R. K. Menon
Chapter 1
The morning traffic on Outer Ring Road was its usual symphony of blaring horns, impatient engines, and the occasional curse shouted through helmet visors. Somewhere between a lumbering BMTC bus and a swerving goods carrier, Prakash Nayak’s modest grey scooter skidded. The police report would later write it up as a tragic but routine road mishap—oil slick on the asphalt, sudden brake, impact with a divider, helmet cracked clean through. For the few bystanders who stopped, he was just another middle-aged man in an ill-fitting formal shirt and worn office trousers, carrying a black backpack that had spilled a few scattered bills and a box of homemade idlis onto the road. By the time the ambulance came, it was too late. In the sprawling anonymity of Bengaluru’s rush hour, Prakash’s death was absorbed like rain into the city’s dusty roads—noticed briefly, then forgotten. There was no family scene, no outcry. His landlord identified the body. The police filed the paperwork. Another statistic in a city that measured time by tech IPOs and traffic delays.
At the office of AegisWave Solutions, where Prakash had been the company accountant for almost twelve years, the news trickled in over the HR WhatsApp group. A junior HR executive posted, “Sad news – our colleague Mr. Prakash Nayak from Accounts met with an accident this morning. Funeral in Jayanagar later today. RIP.” The replies came in lazy waves: “Oh no,” “RIP sir,” “Sad to hear.” One sales associate, probably halfway through a cappuccino, typed “Who?” before deleting it and sending a safe “Condolences to family.” No one asked how it happened. No one remembered the last time they’d spoken to him—if they ever had. In the corporate ecosystem, Prakash was that quiet fixture you assumed would always be there, hunched over spreadsheets, invisible until payroll day. Only one message stood out from the blur of generic sympathy: a number saved in no one’s contacts popped up with a long, formal condolence, ending with the line, “He was sitting on a time bomb, but I guess now it’s in someone else’s hands.” The sender’s name: K. Ramanathan (Retd. Auditor). It slid past unnoticed by most, buried under GIFs of candles and folded hands.
That evening, the funeral in Jayanagar drew fewer than a dozen mourners. The priest recited the rites with professional detachment; the smell of incense clung to the damp air. The landlord stood in one corner, muttering about pending rent and key return. Two office colleagues attended out of obligation, whispering about a client pitch they had to prepare for. A tall, well-dressed man in his fifties stood at the back, eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses, leaving before the final prayers. No one asked his name. The pyre burned, and with it, the last physical trace of a man whose life had been lived almost entirely in columns, rows, and balance sheets. Somewhere in the city, accounts were being closed for the quarter, expense reports were being filed, and emails marked “Urgent” were being sent. In the quiet glow of the cremation ground, it was hard to imagine that this quiet, unassuming man might have been holding the thread to something far larger—something that, in the days to come, would unravel in blood, scandal, and the kind of chaos that Bengaluru’s glass-and-steel skyline was built to hide. For now, though, Prakash Nayak was simply gone, and almost no one cared enough to wonder why.
Chapter 2
The rain had stopped just long enough for the cremation ground in Jayanagar to fill with the scent of wet earth and burning sandalwood. Meera D’Souza stepped out of her silver hatchback, her ID tucked deep into her handbag, adopting the unassuming air of someone merely paying last respects. The tip-off had come in an encrypted email from an informant she trusted—barely—claiming that an accountant named Prakash Nayak had been preparing a whistleblower report on a large-scale corporate laundering operation. She had never heard of Prakash before, but the words “evidence trail” and “multi-crore tax evasion” were enough to bring her here. The funeral crowd was sparse: a few men in crumpled shirts standing awkwardly under umbrellas, an elderly priest murmuring shlokas, and a knot of office colleagues shifting from one foot to the other as if counting down the minutes before they could get back to air conditioning and Wi-Fi. A dented steel tumbler of filter coffee was passed around, and Meera took it, the liquid strong but lukewarm, grounding her in the mundanity of the moment. This wasn’t the kind of scene she was used to—there were no grand revelations, no dramatic confessions. Just a dead man, a handful of polite strangers, and a faint smell of burnt ghee hanging in the drizzle.
