by UD Yasha
‘I wonder if we’ve been looking at it the wrong way,’ Rahul said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We've constantly thought that Manohar contacted Mule. What if it was the other way around? Mule must have come across some sort of illegal activity. He could have needed some information that might have been connected to the Gills or the Sinhas, or both. With the kind of access Mule enjoys because of his job, he's more likely to stumble upon a crime than Manohar.'
Just then the office door opened and Kolte returned. He was shaking his head while rubbing his face.
‘I’m sorry for that,’ he said. He was more in control but still in shock. ‘I found something that Mule was working on when I searched his logs. I’ll tell you what I found.’
Kolte closed the blinds. He stretched his hand and said, ‘Give me your phones please. I need to secure this conversation’
We handed him our phones. He pulled out a box from under his desk and put them in it. He closed the box and kept it away. He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward on the desk.
He said, ‘Sorry for the extra precautions. But if Mule was killed because of your case, we need to be careful. I’ll have to give you some background. As I told you before, Sitaram Mule was the head of Active Threat Detection. His area of expertise was the Dark Web. Are you familiar with it?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Same,’ Rahul said, shooting me a glance.
‘Alright. You need to know about Deep Web before I tell you anything about Mule. Here’s what the Dark Web is about in a nutshell. When you search anything on Google, it throws millions of results at you. This is because the pages it shows you are indexed. Think of it as a library. Each library has books that you can see on the shelves. They're kept there because they have a barcode that allows the library computer to know when it has been checked in and out. But every library has thousands of books in its basement. They are not available for the general public to read because they don't have the library's barcode yet. In other words, you can only borrow books that are indexed. Similarly, when a search engine like Google or Bing gives you results, it is only from the indexed part of the Internet—what is called the surface web. But that only forms a fraction of what the Internet truly is. The rest of the stuff is unindexed—and this unindexed part is called the deep web.
If you go a little deeper, you get to the Dark Web. To access the Dark Web, you need special software. The popular ones are TOR or Freenet. These programs are built to provide anonymity. TOR is one of the most popular programs used to access the dark web. It was developed by the United States Naval Research Laboratory in the mid-1990s. TOR is the short form of ‘The Onion Router'. It was developed to promote privacy. Now, because programs like TOR are so good at it, they started being used by criminals for illegal activities. That's why you need to take certain precautions to keep your identity a secret on the Dark Web. If you aren't careful, your IP address and other sensitive information can be exposed. You can't imagine how badly people's lives have been ruined because of it.
There's a reason I am telling you all of this. There’s a portion on the Dark Web where extremely shady stuff goes on. For example, you can buy all kinds of drugs on the Dark Web. The now-defunct Silk Route is the best example. It was once of the biggest marketplaces to buy drugs not just on the Dark Web, but anywhere in the world. You can also hire assassins on the Dark Web. That's the most common association people have to the Dark Web. But there's so much more that happens. You can buy credit cards, new identities, slaves, prostitutes…the list goes on. The Dark Web has a place for all kinds of people—no matter how offbeat your choices. Because of all these reasons, a lot of scammers set up dark web pages that take money from people for all kinds of things,' Kolte said and paused to sip water. ‘Are you with me so far?'
‘Yes,’ I said.
Kolte continued. ‘Sitaram Mule's job was to find active threats on the Dark Web. As it is a place where you can communicate anonymously, a lot of criminals and terrorists use the Dark Web to relay information. Mule's job was to intercept this information.'
‘How could he do that if everyone is anonymous?' Rahul said.
‘That's exactly why he can do it. He could pose as a member of a criminal gang. Or he could enter an invite-only chat room by speaking to its users and establishing some level of trust with them. Everyone knows the Dark Web is a place where illegal shit happens. That's why investigators hover around it as well. There's a popular phrase we use in our line of work. Fifty per cent of the dark web is made up of criminals and the remaining fifty is made up of cops.
I'll give you an example. As the Islamic State is losing its footing in Syria and Iraq, it's trying to spread its influence in other countries. One of the main reasons governments across the world are terrified of the Islamic State's is because they are the only terrorist organisation to have ever existed that has land of its own. It’s losing the land rapidly, but that’s beside the point. It also gives passports to its members. In other words, it acts like a country. But now, they are moving across the world as they are forced to get away from their claimed land in West Asia. The recent bombings in Sri Lanka were an example. As a part of an assignment for the Government of India, Mule had to read Islamic State texts and understand what got its member to tick off. He is already in five chatrooms of the Islamic State on the Dark Web.
I only told you that because Mule was working on something else as well—an assignment that was not Secure Point work. I just got to know about it. I noticed he had entered a different chatroom. It is an invitation-only page. To enter that chatroom, he had created an entirely false persona on the Dark Web. I was most surprised because he withdrew two crore rupees from his fund at Secure Point. In addition to that, he copied user data of more than twenty thousand people from the chatroom. While attempting to get that user data, he let someone enter our system for seventeen seconds. Because of that, our entire system at Secure Point has been compromised.'
