by RV Raman
‘There is only one way to check if that is true,’ he heard Sashikant say. ‘Have another agency sweep the office. An agency from Mumbai – one that we know. There are a couple we have used in the past. Dilip?’
‘My secretary will have the details,’ Dilip confirmed. ‘You can meet them tomorrow if you wish, Gautam. Or do you want to get the police girl to look into it? She handled the data theft issue pretty well.’
‘She won’t take it on unless I make a formal complaint,’ Gautam said. ‘And I don’t want the world – and Kantoff – to know that someone has been listening to our confidential discussions.’
‘How can you let such small things stop you, Gautam?’ Sashikant turned an irritated gaze on his other son. ‘Can’t you speak to your DCP friend, Dilip? I’m sure he can speak to his counterpart in Bengaluru.’
Dilip nodded. ‘I’ll speak to him about the bugs. But what do we want to do about this data theft case? We need to take a call and instruct Darshan accordingly. He’s waiting.’
‘What call is there to take?’ Puraria Senior snorted. ‘We can’t risk this going to court. Bury it.’
‘You mean, drop the case?’
‘What else?’
Gautam was listening to the exchange with growing dismay.
‘Then Manoj and Harry will go scot-free!’ he protested. ‘After all we’ve done to catch them!’
‘Give me an alternative, Chotu.’
Gautam knew that the choice of his nickname was deliberate. His father always used his formal name in business-related discussions. That was his way of telling his other sons that Gautam was no longer a kid. Addressing him as ‘Chotu’ was a reprimand. He was being told that he was acting without the maturity expected of him.
‘An alternative,’ Sashikant repeated, ‘that doesn’t compromise MyMagicHat or the data centre.’
Gautam’s thoughts were in a whirl. His sense of justice rebelled against letting the thieves go. Somewhere at the back of his mind, an alarm was ringing. He took a moment to seek it and listen to it. As he did, Harry’s words in the jail came back to him.
‘If these guys go free, Moin will be in danger!’ he said aloud. ‘He and his friend, Najeeb.’
‘Is there something you haven’t told us, Gautam?’
Gautam realized that he hadn’t told them about what had transpired in the jail. He quickly recounted how Harry had threatened Moin and Najeeb.
‘That’s all, Gautam?’ The expression on Sashikant’s face had softened.
Raj and Dilip were smiling.
‘It’s easily fixed,’ Sashikant added.
‘It’s good that you care for your people,’ Dilip said, placing his hand on Gautam’s arm. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll put the fear of God into Harry and Manoj. They won’t dare touch Moin or his friend.’
Chapter 14
The last two days had been very full for Nilay. What with Gautam and Moin away from office to track down the data theft, the cash situation becoming tighter each passing day and the mega event just a few weeks away, Nilay felt he hadn’t had time even to breathe. Although he hadn’t taken on Moin’s load, he still had to do the work of two very busy men – Gautam and himself.
Today, however, promised to be better. He and Sundar had chalked out a detailed plan to conserve cash, the implementation of which was now Sundar’s responsibility. Gautam was expected back in Bengaluru that evening and Moin had promised to come into office after conducting a part of his investigations at the data centre.
But Nilay was feeling restless and uneasy. Ever since he had begun considering the possibility of Puneet generating the stolen transaction file, he had been itching to go to the data room and look for clues to what the young man had been working on before he disappeared. The PC there was the only computer authorized to accept the auditors’ user ID. That was where Puneet would have run his queries from.
It was almost 4 p.m. when Moin came in from the data centre. As soon as he did, Nilay buttonholed him and both of them adjourned to the data room.
‘Let’s check if there are any query results on this PC,’ Moin said, switching on the computer.
Once a query was run, the query facility generated the output as a PDF document by default and wrote it on the local hard disk. It also offered the option to write it as a text file, a CSV file or a spreadsheet, which were often necessary if further analysis was to be done.
Moin navigated to the query facility’s output folder and sorted the files by date. The newest file had been created at 9.17 p.m. on Thursday, the night Puneet disappeared. Dozens upon dozens of output files were dated between Monday and Thursday of the previous week.