She kept her distance from the pyre, watching instead from the edge of the shamiana. That’s when she saw them: three men and a woman, all dressed too sharply for the occasion, their umbrellas perfectly coordinated in matte black. They had arrived together, stood in a tight cluster away from the others, and now, barely halfway through the rites, they were already leaving. Their posture was all wrong for grief—no slouching, no glassy-eyed stares. Instead, they moved with the brisk, purposeful steps of people who had other places to be and didn’t want to linger under anyone’s gaze. One of the men glanced around just before stepping out into the lane, his eyes scanning for cameras. Meera noticed the subtle choreography—how the woman in the group positioned herself to block any potential photograph, how the tallest man adjusted his coat as if to shield a briefcase from view. She considered following them, but experience told her that chasing shadows too early only made them scatter. Better to observe, file the faces away, and let the trail ripen.
When the ceremony ended, most people left without saying much. The landlord muttered something about rent dues to the priest; two of Prakash’s colleagues whispered about whether they should split the cost of a wreath. Meera lingered by the edge of the tent, sipping the last of her coffee, pretending to be absorbed in a condolence conversation with a balding man who claimed to have been Prakash’s neighbour but couldn’t remember which floor he lived on. Her real focus was on the retreating tail-lights of the black sedan that had carried the sharply dressed mourners away. She noted the registration plate—half covered in dust—and stored it in her phone. The drizzle returned, light but persistent, tapping against the plastic chairs as if urging everyone to leave. When she finally turned back toward her car, she caught herself looking once more at the dying flames of the pyre. Somewhere in those ashes lay the remains of a man who, if the tip-off was right, had been carrying a story worth killing for. And judging by the tension in the air that even the smell of sandalwood couldn’t disguise, there were people in this city very eager to make sure that story stayed buried.
Chapter 3
Prakash Nayak’s address led Meera to a crumbling three-storey building tucked between a hardware shop and a shuttered internet café in an older part of Basavanagudi. The paint peeled in long, curling strips, and the stairwell smelled faintly of damp cement and fried onions. His one-room apartment was on the top floor, the door locked with a flimsy latch that gave way after a few firm pushes. Inside, the place was almost unnaturally bare. A single iron cot with a thin mattress stood in one corner, a plastic chair in another, and a desk by the lone window overlooking a row of tin rooftops. The desk surface was spotless—too spotless. No bills, no receipts, not even a stray pen. She crouched down, scanning underneath, and that’s when she spotted it: a small, dusty USB stick taped to the underside of the desk, the words “Open If I’m Dead” scrawled in hurried block letters on a strip of masking tape. Her heartbeat quickened—not from surprise, but from the confirmation that the tip-off had been right. This was a dead man’s switch, a posthumous handoff. Whatever was on this USB, Prakash had wanted it to survive him.
She had just slipped the USB into her bag when a sound from the stairwell made her freeze. It was the unmistakable creak of multiple footsteps, too heavy and deliberate to be neighbours. A second later, the door rattled violently and burst inward. Two men in black jackets and balaclavas swept in, moving with the precision of people who’d done this before. Meera’s instincts kicked in; she darted sideways, ducking behind the iron cot as one of them headed straight for the desk. “Check the drawers,” one said in a low, clipped tone. The other replied, “Already wiped.” Then, through the static of a handheld radio on the first man’s belt, a voice crackled: “Team Two in position. Project Nandi must not leave the premises.” The words shot through Meera’s mind like an electric jolt. Project Nandi—two words she didn’t recognise but instantly filed as important. She inched toward the window, her eyes flicking to the fire escape outside. The men were focused on their search, yanking open empty cupboards, upending the mattress, tossing aside the chair. She slipped to the window frame, swung a leg over, and began her descent down the narrow, rusted staircase, her bag clutched tight against her side.
The drizzle had returned by the time her shoes hit the alleyway below. She didn’t run—running drew eyes—but she moved fast, weaving between the maze of side streets until she reached a busier road, where the noise of traffic and the aroma of frying vadas helped swallow her up. She kept her head down, the USB heavy in her bag like a concealed weapon. The phrase “Project Nandi” kept replaying in her mind, layered over the image of those men tearing through Prakash’s tiny life without hesitation. They hadn’t come for money. They hadn’t come for keepsakes. They had come for information, and they were willing to smash through doors in broad daylight to get it. That meant she wasn’t the only one who knew Prakash’s death wasn’t an accident—and the others in this race had a head start, more manpower, and fewer scruples. As she reached her car, she cast one last glance over her shoulder, half-expecting to see a black sedan idling at the corner. The street was clear. Still, she locked the doors the moment she got inside, started the engine, and merged into traffic. Somewhere behind her, in that stripped-bare apartment, the masked men were realising they’d been beaten to the prize. And if Meera knew anything about men like that, it was that they wouldn’t stop until they got it back.
