by Leena Nandan
For the security guys, the more sophisticated the technology, the greater was the headache. All mails were tracked and even encrypted communication was regularly decoded. Telephone calls with the most innocuous content also went straight to a satellite and the images of any two individuals immersed in conversation were recorded too. Jealous spouses could, in fact, have a field day with all this ammo! The elaborate web of keeping a tab on the research staff and then scrutinising the security personnel too would have put any self-respecting spider to shame. All communication, whether mail or call, had to be analysed. Most of it was good-natured grumbling and not worth the money spent on gathering the intel. Still, nobody could afford to be dismissive and discount anything, no matter how improbable the theory. The responsibility was huge, the usefulness intangible and it was tedious work all the way…
The security guard in the office of the chief security officer of Future Insights was in a state of perpetual boredom. The cabin, though part of the campus of the research centre, was a standalone structure. As a result, he got to interact with the bare minimum number of people and there was very little to occupy his mind. His pastime was to study people passing by and trying to guess their most pressing business of the day. The young man who was walking towards the reception seemed to be a bona fide employee, otherwise his palm print would not have matched at the gate but he still had to be checked out. The guard growled from behind his glass wall and the man hurriedly held up his pass. He was a senior staff member, a researcher, and why he should have looked so hesitant was a mystery to the guard, who prided himself on having a gimlet eye. The man looked no better than a diffident sales representative, desperate to establish contact and willing to spend hours patiently waiting for his turn. He was slight of build and wearing unremarkable clothes.
Harish, the born loser, was at a loss. He had been in this office earlier too, but the fact that the guard did not even recognise him, proved once again how unimpressive he was. He would have to handle the interaction all by himself this time. He found the guard too intimidating for casual conversation. He was summoning up the courage to approach the receptionist, when he saw her frown, and veered off in another direction instead. This was late winter and the sun had been bright. He wiped his face, shrugged out of his checked brown jacket and then still not finding relief, looked around for water. The receptionist seemed to be looking impatiently at him, so he picked up a brochure on the company’s many achievements and put it into his pocket. Having discovered the water dispenser, he continued further on in search of the men’s room, tucked away in an obscure corner. He walked down the corridor, and suddenly found the room he had been looking for.
He hastily entered it, only to find out that he had worked himself into a lather for nothing. There was no one inside the office of the chief security officer of Future Insights, despite the fact that in his reply to Harish’s mail, he had fixed the time for their meeting. The tension was almost killing Harish, so he decided to end it once and for all—he would mail his surmise and conjectures and be done with it. So he walked all the way back to his desk, and mailed a brief but succinct report to Dr Maken, with a copy to S Benoy, head of security in Future Insights and Tushar Sen in security at the head office of 24x365. He did not need to save the document on his computer—it was all stored in his head, including the programme he had written. Now he could rest in peace. But doing what? It was impossible to concentrate.
Harish left the campus and wandered around aimlessly for a while. He was feeling warm in his jacket, but taking it off in public would reveal his frayed shirt, so he kept it on, stopping to mop his brow again. Aware of a vague uneasiness, he tried to pinpoint the source and realised that there were two pairs of footsteps behind him, walking at the same pace. Wheeling around abruptly, he could see how his imagination was playing up—there were only some fairly commonplace people around. He shrugged and scanned the road for a taxi. Again a frisson of alarm, but a second look behind indicated just how overwrought he was. There was a maid pushing a pram and cooing to an infant; two men were ogling at the scantily-clad mannequin in the display window of a boutique and a crowd of students was pouring out of an examination hall. A bus was also coming his way, at last.
The two men outside the fashion store, one with a pock-marked face and the other tall, thick-set with a beard, ignored the young man who had come out of Future Insights. He was unimpressive in his brown jacket and meandered along, glancing occasionally at his watch. He waited for a taxi and when none stopped for him, made his way to the bus-stand. The tall, bearded guy also took his place in the queue. The bus lurched to a stop, and at least twenty students rushed to board it, elbowing people out of their way. Exasperated passengers stood aside, including Harish and the bespectacled chap, all of whom decided to wait for the next bus, which could already be seen up ahead.
A truck barrelled down the road, and the crowd started gearing up to board the bus following close on its heels. There was jostling to come to the front of the queue and people pushed and shoved each other. Suddenly, a man fell right on the road. With a screeching sound, the truck driver applied the brakes but failed to stop the monster. There were horrified screams, as with a sickening noise, the truck went right over the young man in its path. His body was mangled and crushed, the arms flung out as if in supplication; blood gushing out to make a pool around the brown jacket in a macabre floral design.
THREE
1 February
Vijay Rawat took one step inside the lockup and puked. The stench, a combination of stale sweat, urine and cheap liquor, was unbearable and now his vomit had added to it. The men inside—dirty and tough looking—were like inhabitants of his worst nightmare. One of them jostled his arm and growled, ‘Clean it up, asshole!’ He raised an arm with the fist clenched when Vijay stared back at him, but just then the policeman glanced their way and the man edged away. Aakash had not spoken a word since the police had arrested them. His eyes were sunken and his gaze unfocused. He did not react even when a man spat paan juice on his foot. There was a cacophony of noise, and the stink seeped into the pores of their being.
