CHAPTER 17 Cotton Green #2
"Somebody's been on my line," she said, before he could find the next thing.
"Thursday, three in the morning. I'd just found the twenty forty-one and I got a text.
You're drumming too loud. Someone riding my connection.
Not to stop me. To tell me. And then a bike.
Black, no plate, three vehicles back on Linking Road, and that one wasn't texting.
" Her hand went to her side without her seeming to notice.
"The bike's the man on the ground. The man on the ground has a boss, and the boss had a man in Worli, and the man in Worli had a heart attack on a treadmill on Thursday morning.
That's what I'm told. Now there's a new one, asking at cash hostels.
Kurla, Chembur. Not mine yet." A breath, in two stages.
"The bike doesn't write texts, sir. There's two of them.
Somebody who wants me dead and somebody who wants me alive and pointed. I don't love being pointed."
"Who's told you? About Worli."
"Same pipe that gives me everything I don't ask for.
Case numbers. A heads-up. I don't know who's on the other end.
I know they've been right every time, which is not the same as being on my side.
And I got a text on Friday that said he'll come — let him, and here you are.
" She looked at him. "So somebody wanted you here.
That doesn't make it a trap. It makes it a stage. Which you're used to."
He had nothing for that. He said, "Your ribs."
"Are mine. Two, cracked, according to a chemist who is not a doctor and charged like one." She waved it away, and the wave hurt her. "Don't."
◆
She explained the switch like a woman reading out an insurance policy she had written herself and did not entirely trust.
"Seventy-two hours. I reach in and reset it, or it fires.
Armed Thursday, three a.m. Reset yesterday, three a.m. Next one's Wednesday, three a.m." A small dry sound.
"Which is a joke, considering. When it fires — three press desks, people who still have lawyers.
SEBI, for what that's worth. And a public repo dressed up as a forum for men who argue about pressings of Kind of Blue, which is the one place on the internet nobody from your building will ever go.
" She reached into the bag at her feet and came up with a phone — small, black, the kind sold in a blister pack at a station kiosk — and pushed it under the grille with two fingers until it was on his side.
"One contact. Don't save anything else in it. Don't put a SIM you own anywhere near it. If you send that contact anything — a full stop, a blank — the packet goes. Everywhere. At once. There's no undo, sir. I didn't build an undo, because the moment there's an undo somebody makes you use it."
He didn't pick it up.
"In case I go dark," she said. "If they find the hostel. If the bike gets closer than a nudge." A pause. "Or in case you decide."
"Decide what?"
"That's rather the point of you." She looked at the phone and not at him.
"I could've given it to anyone. Solanki.
Meera — God. I gave it to you because Priya gave it to you, and she's dead, so somebody has to.
This isn't trust, sir. It's redundancy. If I go, it goes with someone who's got a reason to press it and a reason not to. "
He picked it up. He put it in the inside pocket of his jacket, on the side away from his heart, next to where Solanki's card sat in his wallet. He was starting a collection.
"What's in it," he said. "You said the cadence. The case numbers—"
"Everything Priya gave me. Her nineteen, the originals — the bar was a copy, that was for you.
Plus my analysis of the maintenance side — the login, the twenty forty-one, the three-hundred-second renames, timed and tabled.
Not the sessions themselves; I can't lift those from a hostel.
I've got the shape of it, not the thing itself.
Plus two case references from a police system that isn't supposed to be readable and is.
" Her hand went out and touched the corner of the photograph and came back.
"Plus your memo, yaar. She put it in herself. Said you'd need to choose."
He heard it the way he had once heard a lift chime on an empty floor.
"What memo."
"Don't." Quietly. "Please. It's three in the morning and I've known since April.
SafeCity Pilot — Outcomes Inconclusive. Internal, 2019.
Author R. Malhotra. Doc019, sir. She numbered them herself and put you last, which I think was legal humour, and she said — he'll know it when he sees it, and if he doesn't go looking, that's an answer too.
" She watched his face and did not enjoy it. "You didn't go looking. Did you."
He didn't answer, because he was counting.
Nineteen on the bar's laptop; seventeen on his phone; source unavailable against the last two like a pair of small red doors.