‘He’s run a large number of queries,’ Nilay said, staring at the screen as Moin scrolled down. ‘At least a hundred.’
‘One hundred and seventeen,’ Moin confirmed, selecting all the output files and glancing at the count at the bottom of the screen.
‘Let’s open some of them. I’d like to see what kind of queries he was running.’
Nilay took the mouse and opened the last query Puneet had run. It had been created less than an hour before Nilay and Puneet left the office on that fateful night. It showed a breakdown of MyMagicHat’s sales by state and city for the past three months. He opened the next file and found a breakdown of sales by category of products for the same period. The next few files analyzed sales on other parameters – payment type, invoice amount, seller ID, customer ID and pin code. A few more showed more complex analysis by combining these parameters.
Not one of them was a detailed report that even remotely resembled the transaction file recovered from Manoj.
‘These are all summary reports,’ Nilay said, feeling vaguely disappointed. ‘I’m not sure why he wanted to analyze our sales in so many different ways, but he was within his rights in doing so. Let’s look at it by file size. Large files may be transaction listings.’
He clicked on the file size column to sort the files by size and opened the largest one. They waited impatiently as the computer struggled to open it, but twenty seconds later, the file eventually opened.
‘This, too, is a summary report,’ Nilay said after skimming through the report. ‘The file is large because of the graphics.’
Puneet had chosen to display the analysis as a series of charts rather than as tables of numbers. They closed the file and spent the next fifteen minutes looking at the other queries Puneet had generated. All of them were summaries that analyzed MyMagicHat’s sales in a variety of ways – some for the last month, some for longer periods.
‘Why was he so keen on analyzing our sales?’ Nilay wondered aloud.
‘Maybe, he was checking if the physical reports we had given him were accurate,’ Moin offered.
‘That’s possible.’ Nilay pulled a blue binder towards him and opened it. ‘These are the reports we gave him.’
He compared a few reports in the binder with the closest query outputs on the computer. At length, he nodded and closed the binder.
‘They check out,’ he said, sitting back, as Moin took control of the computer. ‘Our reports are accurate – I know that for sure. We are not a company that doctors them to raise funds. I told him so and he seemed to believe me.’ He frowned. ‘Why was he so suspicious? Didn’t he trust us?’
‘But Nilay, isn’t this what a DD is for?’ Moin asked, his fingers flying busily over the keyboard. ‘To check if what we are saying is correct.’
‘Yes, but he seems to have harboured an unusual level of suspicion. Unwarranted, too. There have been a number of DDs earlier, but none of them were like this one. Puneet’s questions too were unusual. I thought they were interesting when he asked them, but in hindsight… Did he not believe me? Something would have triggered his suspicions, surely?’
‘What was Dhruvi saying the other day?’ Moin asked. ‘Something about his getting reports from someone in Mumbai –’
‘That’s right!’ Nilay sat up. ‘She said that he had been comparing our sales with sales of a
chain of physical stores. That could explain these queries,’ He gestured towards the PC. ‘But why would he be comparing our sales with that of physical stores?’
‘Whatever be the reason, there is still no evidence that he created a detailed transaction file. Nothing he created is remotely like the transaction listing Manoj stole.’
Moin hit a key and sat back, as if waiting for something.
‘What if he had created one and deleted it?’ Nilay asked.
‘That’s what I’m looking for now. I’m trying to recover deleted files. Let’s see if something comes up.’
Ten minutes later, Moin shook his head in disappointment.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I’ve checked the entire hard disk. There is nothing even remotely of that size.’
‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t create such a file.’
‘No, it doesn’t. Had we discovered such a file, it would have been conclusive. But not discovering it is, by no means, conclusive. There are a number of ways a computer-savvy person can delete a file so that it cannot be recovered.’
‘Puneet was more than computer savvy. His undergraduate degree was in computer science.’
‘Then we are back to square one.’
