Saboteur

by RV Raman

‘I’m not sure…but he’s in Bengaluru.’ Puneet ran a trembling hand through his hair. ‘I think…I think it –’ He stopped short.

  ‘Who?’ Dhruvi asked.

  ‘I’m not sure!’ Puneet wailed.

  Dhruvi stared at him for a long moment. She leaned forward, bringing her face close to his.

  ‘That someone,’ she whispered, ‘is not far from this place, is he? He’s satisfied that your amnesia is genuine. That was critical for Mamata’s continued safety.’

  Puneet shuddered. His face had gone chalk white again.

  ‘I’m not sure!’ he keened again, his voice as low as Dhruvi’s whisper. ‘Please believe me! I only heard bits and pieces of the conversations between my captors. One of them spoke frequently to his boss.’

  Dhruvi leaned back, her gaze uncompromising.

  ‘You’d better tell us the whole story, Mr Kaul,’ she said firmly.

  ‘I will. But first tell me how you found me out.’

  ‘The ring you are wearing now… You weren’t wearing it when you turned up at MyMagicHat after your abduction. And your mother didn’t bring it down from Mumbai either. My suspicions were confirmed when photos taken before your abduction showed you wearing it. When your abductors took away everything you had, it is unlikely that they would have overlooked a valuable ring. You hid it from them, didn’t you?’

  Puneet nodded. ‘In my underwear.’ He dropped his gaze, embarrassed. ‘It’s Mamata’s gift…I couldn’t lose it.’

  ‘Now, Mr Kaul, we’ve lost enough time. Let’s hear your story.’

  Chapter 26

  ‘I had been suspicious from the beginning, from the time I started the DD exercise,’ Puneet began. ‘Something just didn’t add up, but I was unable to put my finger on it. You see, thanks to a valuation exercise I had undertaken for Puraria Retail a few months back, I had a good sense of how much they were selling through their brick-and-mortar stores and how much through e-tailers.

  ‘So when I looked at MyMagicHat’s sales, they seemed too high to me. That’s when I began investigating. I initially suspected Nilay, but his sincerity made me reevaluate my thoughts about him. Clearly, he accepted the numbers as genuine, but I could not be absolutely sure about their authenticity.

  ‘I tapped Ved, with whom I had worked during the valuation exercise, and asked for reports that I knew he generates. By that Friday, I was certain that some MyMagicHat transactions were disappearing after they’d left the company, but before they’d reached PRL. That is what I wanted to share with Vikram that night, but I never reached the hotel.’

  ‘What happened?’ Dhruvi asked. ‘It seems a car picked you up.’

  ‘Since my colleagues were using our regular car, someone, whom I assumed to be the MyMagicHat admin person, had arranged for another car to drop me off at the hotel. It was the same car that had taken me to the Whitefield warehouse the previous day. Since I already knew the driver, I was fine with the arrangement.

  ‘When that car arrived, there was a second person in it – a man I knew as Nathan. He had shown me around the Whitefield warehouse. So I didn’t suspect anything.

  ‘I called Ved for the last time from the car and when I hung up, I found myself staring at the point of a dagger. Nathan snatched away my phone and switched it off. The car then halted at one point and I was forced out and made to get into a Corolla Altis that was waiting there. I found myself sandwiched between Nathan and another man, who was also armed with a dagger. A third man was at the wheel. We sped out of town to some kind of a farmhouse, where I was kept captive.

  ‘Nathan was the only one who would speak to me and I could tell that he was receiving his instructions from his handler over the phone. Once we reached the farmhouse, he took photographs of my parents and of Mamata from my phone and warned me that a gruesome fate awaited them if I tried anything funny. I believed him; he had every intention of carrying out the threat.

  ‘Gradually, over the next couple of days, it became apparent that they were planning to kill me. I pleaded with Nathan and made all sorts of promises. But to no avail. Then I had an idea. I promised him that if I were released, I would feign amnesia; I would divulge absolutely nothing of what I had seen and heard. He laughed in my face and walked away in contempt.

