by RV Raman
It was now established that Tau Squared was in possession of the entire million transactions stolen from MyMagicHat.
With that, the police locked down the company and several cyber crime sleuths began examining its computers. Two copies of the stolen transaction file – one on a server and another on a laptop – were discovered. Within an hour, they had also found evidence of bots programmed to visit specific e-commerce websites for artificially boosting traffic and page hits.
Then began the lengthy process of scrutinizing Tau Squared’s paper correspondence, office files and emails and interrogating its employees. But first, the company’s management team and the person to whom Harry had handed over the disk were arrested.
Meanwhile, oblivious to the latest developments at Tau Squared, Nilay was at the MyMagicHat guest house, watching the doctors interview Puneet, who had insisted on him being present. Beside Nilay was an uncharacteristically restless Dhruvi, fidgeting and ill at ease. Something was obviously distracting her. Elsewhere in the room, Puneet’s parents watched silently, lines of worry etched deep on their faces.
An hour of gentle probing produced no new information. They still didn’t know where Puneet had been the past week, what had happened to him or how he had sustained all those injuries. Puneet had spoken willingly enough, but whenever the questioning turned to events of the past week, he would become agitated. Fear and uncertainty had combined to create panic in him, which eased somewhat when Nilay sat beside him, murmuring reassurances.
‘I remember last Friday very clearly,’ a frustrated Puneet said in response to a question. ‘Till the evening, that is. Nilay, you were wearing a striped shirt – white and light blue – and navy blue trousers. Am I right?’
Nilay nodded and smiled.
‘I also remember what we had for lunch,’ Puneet continued animatedly. ‘Mysore masala dosa and bisi bele bhath. I even remember the aroma.’
Nilay didn’t remember, but Mervyn, who always took a keen interest in ordering lunch, corroborated the details over the phone.
‘What did you and Nilay talk about?’ the psychiatrist asked.
That question threw Puneet into confusion. He remembered what Nilay had worn, what they had eaten, how the dosa had smelled and the fact that they had had long discussions. But he couldn’t recall what they had talked about.
‘That’s not unusual,’ the psychiatrist said during a break. ‘The brain stores information very differently from how a tape or a disk does. Theory suggests that the five sensory inputs – sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch – may be stored in different places. Losing one or more of the five – hearing in this case – happens sometimes in such cases. The blow on the head was quite a severe one, you know.’
Puneet was as keen to discover what had happened to him in the past week as everyone else was and the frustration of not being able to do that wore him down. Nilay’s heart went out to him. The gentleness with which he spoke to Puneet came from within; he didn’t have to assume that manner to comfort the unfortunate man.
After an hour of asking Puneet different questions, the psychiatrist decided not to push any more. The young man had already grown tired. The past week had greatly sapped his physical strength. They let him retire to bed after scheduling another interview session for the afternoon. Nilay and Dhruvi returned to MyMagicHat.
Fifteen minutes later, they were seated with Gautam in the latter’s cabin. As soon as the cabin door shut, Dhruvi turned her chair to face Nilay. Normally, all chairs would be facing Gautam across his desk and their occupants would turn their heads to look at each other when they talked. Today, it was different. Dhruvi was facing Nilay squarely, as was Gautam from across the desk, his face inscrutable, but set.
Nilay wondered why and a feeling of trepidation stole over him. Today, he was going to be the centre of attention. And judging by the expressions on Dhruvi and Gautam’s faces, it was going to be a difficult conversation.
‘Mr Adiga,’ Dhruvi began softly, ‘Moin was not the only buyer of the stolen data from Manoj and Harry. There was another one who bought it a few days before Moin did.’
Nilay’s heart lurched and his pulse quickened. The fact that Dhruvi was addressing him and not Gautam meant that Gautam was already aware of it. But he had chosen not to share the knowledge with Nilay. He felt a twinge of disappointment. Why had Gautam not told him?
‘Who bought it?’ Nilay asked.
‘A Bengaluru-based firm.’
‘Name?’