Nilay stared at Moin pensively and shook his head slowly. ‘Except that we now know that Puneet had an extraordinary interest in analyzing our sales.’
■
Twenty kilometres away, somewhere near Hoskote on a side road leading off the highway, a decrepit old man was sifting through a pile of roadside litter. Tired, hungry and homeless, he was searching for something – anything – that could fetch him a few rupees to fill his stomach.
As he picked up a stick to shoo away a couple of dogs that were loudly contesting his claim over the scattered litter, his eyes fell on something black and glossy under a pile of discoloured rags. With the stick in his hand, he pushed away a tattered shirt covering his find and gaped at what looked like a flattish rectangular bag. Had he been one of the homeless who took their chances deep inside the city, he might have recognized it as a laptop bag.
It looked fairly new and serviceable and, except for a few scratches and streaks of dirt, it looked like something that might get him his meal for the day. Squatting on his haunches, he picked up the bag gingerly and brushed away dirt with a gnarled hand. His eyes darted to the barking dogs, the road and the clutch of new buildings coming up a little distance away. He rose quickly and scampered away to a nearby tree, behind which he sat down again and opened the flap covering the front compartment of the laptop bag.
Inside were some folded pieces of paper, a couple of pens and some odds and ends. The pens were sure to fetch him a few rupees, at least, but what attracted his attention was a small pocket the size of his palm.
His fingers quickly unfastened the Velcro flap. When he dipped them into the pocket and pulled out its contents, his eyes bulged in delight. In his hand was a little wad of currency notes – a few hundreds, a couple of fifties and some tens. He stood up and pushed the wad deep into the innermost pocket of the shorts he wore under his lungi.
With the money secure, he sat down again and opened the zip of the main compartment. In it was a glossy black laptop. The pouches that lined the top of the compartment looked as if they had recently held things. But under the fabric of the bottom surface was a rectangular bulge. That meant that there was another compartment below the main one.
He turned the bag over and found a slim compartment, fastened by another zip. Something heavy moved loosely under it as the bag shook. He opened it, dipped his hand in and drew out something hard, black and glossy, with metal buttons on the top and sides.
A mobile phone.
His hands trembling with the excitement of this unexpected discovery, he pressed the top button and grinned toothlessly as the face of the screen lit up. Less than a minute later, small icons sprouted on the screen as the phone beeped repeatedly.
Unknown to the old vagrant, a computer console began beeping at the telecom operator’s office 20 kilometres away. Sixty seconds later, the phone of the Inspector handling Puneet’s missing person case began ringing. Five minutes later, Dhruvi’s mobile rang.
‘Puneet’s mobile has been switched on near Hoskote,’ the Inspector from the police station said. ‘A local team is on the way to secure the location and the phone. Anything specific you want them to do?’
‘Please have them scout the area for Puneet’s belongings. Where they can, they must lift fingerprints.’
‘Fingerprints? You expect this to be a big thing, Dhruvi?’
‘Possibly. We have discovered espionage that may be connected with Puneet’s disappearance. We don’t know for sure, but it looks like big money is at stake.’
‘Ah! I’ll send a dog as well. We better look for a body too.’
■
Nilay came in early the next morning in response to Gautam’s request. As he walked into the office, he saw three men with Gautam. Two were packing some equipment into their briefcases, while the third spoke to Gautam. A short distance away, Moin was seated in his glass-enclosed cabin.
Presently, Gautam shook hands with the man he was talking to and saw the three men to the door. When the men had left, he signalled to Nilay and Moin to join him in his cabin. Darshan was already there.
Once they had gathered, Gautam slid a small tray across the desk. It held what looked like three broken toothpicks.
‘More bugs,’ he said. ‘Sophisticated non-metallic ones that are much harder to detect.’ He dropped two more metallic bugs like the ones discovered the previous week. ‘The last sweep missed these two.’
‘Where were they?’ Nilay asked
‘The metallic ones were in the corridors outside the conference room and a meeting room. The newer ones were in the conference room and here.’ He gestured to the false ceiling above their heads.
