CHAPTER 6 Priyas Warning
The legal wing of Trinity Infoworks was mostly empty.
Fluorescent tubes hummed over vacant cubicles — at twenty-five to nine on a Friday morning half of Legal was still on the Western Express Highway, watching the water rise round their tyres — and the carpet held the damp of every shoe that had crossed it since June.
Priya's office was the only one lit. She had walked him down two floors by the stairs without a word, one hand on the folder and one on the rail, and she did not speak until the door had shut behind them and she had checked, once, that it had.
"Deshpande's death wasn't chance," she said. "You know that, don't you?"
It came out of him before he could think. "Speculation doesn't serve the company."
He heard it land. It had Meera's cadence and Meera's polish and it had done its job for him twice in two days. Priya Nair, who had cross-examined better liars than him for a living before she came in-house, looked at him over her fogged spectacles and waited.
"I didn't ask for the company's answer, Raghav. I asked for yours."
She went behind the desk but she did not sit.
The desk was stripped to essentials: a yellow legal pad filled to the margins in her small, upright hand; a fountain pen laid exactly parallel to the pad's edge; and, by the pad, a flat round tin of mint lozenges with the lid off and three left in it.
Everything else — the in-tray, the family photograph, the little brass scales someone had given her when she made head of department — was gone into drawers.
She had cleared the decks. He had seen the desks of people who cleared their decks and it had never once been good news for the person opposite.
"Since when," he said, "do you not sit down in your own office?"
"Since Wednesday night." She looked at the pad, not at him.
"I texted him at twenty to midnight. From the car — I'd left the gala early, I had a headache, I had the draft on my mind.
We need to talk about the Singapore files.
Tonight. He didn't answer. I assumed he'd gone to bed.
I went to bed." She adjusted her spectacles once.
"Meera rang me at ten past twelve. I have been standing up more or less since.
" She set the folder on the desk's near edge and squared it with two fingers.
He took half a step towards it without deciding to, and she lifted one hand, flat, and he stopped.
"This isn't a theory," she said. "It's proof.
Payments routed through Mauritius since 2016 — a consulting vehicle that consults nobody.
SafeCity, still licensed, still exporting.
Not just Delhi and Mumbai. Jakarta. Riyadh.
Ankara. Sub-licences to people who call themselves security ministries.
" Her voice caught once, on the name, and steadied.
"The same scandal you helped bury after Stanford.
Only now it's feeding the merger. It's in the merger, Raghav.
Singapore is buying it without knowing they're buying it, and somebody has been very careful that they shouldn't know. "
The words went in and found the place they'd been made for.
He was, for a second, twenty-nine again.
A smaller office on a lower floor. A suit that had fitted.
Three weeks of nights with the Delhi pilot's raw tables open on one screen and a blank document on the other, learning to write the sentence that would make the tables go away.
Pilot outcomes inconclusive. Small sample.
No control group. Artefacts of the collection method.
He had been very good at it. So good that his jaw had locked for a fortnight afterwards and his gums had bled when he brushed his teeth, and he had told himself it was the pressure, and it was survival, and it was temporary.
The story had not run. He had never learned who had written it. He had been promoted twice.
"Priya," he said, and heard the polish going on, layer by layer, "look. If speculation of this kind gets outside this building — we have regulatory clearance pending, partners aligned—"
Her laugh was one breath long. She took her spectacles off, cleaned them on her sleeve, put them back, and adjusted them: once, twice, a third time. It was the tic he had watched her use on a hostile witness in an arbitration years ago, just before she took him apart.
"Raghav. Listen to me. It isn't gone. It's running — Mumbai precincts, Delhi surveillance, and in three countries where a false positive doesn't mean two days in a lockup. It means nobody hears from you."
"Priya—"
"We built a thing that picks up boys because it likes their surname.
And we kept selling it." Her hand went flat on the pad.
"And when a man who had done all of that decided, in the last month of his life, that he'd rather tell Singapore himself than have Singapore find out — somebody made sure he never sent the letter. "
"You're saying he was going to disclose."
"I'm saying I helped him with the wording." She held his eye. "And I'm saying I don't intend to be the second person who knows that."
"Then take it to the board. Krishnamurthy—"
"Half the board sat through the minutes in 2016 and asked no questions. Krishnamurthy is decent. He'd want it verified, and verification in this building means handing it to the people it's about."
"The police, then."
"An inspector who eats paan asked me yesterday what my department bills a year and wrote the figure down.
" She ticked them off against the pad with one finger, the way she would have ticked off grounds of appeal.
"SEBI — I've been on the phone with their helpdesk since April; they'll get to it after the monsoon.
Singapore is the buyer. And the press had this story once.
In 2019. You'll remember what happened to it. "
He remembered.