Dhruvi’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly as she quietly said, ‘Tau Squared.’
She had done nothing to soften the blow. Nilay’s mind reeled. Again, that accursed firm! He had thought he was done with it; that he had buried it with the past. Yet here it was, rearing its ugly head again, trying to ruin him anew. He felt the blood drain from his face and knew that it would be apparent in his sudden pallor. Dhruvi’s expression indicated that she hadn’t missed it. Gautam wouldn’t have either.
So that’s why Gautam had played his cards close to the chest. He and Dhruvi had decided to confront him – yes, confront him – to gauge his reaction. That meant that Gautam knew. He had never spoken of it, but he had known.
With the realization came a stab of bitterness. Couldn’t he have asked Nilay privately? Why did he have to get the police to do that? Didn’t he trust Nilay any more? He wanted to turn to Gautam and confront him, but decided not to do so. There was no telling how that would be interpreted in the current situation. He decided to focus exclusively on the Inspector.
‘Do you know Tau Squared, Mr Adiga?’ Dhruvi asked.
‘Yes.’ Nilay cleared his tight throat. ‘Yes, I do. I had dealt with them at TezShop, my earlier employer. Tau Squared is a dubious company with unsavoury people. I had an unfortunate incident with them.’
‘Please tell us about it.’
‘I will. But first, I want you to understand that I have no way of proving what I am going to say.’ He felt the blood return to his face as he began speaking. ‘I would, therefore, want this to be treated as a private conversation. Making it public would leave me open to a defamation suit.’
‘I understand your sentiments,’ Dhruvi nodded. ‘But I am in no position to give you assurances without first hearing what you have to say.’
‘Fair enough. TezShop is a fast-growing e-tailer now, but when I had joined it four years back, it was a struggling start-up. My mandate was to grow the customer base and GMV. I assembled my marketing team and got to work and, within a couple of months, our efforts began bearing fruit. I must say that we had a very generous budget, as the company was very well funded.
‘Tau Squared was the firm that supplied us market intelligence. They were already a supplier when I joined TezShop and once a professional marketing team was in place, their business with us only grew. They provided information on market trends, including what categories of products were moving fast and what were not, what categories were likely to grow in the near future, what customers were looking for, approximate sales volumes of various e-tailers and so on.
‘Based on their intelligence, we designed several marketing campaigns. Of course, some were hits and others misses, but that was to be expected in a fledgling industry. In order to know how successful our actions were, we hired Tau Squared to measure the effectiveness of our campaigns.’
‘Pardon me for interrupting, Mr Adiga,’ Dhruvi said. ‘How did Tau Squared acquire their market intelligence?’
‘I am wiser in hindsight, but at that time, we believed what they told us – that they conducted a large number of interviews with customers and sellers. Naturally, no e-tailer would share information about his sales, but if you interviewed a sufficient number of buyers and sellers, you could construct a pretty reliable picture. To substantiate their claim, Tau Squared showed us samples of their interviews and questionnaires.
‘There is also a lot of disparate information in the market – regulatory filings, news articles, interviews, etcetera, which Ta
u Squared collated, triangulated and made good sense of. I must say they were very convincing. Better still, our marketing campaigns that were based on their intelligence worked very well.
‘Tau Squared charged us an arm and a leg, but the results justified the high cost. As the marketing head, I received market intelligence and campaign performance reports. Other divisions of the company and its subsidiaries engaged Tau Squared for other purposes, including technology-related services.
‘Six months into my tenure at TezShop, the CEO, Arvind, decided to consolidate all payments to Tau Squared into one single monthly retainer fee. That was understandable, as not all subsidiaries had the same paying capacity. It made business sense for some of the companies to cross-subsidize the others.
‘As a major user of Tau Squared’s services and one of the senior people in the holding company, it fell to me to approve Tau Squared’s invoices for payment. Though my services accounted for only a third of the monthly retainer fee, I approved the entire invoice.