Chapter Forty-Three
If Sashi Kolte was right, an access of seventeen seconds would have resulted in damages worth millions of dollars. The two crore rupees that Mule would have taken would be minuscule in comparison. Two crore rupees was a little less than three hundred thousand dollars.
I had just three questions in my mind.
‘When did he enter the chatroom?’ I said.
Kolte looked up at me as if I was insane and had missed the point of his revelation.
I said, ‘This could be about something much bigger than money. I have a feeling people’s lives are in danger.’
‘I’ll check, please wait,’ Kolte said and referred to his computer. ‘21st April 2019.’
That was just before Shaunak Manohar had taken Natasha.
‘And when did he withdraw money from his work account?’
‘He made four withdrawals. Seventy lakhs each time.'
I knew that figure. Four hundred people equal to four million dollars. Seventy lakhs into four was twenty-eight crore rupees, which was four million dollars. What was he doing with that kind of money?
‘When was the last time he withdrew money?' I said. This was just a follow-up question and not one of the three I had in mind.
‘Five days back.’
I asked the third question. ‘Can you access the data he had stolen from the chatroom?’
‘It’s encrypted. It’ll take time to go through it all.’
‘I know I’m asking for a lot. Can you please decrypt it as a special request on a priority basis?’
‘Do you understand the implications of what Sitaram Mule has done? He compromised everything at Secure Point for this one operation. And it was not even sanctioned by the company. He has thrown us under the bus. And it's not just about the money. We also work with the Government of India. Sensitive information regarding national security is present on our servers. Whoever got into our system could have taken anything,' Kolte said, shaking his head. ‘I'm just waiting to see how much dam
age he has caused. I'll have to act accordingly.'
‘Maybe he had a strong enough reason to risk it all,’ I said, wondering what exactly Mule had found that had pushed him to siphon money from his company.
A rap on the door.
‘Come in,’ Kolte said.
A young man wearing a skinny tie entered the office. He looked no more than twenty-two or twenty-three years of age.
‘I just spoke to Sadanand sir,' he said. ‘We just found that Mule had built a firewall to protect the data he had collected for the Government of India assignment. They are safe. We also found that he was trying to build similar firewalls to protect other segments of our company. Most of the other firewalls he built were not nearly as strong as the one that protected the Indian Government data. So the rest of them were taken down. Some of our corporate vendors might have been affected.'
Kolte thanked the young man and let him go.
‘That tells us that Mule knew Secure Point’s system was at risk because of what he was going to do,’ I said.
‘But that doesn’t change his actions,’ Kolte said.
‘Do you know who could have hacked your system?’ Rahul asked. I knew where he was going with the question. If Secure Point knew the owner of the Dark Web chat room or the hacker, we could be directly led to the person responsible for what was happening.
‘No, we don’t know. It’s going to take a long time to figure that out. Maybe we will never find out. For all you know it could be a teenager in Moscow or an old lady in Bangkok.’
Kolte pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead with it. He said, ‘I don't think we can help you with the data you want to decrypt. Decrypting it is the last thing on our agenda. We've got to clean up this mess that Mule has created. He can't even be sued because he's dead. The directors are going to be taken to court. I am the Head of Relationship Management. I'm going to have to get back to work. I'm sorry. But you need to leave. We have other things to do,’ he said, handing us back our phones.
I got up to exit but then stopped. I opened the picture of the blue file that we had found at Mule’s house.
‘Is this the data that Mule took?’ I said, turning my phone to let Kolte see the screen.
His face turned red. ‘What? How did you get that?’
‘Your reaction confirms it was. That’s all I wanted to know,’ I said and walked out along with Rahul.
As we exited Kolte’s office and walked down the long corridor, we heard heavy footsteps behind us. We turned around to see that it was the young man who had entered Kolte's office. He whispered in Rahul's ear as he went past us.
‘What was that?’ I said, surprised.
‘He just asked me to meet him in the men’s washroom.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. He said he needs to tell me something. I’ll be back,’ Rahul said and strode ahead faster.
Chapter Forty-Four
I waited for Rahul in the same area where we had sat before. I tried to remember the name tag clipped to the shirt of the young man. It eventually came to me. Jay Parikh.
I checked my messages while I waited. I had two messages from Radha and one from Rathod. Radha first told me she had not yet come across anything. And then in the next message, she told me she was looking at transactions that had different figures but the same values because of exchange rate fluctuations. Rathod's text was an update on Jaggu and Manohar’s friend Vijay Krishnan. He had spoken to both of them and their stories had checked out. Shaunak Manohar was still the good guy in this.
When I looked up from my phone, I saw Jay coming out of the bathroom, adjusting his hair. Rahul walked out three minutes later and joined me.
‘Let’s walk out. I’ll tell you what he said,’ Rahul leaned towards and whispered in my ear.
Once we got in the car, Rahul said, ‘Jay Parikh said he wants to help us out. He can tell us the name of the chatroom and TOR page. But he said it wouldn’t be useful as we wouldn’t be accepted into the chatroom so quickly.’