  ‘For a brief moment, I felt I had been left unguarded, as the other two men were nowhere in sight. And the front door was open. Seizing the opportunity, I darted out, only to run into one of the other men. My attempt to escape turned out to be a grave mistake; they gave me the thrashing of my life.

  ‘The next two days were terrible. I was beaten black and blue and left to starve. The only thing that passed my lips was water from the bathroom tap. In between, I heard Nathan speak to his handler about my proposal to feign amnesia. The handler obviously rejected the idea.

  ‘It was now only a matter of time before they killed me. I overheard them making arrangements to remove my body from the farmhouse and dispose of it, and realized that I had only two or three days to live. They didn’t want to kill me immediately, and have a dead body in the farmhouse prematurely.

  ‘But the next day, something happened that made them decide I wasn’t an immediate priority. I would realize later that eliminating Moin had suddenly become more critical for them, far more urgent than the task of bumping me off. Nathan and another man left the farmhouse, entrusting my custody to a single man.

  ‘This was my chance. I had to escape that night. It was then or never.

  ‘I had noticed during the nights spent at the farmhouse that my captors tended to sleep very soundly. After they had locked the door to my room, I would hear loud snores from the adjoining room. I had also noticed that the bathroom attached to my room had a ventilator with glass slats, but without any iron bars between the slats.

  ‘That night, I removed the glass slats and wriggled out through the ventilator, but lost my hold and fell on the rocks below. I twisted my ankle and banged my head hard against a tree.

  ‘As I lay stunned and disoriented, I heard my captor’s shout of alarm from inside the building. My fall must have made a noise loud enough to wake him up. I ran as fast as my injured ankle would permit. Except for a kutcha road, the building was surrounded by fields with tall sugarcane stalks swaying in the breeze.

  ‘I plunged into the sugarcane field and tried to get as far away from the farmhouse as I could. I thought that dreadful night would never end. I would run and hide, then run again. I didn’t know if my captor had got help to search for me. Once, when I heard voices close by, I lay flat on the damp mud of a field and stayed motionless, hardly daring to breathe.

  ‘At daybreak, I came across an abandoned building, which turned out to be a sugarcane mill. It was filthy and smelled awful, but it gave me refuge. I stayed hidden there the whole day, afraid to come out in daylight for fear of getting caught. By nightfall, I was ravenous and went out again to find the main road.

  ‘On my very first night in captivity, I had hidden my ring and a couple of thousand-rupee notes in my underwear, before they searched me and took away everything. Now, I used one of those notes to pay for some food. Never before or since have I devoured as much in so short a time; in my famished state, the food tasted absolutely delicious.

  ‘Having gobbled down the food, I quickly bought some bottled water and set out on a long hike to Bengaluru. I stayed close to the highway, but not so close that people passing by in vehicles could spot me. After several hours, I gathered enough courage to approach the highway and hitched a ride to some place on the outskirts of Bengaluru.

  ‘Exhausted, I hired a bed in a filthy shack when I reached my destination and passed out. When I awoke, it was afternoon. I thought through my situation and decided that if I were to protect Mamata and my parents from harm, I would have to feign amnesia when I returned to Bengaluru. I had been badly beaten up. I had two head injuries – one from hitting the tree and the other from the thrashings I had received from the goons – and I reckoned that if my behaviour back in Beng
aluru was convincing enough, my claims of a partial memory loss would be believed.

  ‘I took a bus into the city and then an autorickshaw to MyMagicHat. You know the rest.’

  Puneet let out a long sigh and sat back, drained. Reliving the horrifying moments from his experience had been exhausting.

  ‘I am not a particularly brave guy, Inspector,’ he concluded in a muted voice. ‘With Mamata’s life and that of my parents’ under threat, I did the only thing possible – I faked amnesia. In any case, by the end of my ordeal, I had decided to quit Kantoff. I have no intention of continuing to work for someone as shady as Vikram.

  ‘In the interests of the firm, I had tried to dissuade Kantoff from making this investment, but all I got was a backlash, because Vikram wanted to go ahead with the deal at any cost. Nigel Tammer is a decent guy, but he isn’t based in India. Vikram is a complete fraud – I wouldn’t be surprised if he has cut a deal on the side with Gautam.’