‘Everything went well for a year after that. One of our most successful campaigns was to credit new customers with ₹50 when they opened an account and to offer a heavy cashback for their first purchase. The thinking was that once a customer bought from us, we would become a part of his go-to e-tailer list for future purchases.
‘I got an inkling of something not being quite right when Tau Squared offered me a list of new high-potential customers. These were regular buyers who frequented other e-tailing sites, but not ours – in other words, new fish to catch. Tau Squared claimed that they knew something of these buyers’ preferences.
‘Now there is no way any analysis or analytics can come up with such a list. Nowhere on the web is a legal list of buyers and their buying habits available. If Tau Squared did, indeed, have such a list at their disposal, it had to have been illicitly obtained. I wanted no part of that and spoke to Arvind, my CEO. He agreed with me and ticked Tau Squared off.
‘Now with the seed of doubt sown in my mind, I began wondering about Tau Squared’s sources of market intelligence. I began asking for backups of random pieces of their market intelligence which, they claimed, were based on buyer and seller interviews. Inevitably, the backups were late in coming. After scrutinizing a few of them, I noticed a certain sameness across the interview documents.
‘It dawned on me that Tau Squared was manufacturing fake backups as and when I was asking for them. Their source of “market intelligence” was not interviews, but something else. I decided to set a trap for them, the details of which I won’t go into now. Soon, I was sure that there was something illicit about their “market intelligence”.
‘That was about the time Arvind’s daughter got married. The familiarity with which Tau Squared’s founders moved about with Arvind and his family during the wedding got me thinking. Clearly, there was more to this Tau Squared affair.
‘I then analyzed our new customer list and found that a large percentage of the individuals named in it had not made a single transaction. They had even let their free gift of ₹50 lapse. Such a thing happening in noticeably large numbers was unlikely in India – we like to use every free rupee we can get. I began suspecting that these customers were not genuine ones.
‘I then extracted the list of new customers and analyzed their enrolment details, including date, time, IP address and a few other parameters. The information fell into a revealing pattern. These “customers” were being created by bots or some such automated software.
‘I went online and tried to find these bots that visited our website. I found traces of some, but there was no way to track them back to their source. In short, I didn’t have proof.
‘Nevertheless, I went to Arvind and insisted that we pull the plug on Tau Squared. What followed was a series of uncomfortable, even nasty, discussions over many weeks. Arvind knew that I had no proof, partly because I had admitted it and partly, because he knew exactly how Tau Squared was operating, which ensured that they left no evidence.
‘During one of the last conversations I had with him, Arvind said, “At the end of the day, Nilay, you were the one who was approving Tau Squared’s invoices. It was you who benefited from their market intelligence. If I were you, I’d think hard before taking any drastic step.” It was, unquestionably, a threat.
‘He was right, of course. On the one hand, I had no proof whatsoever. On the other, the first thing I would do by publicizing this matter was incriminate myself. I had trusted Arvind and approved the invoices. Now if this came to court, it would be my word against his. He would deny everything and I would be left in the lurch. The fact that I had approved the invoices would sink me.
‘I did the only thing possible – I resigned. Along with the resignation, I sent Arvind a detailed account of my suspicions about Tau Squared. If things came to a head, that would be my proverbial fig leaf.
‘I had noticed a peculiar thing about Arvind. During my last year at TezShop, he was often in possession of information about competitors that made me wonder how he had obtained it. When asked, he would say, “A little bird told me.” But there were far too many “little birds” for my liking.
‘That, in short, was my experience with Tau Squared. As I said, I have no proof of their wrongdoing. If I were to go public with this, I would be sued – successfully – for defamation.’
Silence fell as Nilay finished his account. Having exclusively addressed Dhruvi through his entire discourse, he now turned slowly until his gaze had come to rest on Gautam. He made no effort to hide the bitterness he felt towards him. Surely, they knew each other well enough for Gautam to have spoken to him personally, rather than operate through the police? There was no need for Nilay to utter a word. His face said it all.