‘Does he know what it is about?’
‘I asked him the same question. He told me it's impossible to tell. It could literally be anything. He also told me that Mule did not download the data of one lakh people like Kolte told us. But instead, he downloaded one lakh data points. We do not know how many people's data was downloaded, thereby giving us no clue regarding the size of the chatroom. He said he'll meet us at a café here in fifteen minutes if we want to know more about the functioning of such chat rooms or pages on the Dark Web.'
‘Tell him we want to meet him,’ I said.
‘I already did. It never hurts to know as much as you can.’
We drove to the café that Jay had asked us to wait in. It was a small place in one of the many by-lanes of the South Main Road in Koregaon Park. Jay arrived at the same time as our order of three cups of cold coffee. He was still in his skinny tie. I saw it had Donald Duck on it when he sat down at our table.
‘Thanks for coming,’ I said.
‘Pleasure is all mine. Sitaram Mule was my mentor,’ Jay said.
‘Do you know anything about the data breach?’
‘No, I don't. He didn't tell me. But I believe whatever he did must have been worth it. He has worked at Secure Point since he retired from the police force. The company means a lot to him. He wouldn't jeopardize it in any way unless it's an absolute must.'
‘The ends justify the means,’ Rahul said.’
‘I worked closely with him. I was surprised to know that he didn’t tell me about this side project of his. He knew I loved things like this. I am prepared to go completely against the system and flout rules for the greater good. The only reason he would not have told me was because it might have been too dangerous.'
‘What makes you say that?’ Rahul said.
‘I looked up the case that you guys are working on. The CID database is not well protected. So much blood has already been spilled. With the introduction of Dark Web, it’s going to get messier.’
‘What can you tell us about the Dark Web?’ I said.
‘At the end of the day, the Dark Web is all about anonymity and secrecy. But that can be exposed if you are not careful. I don’t know how Sitaram sir got involved. Although, I can tell you that his presence ruffled the wrong feathers. He could crack open any system and he probably had done just that with the chatroom. The data he took will have answers to a lot of your questions. But I understand it’s encrypted.’
I showed Jay the picture of the files.
‘I can help you with it if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘It’ll be my way to repay the faith Sitaram sir showed in me.’
I wondered for a beat if it was wise to share information with a complete stranger. He could be faking everything and I would not know. But we were staring at a dead end otherwise and I thought there was no harm in sharing a copy.
‘Sure, I’ll send it to you.’
‘Thanks. One more thing,' Jay said and leaned forward on the table. ‘Such chat rooms in the Dark Web are spread wide. I wouldn't be surprised if it has members from countries that we haven't even heard of. I can't promise that I'll give you the names of the people who run the chatroom. But I can give you the names of the members. In most cases, when something illegal is happening on the Dark Web, it leaves footprints in the physical world. The Dark Web is only a place where you can transact—whether it be an exchange of ideas or money or something else. To see the transaction to fruition, you need to make a move in this real physical world. Once we know the members, we can follow them making the physical move. And then BOOM. You can get to the bottom of what's happening.'
‘Thank you. That was very insightful,’ I said.
‘Thank me when I decrypt the data.’
Rahul asked, ‘How long do you think that will take?
‘I can’t promise you that either. But I will work on it till I can crack it..’
Just as we were leaving, Jay came up to us and said, ‘Be careful. You will come
across hell on the Dark Web.’
Chapter Forty-Five
It was almost five o’clock in the evening when we began heading home. We had been out for more than five hours. The weather had gone from being blistering hot to cloudy and humid. I looked skywards. The clouds had gotten greyer now. As we got into our car, everything that Kolte and Jay had told us swirled in my head.
‘I’m trying to figure out how the first four murders fit into this,’ I said as we descended the fly-over near Sancheti Hospital.
‘Malini Sinha took workshops in a field of medicine that had ample opportunity of corruption. Maybe she stepped on the wrong toes,’ Rahul said.
‘Even I thought about it. There are innumerable crimes when it comes to fertility and in vitro fertilization. But that doesn't explain why Manohar took Natasha Gill. It also does not explain why her mother Sumeira is missing.'
‘Both girls were sick. Maybe that has a role to play somewhere,’ Rahul said.
‘Atharva were supposed to speak to the girls’ doctors. Let’s hear what they have to tell us,’ I said and called Radha.
The call was connected via Bluetooth.
‘I’m still trying to find a link between their financial statements,’ Radha said, sounding tired. ‘I’ve tried at least two hundred different permutations and combinations.’
‘Look at something else for a bit, babe,’ Rahul said. ‘It might give you a fresh perspective.’
‘How are maa and Natasha doing?’ I asked.
‘Maa put Natasha to sleep on her lap and then slept on the couch herself. Shadow also dozed off next to them. It’s an adorable sight; all three of them sleeping next to each other,' Radha said. ‘I wasn't finding anything in the accounts so I came downstairs feeling frustrated, only to be welcomed by the three of them sleeping so cosily.'
