by RV Raman
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘What is it?
‘An electronic bug.’ Gautam’s usually even, cultured voice was low and fierce.
‘Bug?’
‘A listening device. The filthy bastards have been spying on us.’
‘Who?’
‘Who else?’
For a moment, Nilay didn’t understand. But when he did, his eyes widened in surprise. Gautam reserved that derisive tone for only one breed of people – competitors.
Nilay stared at his boss, speechless, as the rest of the puzzle fell into place. So that was what the other two men were doing in the conference room – sweeping it for bugs! An instant later, he felt his blood run cold as the implications flooded his mind.
The snoopers would have heard everything, including the discussions about the cash crunch! Shit, the word was already out! All it needed now was for someone to leak it to the press. Bloody hell!
‘Where –’ he croaked through a suddenly constricted throat, ‘where did you find these? In the conference room?’
‘These are from my cabin and the three meeting rooms. The ones we found in the conference room are still on the table there. We also found an automatic room freshener that housed a camera.’
‘We must sweep the entire office!’ Nilay exclaimed. ‘There may be more.’
‘We have.’ Gautam was barely managing to control his anger. ‘All that remains is your cabin and the data room.’
‘Data room!’ Nilay’s eyes widened with horror. ‘God in heaven!’
Over the past four days, Puneet had asked questions about every aspect of the business – revenue streams, business plan, marketing campaigns, customer acquisition, investments, seller strategies and a whole host of details that competitors would give an arm and a leg to discover. Had the eavesdroppers…?
Nilay felt a shiver go down his spine. ‘Who –’ he began and faltered. He found himself unable to complete the question as unpleasant memories stirred; memories that left him dry in the mouth and short of breath. Oh God! Not again. Not here!
‘That is the big question, isn’t it?’ Gautam rasped. ‘Who?’ He turned and walked to the door. ‘We’ll talk about those bastards later. Right now, I want to have your room and the data room swept before people start coming in.’
Half an hour later, they were back in Gautam’s cabin. With them was one of the two men who had swept the office. They had found bugs in Nilay’s cabin and in the data room.
‘This is Nilay Adiga, our Senior VP,’ Gautam said to the man.
As the two nodded at each other, he went on, ‘What do you make of it? Who could be behind this?’
‘It could be anyone, Mr Puraria,’ the man said with slow deliberation, taking the time to pick his words carefully. ‘Let’s start with what we know. The bugs used here are professional, mid-range devices, not easily available unless you know where to get them. It means that we are not dealing with amateurs. Whoever put them in knew what they were doing. The locations of the bugs and the way they were installed suggest that professionals were involved.’
‘They could have been hired by anyone?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Competitors too?’ Nilay blurted out.
‘Uh-huh. There’s a lot more espionage in the corporate world than people realize, Mr Adiga.’
‘How long ago were the bugs put in? Do you know?’
‘Not very, I think. A few months.’
‘How can you tell?’ Gautam demanded.
‘By the amount of dust and grime accumulated around the bugs. In this case, there isn’t much. Bugs installed for more than a year usually have a small ring of grime encrusted around at least one place. And they also leave a darker mark on the spot where they were inserted.’
‘I wonder…’ Gautam frowned. ‘Tell me, how long does it take to instal such a device?’
‘A few seconds to a few minutes, depending on who is doing the job and where the bug is being installed. In places that have a false ceiling, it can be done in seconds, as these are wireless bugs – no wires to mess with. All you need to do is punch a small hole and insert the device. It will be virtually invisible against the already pitted surface of the false ceiling. Similarly, a hole in the wall where a nail had once been driven in is a readymade spot. All one has to do is insert the bug into it.’
As Gautam sat back, deep in thought, Nilay continued, ‘Now that the office has been swept, are we free of bugs?’
‘Unfortunately, we can’t say for sure.’
‘Why not?’