‘How come they went undetected during the last sweep?’
‘Perhaps these,’ he gestured to the three non-metallic bugs, ‘were too sophisticated to be detected with the technology they had. Perhaps, they didn’t sweep the corridors outside the conference room and the meeting rooms. Perhaps,’ he pursed his lips and cracked his knuckles, ‘they didn’t want to find them.’
‘What! Then why did they find them today?’
‘These men, Nilay, were from another security firm – Agate Electronic Security. They came with me last evening from Mumbai.’
‘Are you saying that the local firm – KRS Surveillance – deliberately missed these bugs?’ Darshan asked.
‘Not just that, Darshan,’ Nilay said softly, his eyes resting on Gautam’s face. ‘I think he’s suggesting that they may have actually placed these three bugs in our office.’
‘That is possible, isn’t it?’ Gautam asked. ‘We don’t actually know this local firm. It turns out that they have worked for competitors too. I realized yesterday that I might have been manoeuvred into inviting them to sweep the office. How do we know that the bugs they showed us were actually there in the office? How do we know that it was not a cover to instal bugs? To check it out, I called this Mumbai firm we know.’
‘Thank God you stopped us from discussing the data theft in office,’ Moin blurted out. ‘At least, that remains a secret. But they would have heard all our discussions on the cash crunch.’
‘Nothing much can be done now.’ Gautam pulled back the tray and dropped the bugs into a small plastic box. ‘Other than to minimize confidential conversations in office. I’ve asked this firm to sweep the office as well as my house every week.’
‘Oh!’ Moin exclaimed in disappointment. ‘Darshan and I wanted to update you on the data theft and ask about the cash crunch. Guess we can’t do that here.’
‘We can talk now. The office has just been swept. It’s as safe as it’ll ever be. What’s the update?’
Darshan nodded at Moin and the latter took the lead.
‘We haven’t been able to find how the transaction file was created or who
created it,’ Moin said. ‘Mr Darshan and I spent all of Tuesday and good part of yesterday looking through our entire suite of applications. But we are no wiser. How that file ended up on a tape cartridge also remains a mystery.’
Moin discussed what he and Darshan had done in detail and went on to talk about his exploration, along with Nilay’s, of the PC in the data room.
‘By rights,’ Darshan concluded, ‘the file couldn’t have been created at either our front-end or back-end. We found absolutely no sign of its creation here or at the data centre.’
‘Between the two of them,’ Nilay said slowly, ‘Moin and Darshan know every bit of MyMagicHat’s systems. If they couldn’t trace the breach, there are only two possibilities. One, the data thief is so deep inside MyMagicHat that he is able to outwit these two IT guys. Second – and this seems even more unlikely – the breach is outside MyMagicHat.’
‘The data in the file was genuine, wasn’t it?’ Gautam asked.
‘Oh yes!’ Moin exclaimed. ‘No doubt about that. Every single transaction checks out. I studied every byte of the file layout too. It has exactly the same layout as the data in our system – even the same field lengths, formats and sequence.’
‘I see… That establishes the source beyond doubt, even if we don’t know how it was taken or by whom.’
A thought flashed through Nilay’s mind.
‘What about the transaction count?’ he asked. ‘Does the transaction file have all the orders for the time period it covers?
‘Interesting that you should ask that, Nilay.’ Darshan was frowning. ‘That was what Moin was looking at last night. The transaction file Manoj had has less than half the orders placed during September. It is a subset of your September orders.
‘Now the question is whether the orders were selected at random or there is some logic to it. On what basis were the orders picked?’ Darshan turned to Moin. ‘You could find no pattern, could you?’
Moin shook his head. ‘I tried to figure out if they included only certain categories of goods or certain pin codes or certain payment types, etcetera. I sorted it using every field I could think of, but couldn’t find a pattern. The transaction file has every category: apparel, electronics, books – you name it. The orders are from all over the country and for multiple sellers. I saw no pattern. Maybe the mind becomes dull at 4 a.m.’