How had everything gone so horribly wrong? There they were, cosy and comfortable in 24x365, and one foolhardy attempt had brought the world crashing down on their heads. His parents would never live down the scandal, and as for himself—Vijay was ruined for life. A man opposite winked at him suggestively and made a crude gesture. Something in Vijay’s mind snapped.
He edged into the corner of the cell and fished out the penknife in the inner pocket of his jacket. Stealthily he flicked it open, all the while looking around so that no one would spot his movements. With a swift movement, he cut open the artery on his left wrist. Biting his lip to keep from screaming out aloud at the intense pain, he slashed his other wrist too. The mammoth effort over, he only had to wait for its inevitable outcome. Dark red blood was snaking out and making its way over the rough surface already. Someone was shouting from a distance—not Aakash, he still had a vacant look—and there was confusion as people tried to get out of the way of the river of blood, while the police tried to get in and drag him out. Then a mist came over his eyes…
Maintenance of law and order in the country had for long been of the classical variety, where the police chased criminals through standard detective work based on physical evidence. But information technology had revolutionised the shadowy world of crime, since the criminal-minded used their knowledge of computers to break the law with audacity. To breach firewalls was child’s play and they could access the layouts of underground bank vaults as easily as they could hack passwords and do online shopping.
Here stolid officers were completely out of their depth since the methodology was sophisticated and just nabbing the criminal was not enough; he had to be nailed through evidence that would stand up in a court of law. Though many of the officers would have hated to admit it, they simply did not understand enough about Information Technology to enforce penal provisions in cases of violation
or cyber crime. After much soul searching, cyber crime divisions were set up in many states, but everywhere, the historical lack of trained manpower jeopardised their effectiveness from day one. They functioned mostly as additional charge, which meant they always got lower priority from the harassed official, and in the unlikely event of having a full time officer, he was either thoroughly untrustworthy or an absolute nincompoop, neither of which scenario boded well for the efficiency and effectiveness of cyber crime sleuthing.
The Delhi Police cyber crimes division, no exception to the rule, had only two sanctioned posts—one officer, one clerk. But the DIG, Cyber Crime, Vikram Batra, was an exception in one sense, being neither of the unreliable nor doddering variety. He was tall and lean with dark brown hair that constantly fell on his forehead, but his furrowed brow inevitably detracted from his rugged good looks. He was actually an officer of the Central Reserve Police Force, currently on deputation to the cyber crime cell because he was content to get immersed in the technicalities of software. He had studied the provisions of the IT Act thoroughly but during meetings, gave vague and non-committal statements, getting a masochistic kick from the contemptuous looks that came his way.
For an officer considered brilliant, with an outstanding career ahead in the CRPF, his fall from grace had been stunning; he was happy now to live and work in splendid isolation, churning out quarterly reports that bordered on mediocre. Today, Vikram felt moodier than ever. He hated the disruption of schedules and, having become used to doing nothing at any given time, the slightest change made him a bear with a sore head. Initially, he’d tried wriggling out of it saying that it was a regular policing job and he had no role in catching criminals, but commissioner Goyal was adamant. He even hinted that the deputation could be ended abruptly, if Vikram wasn’t willing to render any meaningful assistance. Vikram immediately made up his mind to do a sloppy job and ensure he wasn’t assigned any other such challenging work in future.
But his expertise in cyber security proved to be his undoing. ‘I bit at the bait and it became a big byte,’ he said ruefully to himself after painstakingly entering all the CDs into the inventory of files. The 24x365 call centre fraud case had drawn him in, despite his promise to himself to remain detached and he resented his own heightened level of interest. He had made a case diary of sorts, recording meticulously the movement of data that left a trail like that of paper, but only to the eye trained to pick up anything unusual. Then, with all the evidence carefully stored in the discs, he had turned the report over to the local police; whenever they asked for the evidence, he was good and ready with the CDs. Of course, no one from the police station had as yet woken up to the fact that the CDs would soon need to be obtained from him for being produced in court.
Celia Martin, his sole secretarial assistance, had long decided she was cut out for better things, so she made sure her visits to the beauty parlour coincided perfectly with office timings. Initially, she used to drop by his cabin once in a while to judge his reaction to all that conservation and preservation, but disappointed by his unfailing lack of response, had since ceased to make even that token appearance. Not that he minded. When he got really involved in a project—which happened rarely—at least there was no one to bother him about office timings and labour laws.
As a rule, he had plenty of time on his hands, but there was some challenging stuff that came in once in a while for comic relief. Like this case, where an attempt had been made by two executives working in 24x365—the biggest call centre in the city—to withdraw cash from the bank accounts of customers.