‘You see, Mr Adiga, the devices we found today are known as “active bugs”. They continuously emit a small signal that detectors can pick up. “Passive bugs”, however, emit signals only when they are activated by a radio beam or cell phone. At other times, they emit nothing. If there is a passive bug in this room that is not currently activated, we can’t trace it.’
‘But I thought that’s what your metal detector was for!’ Gautam cut in.
‘It is, Mr Puraria, but it isn’t foolproof. A simple carpenter’s nail has more iron in it than all these bugs combined. And office walls and ceilings contain a lot more metal than just nails. It’s very difficult to detect a passive bug in such situations.’
‘Shit!’ Gautam swore, his face grim.
‘Here is my guess, but I can’t be absolutely certain: I am reasonably sure that this cabin and the conference room are clean. We checked every piece of metal we found. But we can’t really do that for the entire office. I suggest that you use this device.’
The man opened his briefcase and took out something that looked like a compact walkie-talkie with two stub antennae and a small glass dial that covered a compass-like needle painted red at one end.
‘Keep this on the table during your discussions and make sure that your mobiles and Bluetooth devices are switched off,’ he advised. ‘If a passive bug is activated during a discussion, this will beep. The red tip of the spinning needle will lead you to the bug’s location. Mark the spot and call me.’
By the time the man left ten minutes later and they were alone once more, the anger on Gautam’s youthful face had given way to anxiety.
‘There are two questions on my mind,’ he said. ‘Who is behind this and how much have they heard? Honestly, I’m just too scared to contemplate the second question now. Let’s talk about the first. What do you think?’
Nilay sat back and tried to sort out his thoughts. They were coming in a muddled torrent as his mind flitted from one implication to another. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and finally said, ‘We know that competition is insane in online retailing and we also know that the stakes are very high,’ he began. ‘But spying? It’s downright…criminal!’
‘This is a new low. I wonder which one of them is behind this?’
‘Well, whoever it is, he seems to have had access to our office,’ Nilay said slowly. ‘At least three of the bugs were inserted into the false ceiling. No casual visitor could have climbed on to a table or up a ladder and inserted them.’
‘Some kind of a service provider, then?’ Gautam growled. ‘A maintenance guy – like an electrician?’
‘Quite possible.’
‘But who is behind him?’
Nilay’s mind went back to a time he would rather forget. Not very far back in the past, but it had been an intensely harrowing time.
‘Someone retained by competition,’ he whispered uncertainly. ‘One hears of firms that specialize in such things. It isn’t difficult to find them if you know where to look or whom to ask.’
Gautam’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know something about such matters, Nilay?’ he asked.
Nilay supressed the panic that rose in him. Troubling memories that he had buried deep down were crowding back into his mind, but he dared not speak of them.
‘Rumours, whispers,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Nothing definite. The line separating market intelligence and corporate espionage is a thin one, Gautam. I won’t be surprised if this h
as happened before. Rivalry and high stakes may just have spawned unscrupulous middlemen.’
‘Hmm…’ Gautam’s eyes took on a contemplative look. ‘It occurs to me that if someone is bold enough – or desperate enough – to bug our office, they would try other things too.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as recruiting our employees into the scheme. That should be far easier, shouldn’t it? Paying an office boy to steal papers or make copies of documents shouldn’t be difficult, especially if you’re operating through a middleman. Or you could hire a secretary or an IT guy.’
‘Why limit yourself to low-level staff?’ Nilay asked. ‘Why not co-opt people who are more in the thick of things? Heaven knows there’s enough greed in the system, what with money pouring into the industry.’
‘Indeed. Senior people have access to better information.’
‘What now, Gautam?’
Nilay felt weak and unsteady. He clasped his hands together to prevent them from trembling.
‘Whom do we tell? Whom do we keep in the dark? We need time to locate any passive devices that could have been installed, but the greater the number of people taken into confidence, the higher the chances of tipping off the men behind the bugging.’
‘Any suggestions?’ Gautam asked.