Chapter 4
Back in her apartment, Meera plugged the USB into an air-gapped laptop she kept for sensitive work, the kind with no Wi-Fi card and a stripped-down operating system. The drive opened to reveal a neat hierarchy of folders, each named after a Bengaluru tech company she recognised instantly—some unicorns, some quiet but powerful outsourcing giants. Inside each were encrypted spreadsheets, PDF memos, scanned handwritten notes, and what appeared to be partial audit logs. Even without the decryption, the filenames told their own damning story: “FY23_Offshore_Mauritius,” “Political_Allocations_Q2,” “CashComponent_Executive,” and a chillingly specific “BribeSchedule_CMOffice.” There were at least five major CEOs implicated, names that regularly appeared on magazine covers and conference keynote lists. At the bottom of each folder was a file labelled with a date, all in the next two months, spaced exactly seven days apart. A slow, sinking feeling settled over her—this wasn’t just a cache of evidence; it was a countdown. Prakash hadn’t simply collected the dirt, he’d set it to release in waves, each new drop a fresh bomb in someone’s lap.
She cross-referenced the first date with today’s calendar. It had already passed—yesterday, in fact. The implications hit immediately: somewhere out there, part of Prakash’s files had already detonated. That explained the sudden urgency of the masked intruders, the coordinated sweep of his apartment. They weren’t just trying to bury the evidence; they were trying to stop an automated system already in motion. As she skimmed through a partially decrypted spreadsheet, she spotted a CEO’s name she knew well—Vishal Malhotra, founder of CloudTree Technologies, a man with a gleaming public image built on philanthropy panels and sustainable-tech soundbites. Meera had seen him once at an industry dinner, laughing too loudly at a minister’s joke. Now his company’s files detailed layered transfers to Dubai shell corporations and “consultancy fees” routed to accounts linked to political aides. The scale of it made her stomach tighten. She reached for her phone, considering a discreet background check on Vishal’s current status, but the answer came uninvited through a push notification from a news app: “Tech Mogul Vishal Malhotra Found Dead in Apparent Suicide at Koramangala Penthouse.”
The article was still bare-bones—no motive stated, police calling it a “domestic incident” under investigation. But Meera had been in the game long enough to recognise the shape of a cleanup when she saw one. The penthouse setting, the vague phrasing, the lack of any personal details all screamed controlled narrative. She imagined the scene: an expensive flat with minimalist furniture, a balcony view of the city lights, and somewhere inside, the body of a man who’d been part of something he couldn’t control once the clock started ticking. Whether he’d jumped or been “helped” to fall was almost irrelevant; what mattered was that he was the first name on Prakash’s list, and now he was gone exactly on schedule. She leaned back in her chair, eyes on the pulsing cursor of the encrypted drive. Four more CEOs remained, each with their date already set like an appointment they couldn’t cancel. The mask of the city’s tech world was about to crack wide open, and unless she moved faster than whoever was pulling the strings, she’d be attending more funerals than she could count.
Chapter 5
The microbrewery was loud with the Thursday night crowd—start-up teams celebrating funding rounds, tech bros in logo T-shirts trying to impress dates, the clink of craft beer glasses under Edison bulbs. Meera sat at a corner table, her back to the wall, scanning the entrance. The man she was here to meet, Arvind Rao, CFO of a fintech company called PayAxis, slipped in fifteen minutes late, his pale face glistening with sweat despite the cool air-conditioning. He was overdressed for the venue in a stiff grey suit, the kind that made him stand out among the hoodies and sneakers. As soon as he sat, he gripped his glass of water like it was an anchor and spoke in a hushed rush. He’d known Prakash—only professionally, but enough to suspect what he’d been working on. “He came to me with questions about transaction chains… things he shouldn’t have had access to,” Arvind said, darting glances around the room. “If those files are real, Meera, a lot of people have reason to make sure they vanish.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice further. “One of the dates on that USB… it’s tied to my company. And to me.” She was about to press him on specifics when a waiter appeared, smiling too broadly, and set down two tall cocktails neither of them had ordered. “Compliments from the bar,” he said before disappearing into the crowd.
