenticity. It is so convincing that we at MyMagicHat couldn’t distinguish between the two.’

  ‘But how does Cogent’s system know which orders are fake and which are genuine?’ Vibha asked. ‘It can’t be done manually – there are a million transactions a month!’

  ‘That’s where Nitya’s bots come in. First, they create the fake orders. In order to make the orders look authentic, the bots mix up different customer names and addresses, which Darshan surreptitiously makes available to them. Second, the bots write the details of the fake orders into a file, which is sent to Cogent. At the end of each day, Cogent’s system compares the orders received from MyMagicHat with the file the bots created. When an order appears in both lists, the system knows it is a fake order.’

  ‘Ingenious!’ Vibha exclaimed. ‘Darshan was an uncommonly sharp man. This must have been his brainchild.’ Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘It’s a pity it had to end like this. I actually…liked him. He was a good boss and a competent one too.’

  She wiped her eyes and looked up apprehensively.

  ‘What will happen to MyMagicHat now?’ she asked, her voice unsteady. ‘What of its people?’

  Gautam let out a long sigh. His features softened.

  ‘I’m truly sorry that this had to happen to you, Vibha,’ he said in a choked voice. ‘Also, what happened to Moin doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Gautam,’ Nilay said, placing his hand on the other man’s arm. ‘You too were a victim of deception.’

  ‘Some would say MyMagicHat is doomed,’ Gautam continued as if he hadn’t heard Nilay. ‘“Nobody will put money into it,” they’ll say, “and you’ve run out of cash.” “The brand will take such a beating,” they’ll smirk. “There is no point in continuing with it.”’