‘We could limit it to the management team. We have to tell them anyway, as we need to assess the potential damage the bugs may have caused.’
‘What if one of them is a mole?’
Nilay stared at Gautam for a long moment. ‘Then…’ he swallowed hard. ‘…then we have a big problem. I would be shocked if that is the case. Mervyn, Sundar, Moin – each of them is as passionate about the company as we are. I can’t imagine any one of them being the mole.’
Gautam nodded. ‘You’re probably right. We’ll keep it confined to the five of us. No secretaries or anyone else. Not even the closest of associates.’ He stood up. ‘I have some stuff to do before our 9 a.m. meeting. Let’s take stock then.’
As he walked past his colleague, Gautam leaned in and whispered, ‘From now on, don’t speak of Project Iskan in the office.’
Chapter 3
Gautam was already there when Nilay entered the conference room twenty minutes later. Chatting with Mervyn James, the head of seller management, he seemed relaxed and betrayed no signs of the shock he had received just a while ago. Nilay marvelled at his poise; he himself was still wobbly at the knees, even if he wasn’t as distressed as he had been half an hour ago. He cast a nervous glance at the walkie-talkie-like device on the table, the gadget the man had given them for locating passive bugs.
Mervyn was eyeing it curiously. He glanced up as Nilay entered, but offered no greeting. Mervyn never greeted him and when he did speak to him, it was in an impersonal, matter-of-fact tone.
‘Morning, Nilay!’ a cheerful voice called out behind him.
Nilay turned and smiled affectionately, his worry lines softening. ‘Morning, Moin.’
Moin Aziz was one of those sunny souls who was impossible to dislike – an endearing nerd. Blessed with a lively combination of curiosity, creativity and IT knowledge, the perky, compactly built man was already making his mark, even as he approached thirty. He was both the brain and the hands behind the nifty innovations on MyMagicHat’s app.
He was Nilay’s closest friend at work. They went all the way back to the lost days of carefree camaraderie at college, when Nilay had taken a liking to his junior in the wake of an unfortunate incident.
All the others at MyMagicHat were business associates first and friends later. While Nilay joked, chatted and partied with everyone, he regarded them primarily as co-workers through whom he and Gautam drove the business forward. Friendship was pleasant and welcome, but incidental. Moin, however, was different; he was almost like a younger brother. Nilay had brought him along when he moved on from his earlier job.
‘I have a neat little feature to show you guys,’ Moin now said with the glee of a child who had just cracked a puzzle. ‘It suggests items based on what a customer’s friends bought and liked. We can also offer his friends and him cashback in Magic Money for related purchases.’
‘Another neat little feature, Moin?’ Mervyn laughed, his expression thawing a little as his gaze moved from Nilay to Moin. ‘You showed us one just last week, didn’t you?’
‘Technology is a wonderful thing, Mervyn. The possibilities are just endless. You would be amazed at how much the app on your phone tells me. Did you know that your phone even tells me how much charge you have in your battery? Once you instal the app, you give it permission to read almost anything on your phone.
‘Anyway, this feature is way better than the last one. It taps into the social media trail of customers and pulls out products from our catalogue that match their preferences and those of their friends. We can then offer special pricing if, say, three or more people from the group buy a product.’
‘You cracked it?’ Nilay cried. ‘That will be fantastic if it works!’
Delving into customers’ social media feeds to pull out information of their habits and preferences had been a sort of a holy grail for Nilay’s team for the past few months. If Moin had, indeed, done what he seemed to be claiming, they would leap ahead of the competition. Nilay saw Mervyn’s eyes light up.
But before he could speak, the sombre figure of Sundar glided into the conference room and closed the door behind him. Chatter died and seriousness enveloped the group, as the purpose of the ad hoc meeting rose to the fore.