Arvind hesitated, then took a cautious sip while Meera pushed hers aside, uninterested. The change was almost immediate—a flicker of confusion in his eyes, his hand loosening on the glass, followed by a sharp gasp. His chair scraped back as he clutched at his throat, knocking over the drink, amber liquid spilling across the table. Conversations around them stuttered to silence, then erupted into alarm as Arvind slid to the floor, coughing and convulsing. Meera was on her knees beside him, checking his pulse, but it was already fading. She yelled for an ambulance, her voice cutting through the panicked chatter, while her eyes swept the room. That’s when she saw her—a woman in a tailored black blazer, moving quickly toward the exit, her face partially obscured by her hair. Meera recognised her instantly: one of the sharply dressed mourners from Prakash’s funeral. The woman didn’t look back, just pushed through the door and vanished into the neon-lit street. Meera’s instincts screamed to follow, but the chaos around her made it impossible; staff were crowding the scene, customers filming on their phones, and someone was already shouting about the police. She slipped her phone from her pocket, snapping a single blurred shot of the retreating figure before shoving it away.
By the time the ambulance arrived, Arvind was gone. The official story would likely read “sudden cardiac arrest,” neatly folded into the growing pile of unexplained corporate deaths. But for Meera, the pattern was now undeniable. This wasn’t a random series of tragedies; it was a coordinated purge, each death tied to the chain of evidence Prakash had left behind. And the presence of the funeral mourner at both scenes was too pointed to ignore. Someone had been watching from the very start, attending that cremation not out of respect, but to confirm a job completed. As she stepped out into the cool night air, the smell of hops and burnt caramel still clinging to her clothes, Meera knew she had moved from investigator to target. Whoever was orchestrating this was meticulous, patient, and already several moves ahead. The question was no longer whether she could crack Project Nandi—it was whether she could stay alive long enough to do it.
Chapter 6
The retired RBI official lived in a quiet bungalow off Malleshwaram’s tree-lined lanes, the kind of place where the air still smelled faintly of rain-soaked leaves and old books. Meera had met him once before, years ago, on a banking fraud case that never made the papers. Now, seated in his verandah with a chipped teacup in hand, he listened without interrupting as she laid out what she knew: Prakash’s USB, the dates, the growing list of dead executives, and the phrase she’d overheard—Project Nandi. At the mention of the name, his brow furrowed, and he set his tea down with deliberate care. “That’s not a rumour you want to chase lightly,” he said finally. He explained that “Project Nandi” had been an unofficial codename circulating among a select inner circle of Bengaluru’s most influential CFOs and CEOs—a coordinated effort to create and manage a network of shell companies that laundered enormous sums of corporate revenue through Mauritius and Dubai before routing them back into India as clean foreign investment. It wasn’t just tax evasion; it was a full-scale, years-long operation involving forged invoices, inflated consultancy fees, and strategic political donations to keep regulators away.
As the retired official spoke, Meera realised the depth of Prakash’s role. He wasn’t just a bystander accountant who’d stumbled into sensitive numbers—he had been quietly following the money for years, cross-referencing transfers, tracking inconsistencies across dozens of corporate filings. The paper trail he’d built wasn’t just damning; it was comprehensive enough to dismantle entire empires if made public. “People like him,” the old man said, “don’t survive long when they know that much. Especially if they’re not part of the inner circle.” He sipped his tea again, eyes narrowing. “If someone found out what he was compiling, they wouldn’t just try to shut him up. They’d erase anyone who might’ve seen the data.” Meera thought back to the funeral, to the sharply dressed mourners, to Arvind’s panicked face before the poisoned drink took him. The purge wasn’t just about silencing names on the USB; it was about burning the entire map Prakash had drawn. She asked the official if there was any known leader of Project Nandi. He shook his head. “It’s not one leader. It’s a pact. Each of them controls a piece, and together they protect the whole. That’s why it’s so hard to take down—they can survive losing one, maybe two. But if you hit enough at once…” He left the sentence hanging.
