The COMPLETE Siya Rajput Crime Thrillers (Books 1 to 4)

by UD Yasha

  ‘Mule was a quirky man. He had his way of going about everything but you could never hate him. He was an oddball. You should have seen him. He could light up any room he walked into. I'm not kidding but he could make people laugh at a funeral if he wanted to. He lifted everyone’s spirits. Apart from that, he was excellent at his job. He was a man of great reputation,' Kolte said.

  ‘Was something wrong at work?’ Rahul said.

  ‘I don’t think so but I’ll verify. At Secure Point, we strive to be transparent and corruption free. So, all the department heads can access each other's every keystroke. It screws with privacy but what the hell, we hack people for a living.'

  ‘What department did Mule head?’ Rahul asked.

  ‘Active Threat Detection.’

  ‘What does that include?’

  ‘Hold on to that thought. Just give me a moment,’ Kolte said.

  A minute later, Kolte looked back at us. He had turned white. ‘This can’t be right. You wouldn’t believe what I just found,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, knowing something was wrong.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Across the city, Radha and Atharva were going through their respective tasks. Radha realized very quickly that the desktop and laptops that they had found at Mule’s house were secured by extremely advanced encryption. It would take days to crack it.

  Radha texted Siya, giving her the update.

  She wanted to send a working copy of the data to Salim Khan. But she could not even copy the data because of the encryption. Mule knew what he was doing when he secured his laptops.

  Finding the exact location of the massive warehouse like building based on just its blueprint was also going to be tough. But the outdated government database made it next to impossible. Radha sighed.

  She looked at the blueprint again. She kept thinking about how massive the place was. She wondered if there was a clue in the amount of space allotted to the backup generator. It meant that the operation taking place at the building needed large amounts of uninterrupted power supply.

  She knew she was not going to get much with the blueprint on its own. She updated Siya with her lack of progress again. She needed a change of scene after hitting roadblocks for more than forty minutes. She decided to take a stroll around the house. She went to maa’s room. Atharva was inside, sitting on a chair, reading the account statements that Rathod had shared with Siya.

  ‘Any luck?’ Radha asked him.

  ‘Both the doctors have asked me to call them two hours later. They are busy conducting different surgeries,’ he said. ‘I just started going through these statements.’

  ‘Can I have a look at them as well?' Radha said. ‘I've hit a dead end with my tasks.'

  Radha had always felt a high looking at numbers. Her life had changed at the age of nineteen when she had realized the power of numbers-backed data. It gave her hope and certainty in a world where she had always been confused after her parents’ disappearance. In numbers, she found comfort. She felt in control looking at them. Within the next few months, as she read hundreds of books on data science and algorithms, her love for the field only increased. Her passion for it had led her trade stocks and currencies.

  Atharva handed her transaction summaries of the account that Daksh and Malini Sinha jointly held. The moment she looked at it, she wondered if either of them had an individual bank account. She got her answer soon when she saw a large amount of money being transferred from two other accounts into the joint account every two weeks. She suspected that those would be the individual accounts where their salaries or business earnings would be credited.

  She called Rathod and asked him to check if she was right. He replied to her message right away.

  My team found the same. I’ve the summaries of their individual accounts. Emailing them both to you and Siya.

  Radha got back to reading the joint account statement. It had the usual expenses. The biggest debits went towards the instalments of car and home loans. They amounted to almost a lakh and a half per month.

  Radha’s mobile phone buzzed. Rathod had sent her the statements of the individual accounts. She forwarded them to Atharva as well.

  The individual accounts together drew in more than six lakh rupees every month. Different asset management and life insurance companies paid Daksh a commission while Healing Hands gave Malini a consultation fee. Despite working for just one day a week, she was earning a neat six-figure amount per month from it. Different companies also paid Malini for her workshops. Those amounts were comparatively smaller, and Radha guessed a part of her payment was always made in cash so that she could avoid paying tax on it.

