The moon hung over the minarets of the Mecca Masjid like a silver rupee, ancient and indifferent. The rage that had propelled me from my violated apartment had cooled, solidifying into something harder, colder, and far more dangerous: purpose. The king was no longer just defending his throne; he was planning to burn his enemies' kingdoms to the ground.
Maya's reply—Welcome to the war—was not just an acknowledgement; it was an alliance forged in fire and data. I threw the cheap phone into a nearby bin, watching it disappear under a pile of discarded newspapers. A clean break. A new beginning.
Our rendezvous was at a place of her choosing, a place as far from the glass towers of HITEC City as one could get. An old, crumbling library in Sultan Bazaar, a place that smelled of decaying paper, leather binding, and a century of silent stories. It was a perfect choice. A temple of forgotten information, where secrets could be whispered without disturbing the dead.
I found her in the history section, perched on a rolling ladder, pretending to read a heavy tome on the history of the Nizams. She was wearing a simple black kurta and jeans, but in the dim, dusty light filtering through the high, grimy windows, she looked like a warrior queen planning her next conquest.
"Took you long enough," she said, not looking down, her voice a low murmur that wouldn't disturb the sleeping librarian at the front desk. "I was half-expecting you to have hacked the city's power grid by now just to make a point."
"A city-wide blackout is a blunt instrument," I replied, stepping into the narrow aisle, the scent of old books enveloping me like a cloak. "It's theatrical and inefficient. I prefer the scalpel."
She slid down the ladder with a quiet thud, landing softly on the worn wooden floor. "Right. The great surgeon Ravi Kiran." She led me to a secluded table in the back, a large, hand-drawn map of the city's industrial outskirts already spread across it. "I made some calls," she said, her finger tapping a location near Patancheru. "The bank's off-site records archive. A place so old and forgotten, I doubt even Mr. Rao knows it exists. It's a dusty old godown where they send files to die."
"The Gupta file will be there," I stated, my mind already processing the variables.
"Top marks," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "And I have a way in. My source, the grumpy Inspector Rao, has a cousin who runs the security for that zone. For a 'donation' to his daughter's wedding fund, the main gate will be unlocked for a ten-minute window tonight, and one of the CCTV cameras covering the main entrance will conveniently be on a loop."
I leaned over the map, my eyes scanning the layout she had sketched from memory. "One camera is not enough," I said immediately. "That's amateur hour. A facility like this won't rely on a single point of failure. There will be secondary cameras, motion sensors, a silent alarm connected to a central hub. Your 'donation' just gets us in the front door to be arrested."
Maya's eyes narrowed. "And what makes you the expert on B&E? Don't tell me you moonlight as a cat burglar. Does Mr. Rao know his star analyst has a criminal hobby?"
"Burglary is for amateurs who lack imagination," I shot back, a condescending smile on my lips. "I am a systems analyst. A building is just a poorly designed server with bad wiring. Its security is an insult to my intelligence, frankly." I pointed to a spot on her sketch, a small square marked 'HVAC'. "The archive will be climate-controlled. The HVAC system will have an external maintenance access panel on the roof, away from the main security grid. That is our entry point. It's logical."
She stared at my finger on the map, then back at my face, her expression a mixture of irritation and grudging respect. "Fine. We go in through the roof. Happy, your highness? Then what? We're looking for one file in a graveyard of paper. It could take all night."
"It won't," I said. I pulled out a small, folded piece of paper from my pocket. On it was a complex alphanumeric string: ARC/HYD-SEC/FY20-21/IA-44B-GUPTA. "This is the archival code for the Gupta file."
Maya's eyes widened, her sarcasm replaced by sharp suspicion. "How did you get that?"
"I persuaded a junior clerk in the records department to run a search for me."
"Persuaded?" she scoffed. "Let me guess, you threatened him with mutton biryani?"
"Let's just say I pointed out a series of significant payroll errors that, if revealed, would have cast serious doubt on his competence and future employment prospects," I said coolly. "He was very cooperative."
She shook her head, not with laughter, but with a kind of grim disbelief. "You blackmailed him, Ravi. Let's call it what it is. You think you're a king, but you're just a bully with a laptop."
"Bullying implies emotional investment," I retorted, leaning closer over the map, our faces inches apart. "This was a simple leverage of data to achieve a desired outcome. It was efficient. Something you should appreciate."
Our hands brushed as we both pointed to the map at the same time. We both pulled back instantly, as if burned. The air crackled with a tension that had nothing to do with the heist.
"Watch it, supercomputer," she muttered, refusing to meet my eyes. "Don't want to cause a short circuit."
"The probability of such an event is statistically insignificant," I replied, my voice tight. I straightened up, re-establishing my composure. "Now that we have a viable plan, we need to assemble our tools."
The next few hours were a symphony of tense, efficient chaos. Maya, using her network of contacts, disappeared into the labyrinthine alleys of Begum Bazaar and returned with a magnetic key-card cloner and a set of old, faded security uniforms that smelled faintly of mothballs. I, in the back of a grimy electronics repair shop in Ameerpet, a place buzzing with the energy of pirated software and unlocked phones, built a device of my own. Using a cheap smartphone, a power bank, and a modified Wi-Fi dongle, I created a portable CCTV looper. It was an ugly, brutish little thing, held together with electrical tape and a prayer, but it was a masterpiece of function over form. It would buy us the five minutes we needed.
As dusk fell, painting the Hyderabad sky in shades of orange and purple, we stood across the street from the archive. It was a large, windowless concrete box, surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire. It didn't just look like a prison for forgotten stories; it looked like a fortress.
"Ready to go play thief?" Maya asked, her voice sharp, challenging.
I looked at her. Her face was tense in the fading light, her eyes bright with a fire that matched my own. She was infuriating, illogical, and the only person in the world who seemed to understand the stakes.
"My dear Maya," I said, a genuine, sharp-edged smile spreading across my face. "We are not thieves. Thieves steal money. We are here to steal the truth. And tonight, the truth will finally balance the books." I held out my hand, not in romance, but as a challenge. "Shall we?"
She looked at my hand, then at my face, and a slow, dangerous smile of her own appeared. She slapped her palm against mine, a firm, decisive sound. "Let's go raise some hell."