Being executives with the call centre, they had access to bank account numbers and had smoothly asked innumerable questions of unsuspecting people. How customers tolerated these calls was beyond his imagination, but then he wouldn’t fit the profile of an ideal customer anyway. Apparently though, the world and their aunts were quite happy to part with their bank account number and transaction details. The unscrupulous duo had wasted no time in taking advantage of this confidential information by transferring out small sums of money one day from a large number of accounts. An alert cashier had spotted the movements, stopped the withdrawals and intelligently gone straight to the cyber crime division instead of raising brouhaha. That’s how he, Vikram, came into the picture.
Vikram had tracked them down after painstaking efforts. They’d logged into separate computers and used a different approach each time but his trained eye had picked up the pattern and some sharp sleuthing had done the rest. In fact, it was only due to that slip of a girl in the call centre that they had actually been caught. She knew all the trainees and executives and most importantly, their strengths in terms of technical know-how as also their weaknesses in terms of shortage of cash for high-flying lifestyles or a drinking habit. Vikram, despite his utter disinterest in people, had enjoyed interacting with her. What was her name again? Yes, he remembered it now—Tina Sahni. She was pretty and sassy and her dimpled smile was always round the corner. But her focus on detail was remarkable and after a series of meetings with her, he’d been able to narrow down the choices, till the police finally tailed the two main suspects and cracked the case.
He wished, though, that the outcome had been different, or simply that the police had not kept him in the loop regarding their investigations. But they had. The two employees, Vijay Rawat and Aakash Kumar Singh had been arrested two days ago, and Vijay had committed suicide in the police lock-up by slashing his wrists before the police completed their interrogation regarding their accomplices. Aakash had gone into a catatonic state and fallen completely silent, not even asking for a lawyer, let alone bail. There was still a fair amount of wrapping up to be done, and something kept nagging Vikram—some important detail that he had missed—and his subconscious kept gnawing at it.
Though Vikram had only played his part to the extent requested, he felt terrible about the whole thing. The executives had been bright, promising youngsters and the lives of two had already been shattered. If his subconscious was right, there was more messy business to follow and he’d just about had all he could stomach. Generally in a fairly gloomy frame of mind, he was feeling even more out of sorts for the last couple of days; given his low spirits, he’d soon be making faces at himself in the mirror.
Celia, his secretary—a euphemism really because she only knew how to type and then too he surreptitiously corrected the drafts on the computer during her lunch break—suddenly walked in. She was on the plump side and wore bright colours that clashed violently with each other. Today, the outfit was purple, with huge flowers in red and yellow. Her orange lipstick gave the finishing touch. He almost felt like he was in a discotheque with strobe lights flashing in his eyes.
‘Good morning, sir,’ she said, breathless as always and went on to exclaim, ‘Oh why did you bother to put all the CDs in the file cabinet? I’d have done that on my return from the parlour, and that too in a jiffy. You’ve had to waste the whole day.’
‘That’s okay,’ he mumbled, too embarrassed to say that she didn’t know the first thing about anything, least of all filing.
She was thoroughly incompetent but a good sort. She didn’t seem to mind his complete lack of attention as she explained the latest traffic diversions. He was doodling on the pad and with a start realised that she had fallen quiet and was looking at him expectantly.
‘What was that again?’ he asked, expecting to be regaled with information on the latest films, but for a change she was asking about the CDs and how he had catalogued them.
‘Don’t bother, I’ll retrieve them on my own when required by the police,’ he said and could have bitten his tongue off.
She stared at him.
‘I thought they were part of your research,’ she said.
He snapped, throwing the piece of paper away with unusual force. ‘But then you don’t need to know just everything under the sun, do you, Ms Martin?’
‘If there is something that needs to be carefully handled, sir, then yes,’ she
replied with calm dignity and he was instantly shamed.
‘Well they’re in the locked cabinet on the far side,’ he answered, pointing to the one that looked like it had seen better days.
‘And where are the keys?’
‘I’ll handle everything pertaining to the CDs—don’t you lose your sleep,’ he said jocularly and left before she could think of something else.
The two drunken louts in Tina’s apartment building had realised that these days she came home late in the evenings. The beast had reared its head, the urge was uncontrollable now…they were in the parking lot, waiting…
‘What kind of weird timings does she keep, leaving in the morning and returning so late,’ said one.
‘Oh, she is especially busy by night,’ said the other with an unpleasant leer.
It triggered off a fantasy in the mind of his equally unprepossessing friend.
‘My heart is beating, keeps on repeating,’ he sang in a hoarse voice.
His friend let out a coarse laugh. ‘You can sing about your heartbeat till the cows come home, that’s all you’re capable of. You don’t have the guts of a real man,’ he sneered.
‘I’ll show you what I can do…’ said the budding singer, arm drawn back to throw a punch.
Both heard the click of high heels and the quick footsteps in the silence of the basement parking. The lift made a grinding noise and they could hear her entering it. Another moment and the elevator doors would close. This was the time. They rushed towards the lift and managed to crowd into it. She spun around, fear writ large. It was not Tina but someone else, not as young and definitely not pretty. Not that they minded. They laughed into her face, alcohol fumes and sweat combining to create a nauseating atmosphere.