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

by UD Yasha

  The doctor said, ‘We were able to stop the bleeding in less than five minutes from the time we started operating on her. The bullet did not hit any vital part of the body but she had gone into shock by the time she got here. There was severe trauma on her right arm and some nerves around the area of impact were damaged. That’s why we took time. But now it's under control. You can see her shortly.’

  ‘So, she’ll be okay?’ Rahul said.

  The doctor said, ‘She’s going to be fine. She needs some physiotherapy to regain strength in her right arm but apart from that she will be fit. She can even go home in a few days if her vitals stay normal.’

  The next few seconds were a complete blur. I did not quite understand what the doctor said because a flurry of happiness exploded inside me. I pictured Radha, smiling the way she always does—the happiness reaching her eyes, and lighting up not just her entire face but also the hearts of everyone around her. Just the thought of it warmed my heart. At that moment, I forgot about everything else.

  I did not realize that my phone was buzzing in my pocket until Rahul pointed it out. It was Rathod calling me. I had almost forgotten about them while worrying about Radha.

  ‘Siya, we have secured the warehouse,’ Rathod said, his voice bearing relief and triumph. ‘We have three of their men in custody. The children are safe with us. Rucha is okay. How’s Radha?’

  I told him about the success of our end of the operation.

  ‘We’re coming to Grace Hospital as well. The children need to undergo checkups and four members of my team have sustained injuries,’ Rathod said and paused. ‘We did it, Siya. We got them. We’ve also retrieved a lot of information from the warehouse. I reckon it will tell us what was happening in the Dark Web Chatroom. We’ll see you in a few minutes,’ he said and hung up.

  I closed my eyes, realizing that we had gotten past it all. The smile curling my lips got bigger. Rahul knew right away that the children had been recovered.

  ‘Rathod’s men have the children,’ I said to Rahul.

  The grin on my face refused to go away. It was all over now. Radha was out of danger. She would be back with us soon. We were going to be a happy family once again. As the thoughts swirled in my head, there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around.

  It was Rahul.

  ‘Hey, the doctor is calling us inside,’ he said with a grin on his face. ‘He’s saying we can see Radha now.’

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Two weeks later

  The doctors were pleased with Radha’s recovery and she returned home after six days. Laughter and happiness returned to the Rajput household. Radha, being the way she is, refused to wallow in self-pity. Dr. Pande told me that the events of the past few days had not hampered maa’s recovery.

  We celebrated Radha’s return by ordering from Chef Chu's, our favourite Chinese restaurant. When I called to place the order, the person across the line recognized my voice and instantly guessed our order—chicken lollipops, burnt garlic chicken noodles and American chopsuey. Chef Chu, who knew us far too well because we ordered a lot from his restaurant, sent complimentary dumplings for all of us as he knew we were celebrating.

  We gradually got to know the scope of the entire operation over the coming weeks. Even now, my hands start shivering when I think about what was happening in the warehouse and in that Dark Web Chatroom.

  Rathod and his team recovered several hundred gigabytes of data from the warehouse. The creators of the Dark Web chat room called it ‘The Mothers’ Club’ while talking about it amongst themselves. Its real name was an alpha numeric sequence. At first, it was hard to find out who was hosting the chatroom as it was buried under many layers of anonymity.

  Jay Parikh worked out of my garage office to crack the rest of the data that Sitaram Mule had taken. He was going to need longer to sift through everything Rathod’s team had found. Even then, despite knowing roughly twenty percent of what was out there, he was able to find out about the people who ran The Mothers’ Club.

  The name ‘Cherry Investments’ came up several times in the data we found at the warehouse and the information hacked by Mule. It had all the characteristics of a shell company. It had no active business, it did not have any personnel and it also did not have any assets. Its cash reserves were extremely low. We guessed that the company was primarily used to collect money given to The Mothers’ Club by the highest bidder for the weekly episode.

