"I've had a call from Helsinki." Abhijit said, and paused there for a moment to see what effect it had on me.
Unfortunately for him, I was completely in the dark about what he was referring to and so I waited.
He moved to his desk but did not sit. He had a habit, when thinking, of standing at an angle to whatever surface was nearest, as though the thinking required a specific geometry.
"Before I bring the rest of the team in," he said, "I wanted to speak with you alone." He looked at me steadily. The eyebrows were level, which with Abhijit meant he was being to the point. "What I am about to tell you has a complication that is specific to you and not to the rest of the team. I need to understand how you will handle it before I can decide whether you are part of this."
"Go ahead," I said.
"The project in question is one that Anjali Ahuja is leading."
The name landed in the room with the weight of something dropped from a considerable height. It was a name that I had avoided thinking about for a considerable period of time.
I held his gaze and said nothing.
"She came to this division from Sales like you, as you may know," Abhijit continued, watching me carefully. I kept my mind and face blank.
"She is heading a sensitive engagement for an overseas client. The details will come when the full team is in the room. What I need to establish first is this." He paused. "She was directly responsible for your transfer to this division. She argued for you when there was no particular organizational incentive to do so and when at least one person of significantly more seniority than either of us wanted you terminated outright." He paused again. "I need to know whether that history will affect your ability to work this investigation with the same objectivity you would bring to any other."
The question was fair. He had no idea how fair it was since there was a lot he wasn't privy to. No one was except me….and Anjali. A name that had broken through my defences and withdrawn abruptly, leaving me to rebuild and repair.
I took a moment to answer - not because I did not know the answer, but because the answer had to be delivered convincingly. I had spent the better part of three months in this city dismantling, piece by piece, every architecture I had built around Anjali Ahuja: the attraction, the resistance to it, the brief incandescent period of neither resisting nor being resisted, and then the longer and more structural work of putting those materials somewhere they would not compromise the load-bearing walls.
The work had been real. I had done it with the same methodical attention I brought to anything that needed to be done correctly. What sat in its place now was not indifference but something more useful. The kind of clear-eyed regard you can have for a person when you have stopped wanting anything from them and have stopped fearing what they might take.
"No," I said. "It won't affect my objectivity."
Abhijit studied me for another second. "You're certain."
"She saved my career," I said. "That's a fact. It doesn't change what an investigation requires. If anything it makes the standard higher, not lower. If I find something, I will report what I find."
Whatever he was looking for in my face, he appeared to find it or to conclude that its absence was also informative. He nodded once with the decisive quality of a man who has made a calculation and is acting on it.
"Good," he said. "Wait here."
He picked up his phone and made two calls in rapid succession, each one brief. In five minutes, the team had assembled in his office – Vikram, Simran, Dr. Venkataraman, Faisal, Arjun, Dr. Dhingra, Dr. Irani, and Sudha, arranged in the available chairs and standing space with the specific attentiveness of people who have been summoned without advance information and understand that whatever comes next will require their full concentration.
Abhijit closed the door. He stood behind his desk, all three monitors dark for once.
"This morning I received a call from Dr. Lindqvist in Helsinki," he said. "I will give you the details as I have them, which are not yet complete. The complete picture is part of what we are being asked to establish."
He had the room entirely. Nobody moved.
"Fourteen months ago, this division was engaged to build a data analytics and intelligence platform for an overseas security organization. The client is a government-linked body. The nature of the engagement is classified and I will be sending each of you the specific clearance addendum you will need to sign before the technical briefing. The project is of a kind that requires airtight information security at every stage of development. You will understand why when you see the classification documents."
A brief pause. Dr. Irani had his arms folded. Vikram was perfectly still in the way he was when something had his complete attention.
"Five months ago, the project was restructured," Abhijit continued. "The commercial and strategic leadership was moved to a newly formed division operating parallel to this one. The technical lead remained with Helsinki. The new division was headed by a senior leader brought across from a regional sales function." He paused for a fraction of a second that he probably did not intend. "Her name is Anjali Ahuja. Some of you will know the name."
Several heads turned toward me, briefly and without comment. Simran's jaw tightened and her gaze moved to the window.
"Three months after Anjali's team assumed commercial leadership," Abhijit said, "Helsinki began noticing anomalies. Specific technical details of the platform's architecture were appearing in the development documentation of a competitor organization working for the client's primary rival. Details that were not public. Details that were, in some cases, proprietary to our own methodology and would not have been independently developed. The anomalies were initially dismissed as coincidental overlap." He stopped. "They were not coincidental. By last month, the volume and specificity of the leaked material had reached a level that the client's own counterintelligence unit flagged formally. The matter was escalated to global headquarters by the client at the highest available level." He looked around the room. "We are being asked to investigate."