  ‘Do you know where this farmhouse is, Mr Kaul?’ Dhruvi asked. ‘The place you were held prisoner?’

  ‘Unfortunately not, but I did notice certain things along the road as we drove down the highway.’

  ‘Which highway?’

  ‘The Bengaluru–Mysore highway, I think.’

  ‘That’s a start. What did you see?’

  ‘We passed a town where they were selling wooden toys – lots of them. There were many shops lining the road.’

  ‘Channapatna,’ Dhruvi guessed, glancing at Alex. ‘How far was it from where you were held?’

  ‘On the way to the farmhouse, we passed this town about ten or fifteen minutes before turning off the highway.’

  ‘Did you turn to the right or the left?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Describe the farmhouse.’

  ‘A single-storey granite building, with four or five rooms, standing on a large plot of land bordered by low granite walls. It has a red gate that is left ajar, because the top hinge of one of the gate doors is broken. An ancient, rusting lorry is parked outside the gate to one side. The building is connected to a potholed road by a kutcha lane.’

  ‘That should be useful. What about the disused factory you hid in?’

  ‘I don’t know what it looks from the outside, as I saw it mostly at night. But I did see a board inside that said “Lakshmi Sugars”. The interiors were filthy and I noticed some machines that looked like crushers.’

  ‘Anything else you saw?’

  ‘Lots of sugarcane fields. And oh! I think there was a smallish lake or a large pond nearby.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Alex boomed, uncharacteristically buoyant.

  He stepped out and spoke rapidly into the phone, passing on descriptions of the farmhouse and the factory to his men. A group of 15 policemen in plain clothes had left for Mandya that morning. Now with precise descriptions and an approximate location to bank on, they would be able to narrow down their search.

  Presently, Alex returned to the room.

  ‘We should grab a quick lunch and leave now,’ he told Dhruvi. ‘It’ll take us at least a couple of hours to get there.’

  As Dhruvi rose, Alex turned to Puneet.

  ‘Let’s go and find this farmhouse, Mr Kaul,’ he said, a grim smile on his usually mournful face. ‘You will accompany us and help us identify the place.’

  ‘Me!’ Puneet squeaked, shrinking back into his chair. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ Dhruvi explained, ‘the men who held you captive have taken another prisoner. We must rescue her.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘A young lady called Nitya.’

  ■

  Monday mornings were always busy for Vibha. After the heavy data traffic the databases had seen over the weekend, she had to carry out a number of routine checks to monitor the health of the databases under her care and fix any problems that might have arisen. And with Darshan unlikely to come in before late afternoon, some of his responsibilities had passed on to her as well. Once she had completed the tasks, Vibha parcelled out work to the other two database administrators reporting to her.

  Despite having started the day earlier than usual, by the time she turned her mind to the problem of the data theft and Moin’s murder, it was well past 11 a.m.

  The first thing she did was to verify what Moin had said, which the rest of them had accepted unchallenged. She constructed a query to pull out from MyMagicHat’s systems the September orders that had been placed with the 37 sellers. If Moin was right, this output would be identical to the stolen data file.

  As the query ran, she turned her attention to PRL’s systems. While PRL’s primary system ran from a data centre in Navi Mumbai, Bengaluru was its ‘hot’ business continuity site. In other words, it was a concurrent copy or a backup of the primary system.

  Vibha’s first task was to understand PRL’s database schema – the blueprint of how PRL’s data was organized into databases and tables. This took her the better part of an hour. Once she had understood it well enough, she constructed a query to pull out all orders placed on PRL in September by the 37 sellers and dump them into a file similar to the stolen data file. She then ran the query and waited for it to finish.

  By 1 p.m., she had both files – the first from MyMagicHat and the second from PRL. Each listed all the orders placed with and by the 37 sellers. The next task was to compare them.

  They turned out to be of different lengths, with the PRL file being about half the size of the MyMagicHat file. The latter contained about a million transactions, but the former, only half that number. Now, with the basic facts verified, she turned her mind to what might have happened.

