Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

He probably meant that the company was not willing to contribute nearly enough to the strengthening of Parulkar's own financial development, but Sartaj didn't want to know about any of that. So he told Parulkar about Kamala Pandey's suffering and its resolution, and the punishment that was to be meted out to the pilot.

'Interesting case,' Parulkar said. 'Well done. What is the payoff from the pilot?'

'We don't quite know yet, sir. Kamble and I are going to talk to him tonight. But it should be at least a few lakhs, in cash and kind. The bastard has a lot of money.'

'Very good.' Parulkar was pleased. Sartaj would pay Majid Khan, who would kick something upstairs to the ACP, who would pass something on to Parulkar. By the time the money got to Parulkar, the amount would be small. But he collected many small amounts, which added up to big amounts.

'You look very healthy, sir,' Sartaj said. It was true. Parulkar's hair was swept back from his forehead into a Brylcreemed wave. He had lost a little weight, and he looked young.

'The secret is a strict diet, and good exercise, Sartaj. You must maintain yourself. Without health nothing is of any use. I have stopped eating any non-veg at all, and my cholesterol is down. There may be all these temptations in life, but one must plan for the long run.'

'Yes, sir.' Sartaj knew how much Parulkar loved his chicken pandhara rassa, very tikhat, and soonti, and mountains of biryani. If he was willing to give up all those, he must be planning for a very long life, and a career almost as long. It was good to see him back in the game, all confident and crafty. Sartaj smiled, and lobbed him the obvious question, 'So what are you eating nowadays, sir?'

Parulkar sat up, called for chai and told Sartaj all about bajra rotis, and high-fibre fruits, and the dangers of refined sugar. 'Sartaj,' he said, 'one must balance the body for the soul to thrive.' Then he had to leave for a meeting at police headquarters. Sartaj walked him out to his car, and watched the little convoy leave. Parulkar's white Ambassador was escorted by two Gypsy-loads of armed policemen and an unmarked car carrying yet more policemen in mufti. He was well protected.

Sartaj walked around the zonal headquarters and back into the station. He had paperwork to do, cases to work. It would be another late night, another inevitable dose of the bad restaurant food that he lived on. Eating well, eating for a long life, was not so easy. You needed time, you needed money, you needed a certain position, maybe you even needed bodyguards. Anyway, Sartaj thought, I am not so old, my body is still working. I will worry about it next year. He cleared a desk, and sat down to work.

* * *

Sartaj and Kamble had planned to confront Umesh later that night, but at six-thirty Sartaj received a call from Anjali Mathur. 'I will be arriving at the domestic airport at eight o'clock sharp. Meet me there.'

She came out of the airport building surrounded by a knot of men. There was another group waiting at the end of the walkway for them, and from this hectic confluence of safari suits, she emerged to raise a hand at Sartaj. She was wearing her usual efficient shoes and a dark green salwar-kameez, and she looked very tired.

'This is my boss, Mr Kulkarni. Please come in the car with us.'

Sartaj followed them to a white Ambassador in the parking area. The boss, who was a studious-looking bureaucrat with thick glasses, pointed Sartaj at the front seat. He and Anjali slid into the back. The air-conditioning inside the car was on, and the driver was standing by outside, but apparently they were not going anywhere. Kulkarni folded his arms over his chest and said, 'Go ahead, Anjali.'

The briefing was thorough and precise. Anjali had followed up on Sartaj's tip about Gaitonde and the guru. This guru himself – one Shridhar Shukla – had disappeared the previous year, or 'gone into retreat', according to his people, who were unable to provide current contact information. The organization itself had fallen into disarray after the Guru's disappearance, with furious infighting and struggles and even murders, all of which had been widely reported in the national press. The first of these unpleasant episodes, a double murder, had taken place in the ashram outside Chandigarh, and the police had been summoned. One of the officers who had responded, an IPS probationer on his first operation, had found some money in the room where the murders had taken place, a sum of ninety thousand rupees exactly. He had turned it in at the station, where the senior inspector had spotted the notes as counterfeit. The ashram authorities, when interrogated, had said that the money had probably come in as part of an anonymous cash donation, and they were unable to provide further information. And there the matter had rested, with a couple of notations in a couple of forgotten files, and a stack of counterfeit notes in an evidence room.

Six weeks later, an armed party of the Jullunder police raided a flat in a residential building, after a tip-off from a disgruntled dhobi. The dhobi had delivered ironed shirts for the three male inhabitants of the flat, had got into an argument with one of them over a damaged shirt and had been paid less than his due. The dhobi had then tipped off the local beat constable, alleging that the three men – one of whom was a blond foreigner – were engaging in drug dealing out of the flat, that suspicious characters were going in and out all the time. The raid by a special operations group followed. No drugs were found. No arrests were made, although a bowl of rice was still boiling in the kitchen when the police entered the flat. The three men who had rented the flat had apparently fled through a concealed rear staircase, which the raid party had failed to discover and secure. In the flat, the police found three suitcases and assorted clothing, a few books, a laptop and ten thousand rupees in cash. On closer examination, the money was found to be counterfeit. The ThinkPad laptop was examined and found to be password-protected. The hard drive was then removed from the laptop, and connected to another computer and scanned. All the data files were found to be stored on a logical drive encrypted with a 256-bit cipher, using a commercially available program named DeepCrypt. The local computer consultant tasked by the police tried extended dictionary attacks, but failed to break the encryption. Although it was curious that the men had fled, the Jullunder police had no special reason to pursue the case, and no means of doing so. So the case was filed and forgotten. Forgotten, that is, until a mention of the counterfeit money had bubbled up through the channels and multiple layers into a database containing all mentions of such counterfeiting, which had been tapped by Anjali Mathur in Delhi. And she had noticed, in her careful and slow and relentless querying through the lists of counterfeiting cases, that this Jullunder file contained a mention of Guru Shridhar Shukla. The browser on the confiscated laptop had stored its cache on an unencrypted portion of the hard disk, and only three sites had been visited in the three weeks recorded in these history files. One was Hotmail, the other was a pornography site called www.hotdesibabes.com and the third was this Guru's website.

Anjali Mathur had taken this admittedly vague connection to Mr Kulkarni, told him that there was in both cases counterfeit money of the same type, on the same paper, from the same plates, and also both times the Guru was involved. Mr Kulkarni, in his wisdom, had allowed her to requisition the organization's computer department, to attempt to crack the encryption on the Jullunder laptop. But this laptop had by now disappeared from the police station concerned. The station officer apologized profusely, and promised that in future the evidence room would be guarded more securely, and that he would institute an enquiry, and punish all the policemen responsible for the loss. This halted all enquiries, until Anjali remembered that the hard disk had been removed from the laptop by the consultant, and called the SHO back. The hard disk was finally found at two a.m. on Tuesday night, in a brown envelope secured by a rubber band, on the top shelf of a bookcase in the consultant's office. At which point it was couriered to Delhi, to Anjali Mathur. And, in two days and seven hours, the encrypted logical drive was unencrypted, unlocked and made available.