Maya's laugh was a welcome disruption in the sterile silence of my kingdom. It was a sound like wind chimes, unexpected and melodic, cutting through the monotonous hum of the server fans. "A ghost in the balance sheet?" she repeated, leaning against the doorframe of her own office, a lone light in the darkness mirroring my own. Her silhouette was framed by stacks of paper and the chaotic energy of a mind that thrived on deadlines. "That's a new one. What have you been drinking, Ravi? The office coffee is bad, but not that bad."
I offered her a slow, wolfish grin, swiveling in my chair to face her fully. "My dear Maya, the office coffee is a crime against humanity, a liquid insult to the very concept of a beverage. This," I gestured grandly to my central monitor, where the single line of red pulsed like a dying heartbeat, "this is a crime against mathematics itself. And I am its divine retribution."
She shook her head, a smile playing on her lips. "I see. And does this divine retribution get paid overtime?"
"A man of my talents has no need for something as pedestrian as overtime," I purred. "The thrill of the chase is its own reward. Besides, I think I look rather dashing in the glow of a terminal at midnight."
"Well, don't let me get in the way of your dashing, divine retribution. Some of us just have corrupt politicians to chase. Good hunting, Ravi." She gave a little wave and disappeared back into her office. An interesting variable, that one. A chaotic element I found myself not entirely minding.
But she was right. It was time to hunt.
The next morning, the office was back to its usual state of controlled chaos. The air hummed with the quiet desperation of people trying to look busy, a sound punctuated by the rhythmic tapping of a thousand keyboards and the occasional, soul-crushing ring of a landline phone. I, of course, was busy. I had a ghost to catch. My first order of business was to pay my respects to the king of this particular floor, my manager, Mr. Rao.
I found him in his glass cabin, staring intently at a stock market app on his phone, a frown so deep on his face it looked like it had been carved there. His investments, I presumed, were not performing with the same effortless genius as his star employee.
"Good morning, sir," I said, standing at his door. I didn't knock. A king does not knock on the doors of his vassals.
He looked up, startled, nearly dropping his phone. "Ah, Ravi. Yes. Good. I need you on the quarterly server optimization report. The board is asking for it. Top priority."
"Of course, Mr. Rao," I replied, my voice as smooth and reasonable as a politician's promise. "And I will give it the full force of my considerable intellect. It will be a masterpiece of efficiency, a report so beautiful they will weep. But first, a small matter has come to my attention. A three-paisa discrepancy in the Singapore gateway."
Rao stared at me as if I had sprouted a second head. "Three paisa?" he squawked, his voice cracking like a teenager's. "Are you joking? My morning chai costs more than that! The GST on my chai costs more than that!"
And has about the same impact on the bank's bottom line, I thought. Aloud, I said, "God is in the details, sir. Or in this case," I gave him a charming, conspiratorial smile, leaning forward slightly, "the devil. And I make it a policy to always give the devil his due. It's just good business."
He just sputtered, rubbing his temples with frantic energy. "I don't have time for your... your riddles and your poetry, Ravi! Just... handle it. And get me that report before my head explodes!"
"As you command," I said with a slight bow, and walked away, leaving him to his dwindling stock portfolio. I had received my royal assent. The hunt was officially sanctioned.
The discrepancy was a ghost, yes, but every ghost leaves a trace, a faint residue of its passing. To find it, I needed the raw, unfiltered data packets from the transaction. Data that was firewalled from my department. Data that lived in the cave of the dragon, the Head of IT.
The IT department was on the seventh floor. The elevator ride down felt like a descent into another circle of hell. The seventh floor was a windowless, perpetually chilly room that smelled of aging hardware, stale air, and the faint, spicy aroma of yesterday's biryani. Wires snaked across the floor like metallic vines, a trip hazard that would give a safety inspector a heart attack. At the centre of this chaotic web sat its master: Saleem.
"Arrey, Badshah of the fourteenth floor!" Saleem greeted me as I entered, leaning so far back in a chair that screamed for mercy I thought he might tip over. "What brings you down from your ivory tower? Come to bless us common folk with your presence?"
Saleem was a genius, a man who could coax a dead server back to life with a few lines of code and a well-aimed slap. He was also monumentally lazy, a man powered by an endless supply of Irani chai and office gossip.
"Saleem, my friend, my brother," I began, my tone oozing a camaraderie I absolutely did not feel. "How is the beautiful family? How is your cricket team doing? Still finding new and creative ways to lose?"
"Family is fine, team is useless, as always," he grumbled. "Cut the buttering, Ravi. I know that smile. That's your 'I want something that's going to ruin my afternoon' smile. What do you want?"
"I need a favor," I said, getting to the point. I handed him a slip of paper with the transaction ID. "The raw packet data for TR-GL-Acct-774B. All of it. Unfiltered. From the Singapore gateway. I need to see its soul."
Saleem glanced at it, his eyes widening slightly. "Yaar, this is deep-level stuff. That's a lot of work. The system is slow today. Very slow. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe day after." He took a loud, deliberate slurp of his chai, a clear gesture of defiance.
I sighed dramatically, a performance worthy of the stage. "A shame. A true shame." I shook my head in mock sadness. "And here I was, thinking about the mutton biryani at Shah Ghouse. I hear it's particularly excellent today. The rice, fluffy. The meat, so tender it falls off the bone. I was thinking a large family pack might just... find its way down to the seventh floor around lunchtime."
Saleem froze, his cup halfway to his lips. His eyes darted from me to the slip of paper. The cogs in his brilliant, lazy mind were turning, caught between the Scylla of doing actual work and the Charybdis of missing out on legendary biryani. It was, I knew, a battle he was destined to lose.
"The network traffic is very high," he muttered, a weak last stand.
"And a large Coke to wash it down," I added, the final, fatal blow. "Maybe two."
He sighed, a gust of defeated air that ruffled the papers on his desk. "Achha, fine, fine! You're a devil, Ravi Kiran, a true devil! Give me fifteen minutes."
I gave him my most benevolent smile. "I knew I could count on you. A man of your talent deserves the finest."
Fifteen minutes later, an email landed in my inbox. The subject line was a single word: "Biryani?" Attached was a heavily encrypted data file.
I returned to my throne, the world outside my cubicle fading away. I decrypted the file, and the raw code flooded my screen. This was the ghost's DNA. It was messy, chaotic, beautiful. For two hours, I was lost in the data, my mind dancing with the numbers, following the trail. It was like chasing a shadow through a maze of mirrors.
And then I found it. The three paisa hadn't vanished. They had been redirected. Siphoned off in the nanosecond the transaction was cleared, funnelled into a dormant, untraceable data packet disguised as a system diagnostic handshake. A digital pickpocket, so fast, so clean, it was almost invisible. A work of art.
But it wasn't just one. The signature on the packet was the key. I wrote a new script, a hunter-killer, a digital bloodhound, and set it loose on the entire network, searching for that unique signature.
The results began to pour in, a slow trickle at first, then a flood. It wasn't one transaction. It was hundreds. Thousands. A textile exporter in Tirupur. A spice merchant in Kochi. A software startup in Bengaluru. All across the country, tiny, insignificant amounts, adding up.
My smile faded. The thrill of the hunt was replaced by a cold, chilling clarity. This wasn't a single ghost. This wasn't a clever thief.
This was an army. And it was living inside the walls of my kingdom.