Leaving Malleshwaram, Meera sat in her car for a long minute, the rain starting up again in soft, steady sheets against the windshield. The idea of a pact made the puzzle both simpler and more dangerous. It explained the coordinated timing of the deaths—if one CEO’s date on the USB triggered a leak, the others would see it as a breach and move to secure themselves by eliminating anyone who could testify or access the files. Prakash had essentially built a slow-moving guillotine for them, and now that blade was swinging both ways. She thought about the dates still ahead, the next name in line, and how much time she really had before they vanished too. Her phone buzzed with a news alert—another corporate leader from the city hospitalised under “suspicious circumstances.” It hadn’t even made the front page yet. The killings were accelerating. And somewhere in this city, the remaining members of Project Nandi were deciding their next moves—moves that almost certainly included her. The USB in her bag felt heavier than ever, less like evidence now and more like a live explosive, one she had to figure out how to defuse without getting herself erased from Bengaluru’s skyline like the others.
Chapter 7
Under the shimmering chandeliers of The Ritz-Carlton’s grand ballroom, the air was thick with the scent of expensive perfume, imported whiskey, and veiled ambition. Meera, dressed in a deep emerald gown and armed with a forged investor’s badge, moved like she belonged, letting her eyes drink in the clusters of Bengaluru’s most influential tech magnates. Waiters in crisp white jackets floated through the crowd with trays of canapés, their movements rehearsed to perfection. The corporate gala was a spectacle of ego and wealth—VCs boasting about valuations, founders talking in hushed tones about “next quarter’s burn rate.” Meera’s gaze locked on her target: Raghav Malhotra, a celebrated start-up founder whose ride-hailing platform had recently gone public in a frenzy of investor hype. He stood near the stage, smiling for a line of journalists, his hand wrapped tightly around a crystal tumbler. She noted the subtle tension in his posture, the way his eyes flickered toward the exits every few seconds—like a man who knew the wolves were circling. Then it happened—sharp and sudden. A crack like a champagne cork misfiring, but sharper, heavier. Raghav staggered mid-sentence, his expression freezing before a crimson bloom spread across his tailored white shirt. For one surreal moment, the room went silent—until someone screamed, shattering the illusion of control. Chaos exploded. Security rushed in, shoving guests toward the floor. Glasses shattered. The MC’s voice tried to cut through the commotion, ordering calm, but it was useless; the gala had turned into a stampede. Meera kept low, her investigative instincts overriding her fear. She noticed the shooter was nowhere to be seen, and no one seemed to know where the shot had come from. It was a “security breach” the media would later salivate over, but in that moment, Meera wasn’t buying the randomness of it. Crawling behind an overturned chair, she found herself face-to-face with one of the sharply dressed mourners she had seen at Prakash’s funeral. His suit was immaculate, but his eyes—cold, assessing—flicked over her like he was deciding whether she was worth remembering. Without a word, he slipped through the chaos, moving with the kind of precision you only saw in trained professionals. Meera’s gut clenched; she wasn’t just chasing financial corruption anymore—she was circling a predator’s nest.
As the guests were herded toward the main exit, Meera slipped out through a side corridor, trading the suffocating perfume of the ballroom for the industrial scent of the hotel’s service wing. Her heart hammered, but her mind was already pulling at threads. Raghav Malhotra’s company had been on the list hidden in Prakash’s USB stick, flagged for suspicious offshore transfers routed through the same Mauritius shell network linked to “Project Nandi.” And now he was dead—just like the Koramangala CEO. This wasn’t coincidence. She ducked into a staff elevator and descended to the underground parking garage, where she could watch without being watched. There, leaning against a matte-black SUV, was the funeral mourner again, speaking into a burner phone. She caught fragments—“Phase two… yes, the ledger… no mistakes this time.” A valet appeared, offering the man his car keys, but he waved him off, still talking. The phrase “ledger” made her think of Prakash’s spreadsheets, the ones ticking down with dates like a doomsday clock. Raghav’s death might not have been scheduled, but it had been inevitable. She took out her phone to snap a photo, but the screen stayed black—jammed. Someone was running signal interference. That meant they knew someone like her was watching. Meera backed away, forcing herself to walk instead of run. If she made it out of the hotel alive, she would need to trace the accounting firm on Prakash’s employer’s audit records—the one that seemed to tie every dead executive together.