‘Before we get into the matter of the cash crunch,’ Gautam began, even as Sunder was taking his seat, ‘there is something I need to tell you guys. Nilay and I have had a nasty shock this morning. It’s just the kind of thing we don’t need. It’s something that can rob us of all the advantage Moin’s neat little features offer us.’
He quietly told them about the bugs. Nilay watched the three faces closely, his mind flitting back to what Gautam had said earlier in the morning – what if one of them was a mole?
Watching the boyish enthusiasm on Moin’s face die and give way to dismay, he considered the absurdity of the notion. Emotions showed plainly on Moin’s open face. He now seemed aghast by what he had heard and looked close to tears.
The shock on Mervyn’s rugged face too was genuine. True, he had been very upset when Nilay had joined MyMagicHat as the Number Two after Gautam. As the person most knowledgeable about operations, Mervyn had harboured hopes of being the next in command after the promoter scion. Nilay’s induction into the company had shattered those hopes. But Mervyn was also a long-time employee of the Puraria Group’s Retail SBU. Why would he help a competitor bug MyMagicHat?
Sundar’s usually inscrutable face had frozen in disbelief. Nilay could visualize his orderly mind racing to draw up a list of the implications of what he had just heard. Having apprenticed under his father when the latter was the Puraria Group’s CFO, Sundar was the staunchest of the Puraria loyalists; so faithful, in fact, that he was downright miserly with the information he shared with even Nilay, his own vice president. That he would hurt MyMagicHat’s interests was unthinkable.
All three had their gaze fixed on Gautam. When he finished speaking, their eyes began scanning the conference room.
‘This room can’t possibly have passive devices installed somewhere,’ Mervyn declared presently. ‘Beyond these two glass walls is our own office. The other two are the building’s outer walls. We are at least eighty feet above the road; there can’t be anyone hanging around outside the walls. Where will they activate the devices from?’
‘No, no!’ Moin interjected, shaking his head vigorously. ‘You’re forgetting the floor and the ceiling, Mervyn. On the floor below ours is a visa-facilitation centre. Above are small offices for hire. It wouldn’t be that difficult for someone to hang out there and activate a bug.’
‘Moin is right,’ Gautam said. ‘We can’t take anything for granted.’ He turned to the young man. ‘Another question for you, Moin – what a
bout someone hacking into our systems? How easy would that be?’
‘IT security is not my specialization, but if banks and the US government’s servers can be hacked into, why not ours? Having said that, we do have some additional protection as our customer details are stored separately in the data centre’s most secure server.’
‘Meaning? I know that we have two different databases – one for current orders and another for closed orders. Very few people have access to the second database. Is that what you mean?’
‘Not really. If you break into either of these databases, you will see what customers bought. But you will not find customer details there – name, address, contacts, etcetera. Instead, you will only find a meaningless alphanumeric code in the customer-code field.
‘The real customer details are stored in a third database, to which no user has direct access. That server has additional layers of security for it. You can access it only through one specific software routine housed deep in the systems. Darshan assures me it would be very difficult to break into the customer database.’
Darshan was the head of the Puraria Group’s Bengaluru data centre, which hosted the retail SBU’s common systems and MyMagicHat’s systems.
‘I wasn’t thinking so much about the data centre,’ Gautam clarified. ‘That would be quite secure. What about the stuff in this office? Our laptops, email and things like that?’
‘Unfortunately, those are easier to break into. They are frequently connected to the Internet and public networks, you see.’
Still obsessing over the electronic bugs they had found, a thought buzzed through Nilay’s mind.
‘Tell me, Moin,’ he said. ‘What would you do if you wanted to eavesdrop on my conversations or read my emails?’
‘That’s pretty easy, Nilay. I would hack into your laptop and instal a small piece of software that turns on the microphone without your knowledge. As your laptop would be sitting on the desk during your discussions, it would pick up the sounds and relay them to me. Meanwhile, using a key logger, I could capture your keystrokes and figure out your mailbox password. Then I could steal your mailbox and open it whenever I wanted to.’