  ‘We will not be able to trace this money,’ Jay Parikh said. ‘After leaving Cherry Investments’ wallet, it would have gone to at least fifteen different accounts and cryptocurrency wallets.’

  ‘How will we know who’s behind this though?’ I said.

  ‘Cryptocurrency makes it impossible. But just like in the Dark Web, a person needs to physically push services and goods, in cryptocurrency, money needs to be transferred to a compatible wallet. Think of it as converting Indian Rupees into American Dollars. Hypothetically, if the dollar could not be traced, we could still trace the original rupee when it was converted into dollars. The Mothers’ Club accepted payments only in Bitcoin. But if Chief Minister Sarvate was involved, there’s a high chance he would have converted that money into Indian rupees once again—especially if he used it for funding his political campaign.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have used Indian banks for that,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. He would’ve used banks in Panama, the Bahamas, Switzerland…the list goes on.’

  ‘But it would have had to come back to India at some point if he was using it to fund his campaign.’

  ‘That’s where I was going,’ Jay said. ‘We can trace that but it’s scary difficult and it’ll take time. We’ll probably not even get the required warrants. I’ll have to figure out another way to crack this in that case.’

  Jay was right. In India, information regarding the funding of political parties could not be easily acquired. There was a huge debate on whether it should be included under the Right To Information Act. But I knew courts made exceptions if the situation was dire and if we could provide reasonable doubt that the funding money was acquired through illegal means.

  ‘We could push for getting warrants,’ I said. ‘We can use testimonies of the people we caught, and including the mothers who were involved.’

  The days kept rolling by. I visited Sumeira Gill and Malini Sinha in police custody more than ten times to know exactly what had happened. They were reluctant to talk at first but then I struck a deal with both of them that allowed them to see their daughters once. It bothered me immensely to make that deal but I knew it was necessary to stop the widespread cancer that The Mothers’ Club had caused.

  They had been harming their kids from the time they were born. They had a burning desire to get attention, and they loved it when people told them how much they cared for their kids. Somewhere along the way, while surfing the Internet, they stumbled upon the chatroom in the Dark Web. The chatroom discussed different innovative ways in which mothers suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy could get away with harming their own child.

  Soon, the promoters of the chatroom figured out a way for all these mothers who harm their children to get the most attention by providing them with a platform to discuss their yearnings openly. The mothers were encouraged to upload videos of the abusive methods that they used to harm their children. Not just that, but the promoters also realized that some people, who were perverted enough, were willing to pay to watch the videos. That opened up a huge income generation avenue.

  The chatroom then found a big sponsor in Sanjay Sarvate. Sarvate was only interested in making money. It was his idea to auction off the method that would be featured in the weekly episodes.

  To the outside world, everything seemed normal in the lives of Malini and Sumeira. Caring mothers. Poor mothers. They do so much. Oh, their children are going through a lot. Everything was going as per plan for Malini and Sumeira. The mothers were being loved. But then everything changed when Natasha appeared for an interv
iew at Ad Astra.

  Sumeira told me that it all began with Natasha’s interview at Ad Astra International School. After speaking to Natasha, Shaunak Manohar suspected that something was wrong between the mother and her daughter. More than that, Natasha had spent some time alone with Manohar during her application interview. She was about to tell Manohar something when she stopped after seeing her mother. Natasha had started shaking and her face had gone white when Sumeira stepped into the interview room and changed the subject. This incident along with Manohar’s initial observation had made Manohar suspicious.

  Sumeira came to know later that Manohar had followed them back home that day to see if everything was okay. Manohar saw Sumeira pull out petrol from the car, put it into a bottle and then give it to her daughter. Manohar was confused at first and then worried. Over the next few days, he observed the Gills. Sumeira’s story checked out as we knew from Manohar’s cell phone data that he was spying on them. Sumeira believed that Manohar was making sure Natasha was okay as she was his own daughter’s age. Sumeira told me she made Natasha drink petrol when the medicines from The Mothers’ Club were late to arrive.