  Daksh Sinha’s account had a higher number of transactions as he was a business owner. Six people worked at his investment consulting firm. Some of the expenses and overhead costs were funnelled through Daksh’s personal account, making the task of inspecting his finances more tedious. There were hundreds of credits and debits, ranging from a few thousand rupees to several lakhs. Radha realized she would need court warrants to follow the money to its source in such transactions.

  Sumeira’s account had inflows ranging from eighty thousand to one lakh fifty thousand rupees every month. Most of the money came from the café where she worked. She probably got a fixed salary along with a share of the profit. She also got a hefty dividend from her investments. The outflow from her account was mainly to pay chemists and hospitals for Natasha’s treatment and some expenses for the café for which she would later get reimbursed.

  Radha moved to Manohar’s account statements. He got money from only one source—Ad Astra International School. An astounding two lakh rupees per month. But from what Siya had told her, Radha knew that Ad Astra was a school for the elite.

  Looking at numbers is plain hard work. Still, there was a certain charm to it. Radha bit her nails as she leaned forward. Her face was just a few inches away from the laptop screen. She tried to find similarities between the accounts of the three people. She took her laptop downstairs and worked at the dining table. She opened all three statements on her laptop. Her eyes moved up and down and sideways to spot a pattern. The best way was to find credits or debits of the same value or similar frequencies. She searched for them. That was the most difficult part when it came to analyzing account statements. That both Daksh Sinha and Sumeira Gill were some sort of business owners was the only common thread that Radha had found. But nothing apart from that. She wondered if there was anything else. How can something be the same but still appear differently?

  She punched the air when she realized it.

  How did I not think of it before?

  She had a new theory.

  The value of money keeps changing. She knew that just yesterday, sixty-nine Indian Rupees was worth one American Dollar. Less than twenty-four hours before that, the same rupee was a fourth of a cent or twenty paise less valuable. As a trader, it was her job to know the movement of currencies and stocks.

  And now, she had a new perspective to look at the accounts because of the ever-changing value of money. She began looking at the account summaries with more vigour, trying to see if any credit or debit in any of the accounts was of the same value but a different number, as it could be in a different currency.

  At the same time, Malini Sinha was staring out of her room’s window. She was not looking at anything in particular. Her mind was somewhere else.

  It had just hit her that she would not see her husband, her son and her in-laws ever again. She had been preoccupied in thinking about Rucha. What kind of a mother and wife am I to not have realized this earlier? She gripped the grill of the window tightly. She wanted to cry and let out all her pain and frustration. She was disgusted with herself. How could I be like this? She pressed the grill even harder; to the point that her hand began to hurt. Do I deserve to even get Rucha back?

  Tears flowed down her cheeks. She did not bother to wipe them away. She knew more were going to come. She
stayed that way for a while. Somewhere along the way her mind drifted and she began thinking about Rucha once again.

  She looked skywards and prayed to Lord Ram. Please let her come back to me. I miss her so much. I promise I would never let her out of my sight. The crying eventually stopped but only because her eyes were sore. She could not breathe through her blocked nose so she took loud and heavy breaths through her mouth.

  One image from her memory made her feel better. Rucha was running towards her with a smile that lit up her entire world. How she hoped she would see it once again!

  Chapter Forty-Two

  A quiver crawled up my skin as I wondered what Sashi Kolte had found. He had still not come back after having excused himself ten minutes back. The air conditioner hummed softly in his office as we waited.

  I said to Rahul, ‘This place and the kind of work they do is ripe for criminal activity. I don’t know whether Kolte was exaggerating, but even if half of what he claims is true about Secure Point, their work can trigger bloodshed. Where there is power there is crime.’

  ‘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 put 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 they have 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 of 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 or perverse 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 into other countries. One of the main reasons governments across the world are terrified of the Islamic State 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 leave 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 fi
gure. 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 stole 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 damage 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.'