Eighteen had walked in from his own email address out of a hotel bed.
On Friday morning at his kitchen table he had counted eighteen files that were all somebody else's and had known there was a nineteenth.
He had not asked himself what it was. He had been careful not to.
Doc019. Author R. Malhotra. The one Priya had called yours.
"They were missing," he said. His voice had gone short; it did that when he was caught. "At the bar. Eighteen and nineteen. Not the transfer — the source. They weren't there."
"They were there. I put nineteen in and played every one back with a bartender looking at his watch and Priya on the next stool eating those lozenges.
" Her voice had gone up; she brought it down.
"If they weren't there when you came, someone was in that bar's system between me and you.
Someone who knew which two mattered and pulled them, and left the rest for you like a set list with the encore torn off.
" She stared at him. "Sir. Who else knew about the bar. "
"Priya. You. Me."
"That's not who else."
"That's who knew." It was not quite a lie: nobody had known; somebody had known anyway.
Somebody had been in that system between Sana and him.
Somebody had known which two mattered. Whoever had pulled 019 out of the bar copy had wanted it — not to bury; to hold — and he thought of a woman who had told him a story about a memo, and he put the thought in a room and shut the door on it.
"Someone wanted it for themselves," he said.
"If they'd wanted to destroy it they'd have taken all nineteen." She had done the sum days ago. "They wanted that one. Somebody out there is holding the one page in this whole mess with your actual name at the bottom, and I don't know who, and you've gone a colour that says maybe you do."
"I don't."
"Okay."
"I don't, Sana."
"I said okay." She was being kind, and it was worse than the other thing.
◆
The photograph had been looking at him for twenty minutes before he asked.
"Your brother?"
"Faisal." She didn't touch it this time.
"Twenty-four. Nights at a call centre in Malad, selling insurance to people in Ohio in an accent he practised off YouTube.
" A breath. "He doesn't go out now. He goes to work and he comes home and he sits in the kitchen with the light on.
Your algorithm liked his pin code, sir. That's all it was.
A boy walking home from tuition, and a pin code that scored high, and a surname, and three days, and then sorry, go home.
" She looked at the laptop, and the light on her face was green.
"That's why his case number's in the packet.
If it goes, his name goes with it, and someone will have to read it out. "
The rain came down a notch.
"Solanki," he said. "He has a nephew, the same—"
"I know about the nephew."
"He could—"
"Solanki takes money."
"Not on this."
"No." She thought about it. "Not on this.
Somebody sent him the boy's file last week.
Hand-delivered to Worli, no sender. Not me.
I don't post things." A beat. "Same pipe, sir.
Same whoever, who knows what a policeman is for sale for and what he isn't. Somebody's arranging us.
You, me, him." She closed the laptop halfway; the room dimmed.
"Go somewhere with a bed. You look like a man who's been standing in his own kitchen for three days. "
He stood. He put his hand on the grille the way you put a hand on the glass of a car window, and she looked at it and did not put hers up to meet it.
"How do I reach you?"
"You don't. I reach you. That phone rings, you answer, you don't say your name and you don't say mine.
" The door was in the screen again. "And sir — whatever gets signed on Wednesday, this doesn't stop.
It resets or it fires. Nobody's signature makes it go away.
I built it for a company that files things. "
"I know."
"Do you? Good. Then go."
He got as far as the door, the rain on the tin loud again, and her voice came after him, level and technical and pitched — the way it had been on the reversed track — for one listener.
"Sir. Whoever it is has a key to that building's bloodstream and eight hours' sleep a night. That's how I'd find him, if I could walk in the front door. Go and look at who's rested."
He crossed the yard. He went through the gap in the gate with his shoulder. The taxi was where he had left it, dark, the driver asleep against the window with the meter running, and the man woke without surprise and started the engine.
"Bandra?"
"Bandra."
They pulled away from Gate 4 into the flooded lane, past the godowns in their long dark row and the hull with its ribs open to the rain.
Raghav sat with his wet shoes and his hand flat inside his jacket, over the pocket.
The small black phone under his palm weighed nothing at all, and he did not take his hand off it the whole way north.