  Basically, a million transactions had left MyMagicHat’s systems, but only half of them had arrived at PRL’s systems. It stood to reason, therefore, that the other half had disappeared en route. Logically, sales orders would flow from MyMagicHat’s systems to the sellers’ systems, from which they would be sent to PRL. She drew a diagram encapsulating her understanding.

  Where had the balance – the half a million orders – gone? And why had they been made to disappear? The answer, she figured, must lie in the systems used by the 37 sellers.

  Did the data centre house their systems too? She had no idea. But she did know that the data centre had a large number of clients.

  Over the next half an hour, she searched the data centre’s client lists for the 37 sellers, but in vain. She couldn’t find any of the names. Ravenous from the intense work, she decided to go down to the food court for a late lunch.

  There, as she ate, Vibha flipped through some photographs on her phone that Nilay had shared with her. A couple of them showed the tape cartridge on which the stolen data file had been found. One of them had markings made with a permanent marker:

  ‘Date: 3/10/2014 No: 7/C/03’

  It was on 3 October 2014 that the cartridge had begun its useful life. The data centre had a policy of using tape cartridges for two years before discarding them. So it would have been retired around 3 October 2016. That was four days before it was sold to Manoj.

  But what did ‘7/C/03’ mean? The data centre’s operators would know. Vibha was about to hail one of the operators who happened to be at the adjacent table, when she stopped herself. As far as possible, she shouldn’t discuss this matter with anyone at the data centre or at MyMagicHat.

  Then who could shed light on this matter? A moment later, the answer presented itself – she would call Vishwanath, the operator who had been responsible for verifying if the tape cartridge had been erased before selling it off, but had failed to do so. He had been fired for his laxity. She had been on good terms with him when he had left and thought he would respect her request to keep the matter confidential.

  ‘Hi, Vibha, I’m feeling quite bitter, you know,’ Vishwanath said on the phone in response to her question about how he was doing. ‘Yes, I admit I goofed up by not verifying that tape cartridge, but it’s not possible to do a 100 per cent check. Not when there is so much work to do. To get fired for
that is unfair.’

  After commiserating with him for a couple of minutes, Vibha popped the question she had made the call for.

  ‘It’s a straightforward code in three parts,’ he explained. ‘The first part represents the server cluster; the second, the batch; and the third, the serial number of the cartridge within the batch. This cartridge was from Server Cluster No. 7.’

  The servers in the data centre were organized into seven physically separate ‘clusters’ for ease of operations and management. Each cluster had its own data backup equipment.

  ‘Cluster 7?’ Vibha repeated. ‘That’s not where MyMagicHat’s systems are hosted, is it?’

  ‘No. MyMagicHat is in Cluster 3.’

  So that’s why both Moin and Darshan had insisted there was no such file in MyMagicHat’s back-end! They had searched Cluster 3! But the tape cartridge was a backup of Cluster 7.

  ‘And PRL?’ she asked. ‘Which cluster is it in?’

  ‘Cluster 1. They were the very first client and the one with whom we started the data centre. Naturally, they are in the first cluster.’

  ‘Who are the clients in Cluster 7?’

  ‘Oh, mostly new ones. Some of them are technology companies that run applications for small organizations – application outsourcing. Cluster 7 is the newest cluster, you know.’

  ‘Okay. “Batch” and “Serial” mean the usual, right?’

  ‘We use between three and seven batches for each server cluster, with each batch having as many cartridges as the size of the data demands.’

  Suddenly, a thought flashed through her mind.

  ‘Vishwanath,’ she said, ‘does application outsourcing include running systems for companies that sell on e-tailer websites?’

  ‘Yes. Cogent India Technology Services is one of the clients on Cluster 7. They run and manage retail applications for many sellers on MyMagicHat and other websites.’

  Vibha felt a sudden thrill course through her veins. Dare she hope…?

  ‘Have you heard any of these names, Vishwanath?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice calm and steady. ‘SM Retail, Supreme Electronics, New Horizon Traders –’