  Manohar became convinced that Sumeira was harming her own daughter over the next three days. He went to the police to lodge a complaint. Several cops were on Chief Minister Sarvate’s payroll. It included Ranjit Bhide, the Chief of the Pune Police Department. Bhide asked his subordinate, Dattu Shekhar—another corrupt cop—to deal with the situation.

  In the evening, on the same day as he had filed the complaint, Manohar was held at gunpoint while returning from school. He was threatened that his family would face the consequences if he did not withdraw the complaint. Sumeira was told that Manohar was onto her.

  Sumeira broke down several times while telling me her version of the story. She told me Manohar wanted to know why the police had threatened him hours after he had lodged a complaint. She discovered later that Manohar had hacked into her laptop and tracked every stroke of her keyboard. That led him to know that she had been lurking in The Mothers’ Club chatroom on the Dark Web. He could not tell what she typed once she was inside the chatroom because of the higher encryption on it. But that was enough for Manohar to know something really huge was going down in the Mothers’ Club. Coupled with a little girl being fed petrol by her mother, Manohar knew he had to act.

  From the evidence and data that we recovered, we got to know that Manohar conducted his own research and got in touch with Sitaram Mule who agreed to assist him right away. They first rescued Natasha Gill from her own mother. After that, Mule devised a plan to get into The Mothers’ Club chatroom.

  After an elaborate plan that involved taking funds from Secure Point to pay the chatroom, Mule was inside the Mothers’ Club. He found out about its members and the way the chatroom worked. He could only get a part of the data and that’s why out of the four members of the chatroom who resided in Pune, he only got information about Malini Sinha.

  Saving Malini’s daughter Rucha was the next item on their agenda. But they realized they would need to form a tight case with no loopholes and collect hard evidence if they were going to have any chance of winning against Chief Minister Sarvate. To get more proof, Manohar told Daksh Sinha about what Malini was doing to Rucha, hoping he would come on board to catch his wife red handed.

  But The Mothers’ Club got a whiff of Mule’s presence in their chatroom. Its promoters became suspicious of the Sinha family. They also feared that Manohar had shared evidence with Daksh Sinha. So, Sarvate ordered a hit on the Sinha family to wipe out all the loose ends. During all this, the promoters controlling The Mothers’ Club had taken Sumeira Gill under their care to make sure she did not share any information with anyone.

  Sumeira Gill also admitted to killing her husband Sachin in self-defense. The CID mentioned Sachin’s murder in the chargesheet but they did not try her for it.

  The plan to kill the Sinhas went wrong because of two reasons. First, Rucha Sinha returned home earlier than she was supposed to that evening. Malini had made it clear that her daughter was not to be harmed in the process of killing her entire family. Hence, Rucha was taken by the assassin. The second reason the killings did not proceed smoothly was because Shaunak Manohar went to the Sinha residence on the same day.

  Sarvate knew his assassin only had a few minutes because of the Gunshot Detection System. The assassin had a decision to make. Whether to collect evidence that could implicate his organisation or to kill Manohar. He chose the former; a decision that Sarvate would regret for the rest of his life.

  Manohar and Mule had gone into hiding after rescuing Natasha from her mother. Mule had hidden the evidence he had collected against The Mothers’ Club in the last place its promoters would look—his own house. Later, Sarvate’s men would kill Mule only because he returned to his house to retrieve the evidence. The assassin had not found the hidden chamber in the bathroom. That had enabled us to get the evidence, including the location of the warehouse from which The Mothers’ Club operated.

  Dattu Shekhar, who had threatened Manohar, was the muscle in securing the warehouse in Lonavala. The three people arrested at the warehouse named and identified Shekhar as their boss. Mangesh, the man who shot Radha, directly reported to Shekhar.