The room was silent for several seconds. The kind that follows a statement that has multiple implications and everyone is working through each one simultaneously.
Faisal was the first to speak. "What exactly are we being asked to establish?"
"Four things," Abhijit said. "What information has been leaked. The full extent and specificity of it. How it is being extracted and transmitted. Who is responsible. And how the leak is to be stopped." He paused. "Helsinki has provided us with the technical architecture details and the full access credentials we will need. The commercial side of the investigation - the people, the networks, the non-technical access points - is our responsibility to map independently."
Dr. Venkataraman said, quietly, "When you say who is responsible – what is the scope of that? Are we investigating the technical team? The commercial team? Both?"
"We follow the evidence," Abhijit said. "Wherever it leads."
The weight of that sentence was distributed evenly around the room and everyone received it.
I had been sitting with something since the word leaked had first entered the conversation. A resonance that I could not immediately name. Then, as Abhijit continued describing the shape of the problem – the suppressed anomalies, the technical details appearing where they should not, the difficulty of pinpointing the mechanism from the outside - it arrived with a clarity that was almost physical.
I had felt this before.
Not from this side of the table.
From the other side.
The architecture of the problem was not unfamiliar to me. The slow leaking of specific information, structured to avoid detection, appearing at a destination in a form that obscured its origin. The deliberate construction of distance between the source and the surface. I had built something in that shape once, in a different context and for different reasons, and I had built it well enough that a team of the best data investigators I had subsequently come to work alongside had not been able to find it without the source material being handed to them directly.
I turned the thought over carefully and said nothing.
There would be time to bring it forward. For now, I listened.
Abhijit was describing the timeline and the access protocol, the secure channel Helsinki had established for document transfer, the classification structure we would be working under. He was assigning preliminary responsibilities - Simran to lead the technical extraction analysis, Dr. Irani to assess the cryptographic and transmission methodology, Vikram to handle the access audit trail. Faisal and Arjun would build the monitoring framework. Dr. Venkataraman would model the data to identify what had been taken in what sequence. Dr. Dhingra and Sudha would manage the evidentiary documentation.
Abhijit looked at me last. "Das, you will support Simran on the technical extraction analysis. I also want your read on the overall architecture of the leak as it emerges. Pattern recognition and structural analysis." He held my gaze for a fraction longer than the others. "You have a particular background in how these things are constructed. Use it."
It was the most he would say in front of the team. It was enough.
Simran was now looking at the wall directly ahead of her. Whatever she was thinking, her face was entirely professional.
"Timeline?" Vikram asked.
"Helsinki wants an initial findings report in three weeks," Abhijit said. "Full findings in six. We treat this as the highest active priority. Everything else is suspended or reassigned as necessary." He looked around the room. "Questions?"
There were a few. Practical ones, about access and clearance and communication protocols. Abhijit answered each with the efficiency of someone who had already thought them through.
When the questions were done, he said, "Classification documents will be in your secure inboxes within the hour. I want signed addenda back before end of day. We begin work tomorrow at seven."
He dismissed the room with the small wave that meant he was already thinking about the next thing.
I stood up with the others and moved toward the door. At the threshold, Abhijit said, without looking up: "Das. One moment."
The door closed. The room, empty of everyone else, had a different quality.
Abhijit looked at me for a moment over his three dark screens.
"Three weeks," he said quietly. "That is how long we have before this becomes impossible to contain at the level it is currently being contained at. If the leak is ongoing - and we have every reason to believe it is - the client's counterintelligence division will take independent action and the investigation will no longer be ours." He paused. "What I need from you is what you brought to those three problems on your first week here. Not what you know from your previous work. What you see. The thing that the rest of the team is still learning to see."
He was not being entirely opaque. I understood what he was saying.
"You'll have it," I said.
He nodded and turned back to his screens. The paratha was back somewhere. I could smell it.
I walked back to my desk in the northwest corner, behind the pillar, with the motivational poster on the partition in front of me and the neem tree outside the window in the courtyard.
Data is the new oil.
I sat down and thought about what I knew about the architecture of concealment. About how information could be extracted from a secure system without detection. About the particular shape of the problem as Abhijit had described it, and the specific deja vu that had moved through me when he described it, and what exactly that recognition was telling me.
And I thought, for the first time since boarding a flight in Delhi and landing with a folder of photographs in my seat pocket and a Bangalore morning ahead of me, about Anjali Ahuja.
Not with wanting. Not with the particular ache of something deliberately closed. But with the cold, precise attention of someone who has just been assigned the problem of the most formidable person they have ever encountered, and who needs, before tomorrow morning at seven, to understand exactly where their own thinking is clear and where it might not be.
I opened a new document on my screen and began to write.