‘It was at my insistence that Mr Puraria didn’t speak to you, Mr Adiga,’ Dhruvi said softly, breaking the uncomfortable silence. ‘I told him about Tau Squared last evening and as soon as I did, Puneet surfaced. We were all very busy after that and Mr Puraria had no opportunity to speak to you.’
‘But nevertheless, Nilay,’ Gautam intervened, ‘I could have found the time to talk, given the seriousness of the matter. But I chose not to for a specific reason. The reason, Nilay, is that Tau Squared was to be raided this morning and I had been sworn to secrecy by the Inspector.’
Nilay’s eyes, clearly reflecting his growing elation at what he had just heard, snapped to Dhruvi.
‘You raided them?’ he asked.
‘It’s in progress, even as we speak,’ she confirmed. ‘Our cyber crime folks found a copy of MyMagicHat’s stolen data and some evidence of bots –’
Nilay let out a whoop of delight, his eyes shining. Suddenly, he was filled with joy – the unbridled joy that he had been waiting two entire years for.
‘You nailed them!’ he exulted. ‘You nailed the bastards! Sorry for the French, Inspector, but this is the best news I’ve heard in years!’
‘Nilay,’ Gautam’s tone was sombre, ‘who else knows about your encounter with Tau Squared?’
‘Vibha and…Moin.’
‘Moin?’ Dhruvi’s surprise was evident, but Gautam nodded gravely.
‘Moin was very close to Nilay, Inspector,’ he said softly. ‘And they were at TezShop together.’ He turned to Nilay and continued, ‘You spoke of Arvind and his “little birds”. Do you think he was getting information through bugs?’
‘Possible, but I can’t say for sure. I wouldn’t put it past the Tau Squared slimeballs to have bugs installed. I’m sure they would sell the information at a profit.’
‘Alex and the cyber crime people are checking that angle,’ Dhruvi told him. ‘But coming back to Moin, I wonder if his knowledge of Tau Squared’s shady business could have had something to do with his death? We still don’t have a motive, you know.’
Nilay’s fingers tingled and his loathing for Arvind and Tau Squared surged. When he turned and looked at Gautam, his face was unnaturally pale.
‘There’s something you don’t know, Gautam
,’ he rasped. ‘Moin and I have been continuously on the lookout for bots and malware. In our minds, Tau Squared and Arvind could do anything, including infecting our servers with viruses or installing malware on our customer’s computers or using bots to launch a DoS – Denial of Service – attack on us to bring down our website.’
‘Did you find any evidence of bots on our website? Any trace?’
Nilay shook his head. ‘No. But that means nothing. It’s virtually impossible to distinguish an intelligently created bot from a human being, and well-written bots leave no trace. The only thing we can do is analyze our website data and customer acquisition data post facto for patterns.
‘Moin,’ Gautam said slowly, his eyes shining, ‘was analyzing past data the day he was killed. I wonder if he discovered something.’
Nilay’s head was swimming. Half-formed thoughts swirled in his mind.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice breaking from tension. ‘You remember the last conversation you and I had with him? On the morning of the very day he was killed? He was looking for patterns in the stolen data file.’
‘You’re right!’ Gautam gasped, his face turning pale. ‘He had pulled an all-nighter, looking for all kinds of patterns.’
An abrupt silence enveloped the room as Gautam and Dhruvi fell deep into thought. Nilay too remained silent, ruminating over Gautam’s sudden doubts about his integrity. Was that how fragile his trust had been? So fragile that one random suggestion could shatter it? Would he have suspected a loyalist like Mervyn or Sundar as he had suspected Nilay? No. After this, would Nilay want to continue in MyMagicHat under Gautam? Perhaps not.
The charged silence was interrupted by the soft buzz of Dhruvi’s phone vibrating. She answered the call and listened silently. After a while she said, ‘Okay,’ and hung up.
‘That was Alex,’ she said, gazing at Nilay pensively. ‘They have discovered some source code at Tau Squared that relates to bots. It appears that some of them may have been created by a person or agency going by the name of Nefertiti. Does it ring a bell?’