  Multiple eye witness accounts across Lonavala as well as expressway toll receipts placed Shekhar in Lonavala at the times and dates that were shared with us by the three people in custody. At the same time, about two years back, Shekhar’s lifestyle had changed completely. He lived far beyond the means of a police officer’s salary. His name further cropped up at various points in the data retrieved from the warehouse.

  At first, Shekhar denied any involvement. But as the evidence against him began mounting, he knew he could strike a deal with us. For a reduced prison term, he pleaded guilty and provided hardcore evidence in the form of money trails, company registration papers and account numbers in Swiss banks that were held by Sanjay Sarvate and two other businessmen—one Ukrainian smuggler and an Indonesian drug lord.

  Throughout the entire evidence collection process, Rathod and I were afraid that Sarvate would flee the country. He could not be arrested as no law enforcement agency was willing to look in his direction because of the power he had.

  Rathod had an idea on the day Radha returned home.

  ‘There are always leaks in every police department,’ Rathod said. ‘How else would the media know what the police were doing? In my experience, the leaks spread quicker when the department is told to keep a piece of information private.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to do it?’ I said.

  ‘If being the origin of a leak can keep Sarvate in the country, then it’s all for a good cause,’ he said.

  That very day in the evening, all news channels grabbed the story of Sarvate’s possible involvement as hard as they could. It was great for their viewership. A serving Chief Minister of a state involved in a multi-crore scandal in which mothers harmed their own children. It could not get any bigger for them.

  Eventually, twenty days after the raid of the warehouse, a charge sheet was filed against Sarvate and sixteen other people including Sarvate’s partners. It was going to be hard to get Sarvate’s partners to India because of strict extradition laws.

  By speaking to the sixteen people involved, we got to know that Cherry Investments was the main company behind which everything was hidden. It was used to collect the auction money as well as the money earned from the medicine sold by The Mothers’ Club. The transactions were mostly worth only a few thousand rupees every time, but they were many in number. Every week at six thirty in the morning on Sundays, a large amount of money—something to the tune of two to five crore rupees—was deposited in Cherry Investments Bitcoin Wallet. Like clockwork, it was moved out of the wallet within five minutes. This had been going on for months.

  A deal was struck with all of Sarvate’s sixteen associates. They named Sanjay Sarvate as their boss. They gave us enough proof in the form of photogr
aphs, video recordings and witness statements—all of which placed Sarvate at the warehouse. At the same time, Jay was able to connect a part of the campaign funding to a bank account in Switzerland, sealing the case against Sarvate.

  Such court proceedings take time, especially when a high-profile suspect is involved. It was going to be no different in this case. I handed over all the evidence we had collected to Rathod. I also introduced him to Jay Parikh, who was contracted by the CID to pursue the matter. I shut the lid on The Mothers’ Club and tried to push away everything that I had seen and felt in the past few days.

  I was pleased at the end but two issues continued to tug at my heart—Atharva was devastated to find out about his sister. He took Rucha under his care and returned to his Air Force base in New Delhi. Being away from the madness would help both of them. I wished for their scars to heal soon. Natasha Gill was promptly adopted by a family in Mumbai.

  My second regret had to do with Radha. I had put her in danger. I decided that the next time, if at all there was one, I would not let Radha and Rahul join me in the field. They were far too precious for me to lose. I was being selfish but a switch had been flicked in my mind when Radha had been shot. I did not want to lose anyone else in my life.

  That got me thinking about my dad and his name in Mule’s black file. I did not know what I was going to do with that information. I realized I was too afraid to find out. I had not even looked at the file again after putting it in my cupboard drawer. What if he was not the perfect father I had always imagined him to be? I had no intention of telling anyone at home about it.

  ‘Siya!’ Radha cried out from downstairs.

  I was shaken out of my thoughts when Radha called me. I got up from the bed and looked out the window to realize that rain was belting down.

  ‘Shama is making kanda bhaji for all of us. Come down quickly,’ Radha said.