"So it goes to one person," she said. "One person who can put it in front of a room and make the room look. Deshpande thought that was going to be him. It's not going to be him now."
"And you think it's me."
"I think you're the COO. I think you're the man Singapore is buying.
I think if you stood at that podium and said the words, they'd print.
" Her spectacles again — once. "I also think you wrote the sentence that killed it last time.
So I'm not handing you anything I can't take back.
That's not personal, Raghav. That's Legal. "
Lightning went off outside and the tubes overhead cut for a heartbeat and came back. The room felt smaller for it, and damper, and closer.
"Where," he said. It was the first honest word he'd managed. "You said hidden."
She lowered her voice, though there was no one on the floor to hear it.
"Colaba. The hotel — the one you were toasting yourself in on Wednesday.
There's a bar in the basement, the Blue Note.
Vinyl on the wall. Ask for the Kind of Blue pressing.
There are two; you want the one that's been laminated.
On the sleeve there's a QR code, small — you'd have to be looking.
It opens nineteen files sitting inside the bar's music system, wrapped in the tracks.
Sana embedded them. She hummed the whole time she was doing it.
She said—" and Priya's mouth did something that was almost a smile "—she said the data's got a rhythm and you just have to hear it. Which is the kind of thing she says."
"You hid corporate fraud in a jazz bar."
"I hid it where nobody who works for us would ever look." The almost-smile again, gone. "Absurd, I know. But put it on a server and somebody owns the server. Nobody's going to subpoena a bartender."
"Nineteen."
"Payments. Licences. Sub-licence contracts.
A compliance note. My own audit of the false-positive tables — the one I was told to file and forget.
The draft. A minutes extract from 2016." She looked at the folder under her hand and then, differently, at him.
"There's one file in there that's yours. You'll know it when you see it."
He should have asked. He heard the sentence and heard that there was a door in it, and he was so busy being afraid of the rest of the room that he walked past the door without trying the handle. He nodded and let it go.
"Then give me the folder," he said. "Whatever's in there, I'm the one who has to carry it into a room and—"
"No."
"Priya."
Her fingers had curled over the cardboard's edge.
"Not yet. If you're compromised, it dies with you.
If you're not, you don't need it — you need the bar.
" She adjusted her spectacles once. "I've been head of Legal for six years.
Everybody who ever asked me for the folder wanted to decide who else got to read it. You're asking me for the folder."
He opened his mouth to over-explain and her phone lit on the desk.
She looked at it. Her hand went out and stopped above it.
Then she picked it up, and unlocked it, and read, and her face did not change — that was the thing he would remember, that it did not change — but her thumb tightened until the knuckle went pale, and she adjusted her spectacles twice in quick succession, and turned the screen towards him without a word.
Stay silent. Or we tidy you next.
Neat, square, no signature. It sat on the glass like a line from a compliance report.
Something cold went down the back of his neck and settled.
He thought of the terrace: her fingertips along the table's edge; his phone face-down under them.
He looked at Priya's phone and then, before he could stop himself, at his own pocket, and thought — clearly, for the first time — what if it isn't hers they're reading?
"They know," Priya said. Her voice had gone very level. "Already. You've been in this room eleven minutes."
"Who's they?"
"If I knew that I wouldn't need a bartender." She pressed the folder to her chest with both arms. Her hands were steady. The paper was not; a small tremor went across it and stilled. "Go. Now. Before someone notices you were here at all."
"Priya, I'm not going to—"
"You are, actually. You're going to walk out of that door and take the stairs and go and stand in your glass box and look like a COO.
" She came round the desk — the first time she had moved towards him — and stopped close enough that he could see the rain still drying in her hair.
"You pivoted the optics once, Raghav. Five years ago.
I watched you do it from two floors down and said nothing, which is its own kind of signature.
Can you do it again — the other way this time?
" A pause. "Or will you look away like before? "
The question did not land like an accusation. Accusations he could answer. It landed like a forecast.
He stepped back. In the glass of her office door his own reflection had come up over hers, blurred by the rain on the outer pane, and for a moment he could not honestly have said which of them was inside.
"Sana knows," he said, at the door. "Anybody else?"
"Sana knows where. You know where. Deshpande knew what, and Deshpande is in a mortuary at Cooper." She had already turned back to the desk. "Go."
He opened the door. The corridor met him with the same fluorescent hum, and it did not sound like a corridor now. It sounded like something that was being recorded.
Through the closing gap he saw her one more time. She had picked up the tin, and taken a lozenge and put it in her mouth without looking at it, the way you take a pill you have taken every day for a year. Her other hand had the phone. She lifted it. Her lips shaped a name.
"Sana—" she said, and the latch caught, and took the rest.