By the time she reached the relative safety of MG Road, the city’s late-night traffic felt like a strange kind of sanctuary. The gala was already trending online; grainy videos of guests screaming under the chandeliers were circulating with speculative hashtags. The official statement from the event organizers blamed a “targeted security lapse” and promised “full cooperation with authorities.” Meera didn’t believe a word of it. Her thoughts kept circling back to that accounting firm—Mehra, Jain & Associates—its logo innocuous, its public image spotless. Yet Prakash’s employer used them, as did Raghav Malhotra’s company, and the Koramangala CEO’s tech empire. It was too neat, too perfect. Somewhere inside their pristine offices, buried in air-conditioned file rooms, lay the real map of Project Nandi’s financial arteries. And if that was true, then whoever controlled those books controlled the kill list. The USB in her possession was suddenly more dangerous than she’d imagined—because if it could implicate the firm, it could also prove she was in their crosshairs. As she stood at the edge of the footpath, the glow of a microbrewery sign reflected in a nearby puddle, Meera realized she had crossed a point of no return. This wasn’t an investigation anymore. It was survival.
Chapter 8
The next few days were a blur of late nights and red-eyed mornings for Meera as she pored over the USB’s contents, cross-referencing each name in Prakash’s files with news reports, corporate filings, and social media updates. Slowly, an unnerving symmetry revealed itself—each “date” in the documents corresponded not just to financial events, but to deaths, each one staged with a theatrical cruelty that made the connection unmistakable. The first victim had been found hanging in his own penthouse gym with motivational posters still on the walls. The second, poisoned mid-meeting, with his untouched quarterly report still open beside him. And now, the next name in the list loomed—a mid-tier executive whose company’s recent PR campaign touted “fitness as the future of productivity.” Meera felt a tightening in her chest as she scrolled through his Instagram feed—dozens of posts of him on treadmills, lifting weights, and boasting about “outpacing the competition.” If the killer was following Prakash’s grim timetable, there were less than twenty-four hours before the next “accident” struck.
She arrived at the upscale gym in Bengaluru’s business district before dawn, hoping to catch the man before his routine could be sabotaged. The place was glass and chrome, humming with early morning ambition—finance bros in performance wear, influencers filming workout reels, and a faint citrus scent from the air fresheners. Meera flashed a fabricated membership QR code on her phone, courtesy of an old cybercrime contact, and slipped inside. Her target, Anand Deshpande, was already on a treadmill, earbuds in, grinning to himself between strides. She made her way toward him, rehearsing how she’d introduce herself without sounding like a lunatic, when a subtle shift caught her eye—one of the treadmills near the corner had been cordoned off earlier, but now someone in a maintenance uniform was adjusting the control panel of Anand’s machine. It happened too quickly—by the time Meera closed the gap, Anand’s pace had accelerated sharply, his legs tangling in a sudden, unnatural surge of speed. The machine’s safety clip dangled uselessly. She lunged forward, but a heartbeat later, he was flung forward into the steel console with a sickening crack.
The gym erupted into chaos—shouts, phones out, someone yelling for a medic. Meera crouched beside the fallen man, her training taking over, but there was no pulse. His head lay at an unnatural angle, blood pooling darkly beneath him. In the mirrored wall opposite, she caught the faintest reflection—a figure in the maintenance uniform slipping through the emergency exit, head lowered. By the time she reached the stairwell, they were gone, swallowed by the pre-dawn traffic. Back inside, she scanned the panicked crowd and noticed the same sharp-eyed man she’d seen at the funeral weeks ago, standing unnervingly still amidst the commotion, watching her. When their eyes met, he gave the slightest tilt of his head—as if acknowledging her progress in this deadly game—before vanishing into the dispersing crowd. In that moment, the killer’s intent crystallized in her mind: these were not random murders, not even simple silencing of witnesses. They were executions staged as ironic corporate tragedies, each a signature on a ledger of revenge or control. And somewhere, hidden in the remaining names on Prakash’s list, the true purpose of this killing spree waited to be uncovered.
Chapter 9
Prakash’s firm’s server was buried behind multiple digital firewalls, but Meera’s persistence and late-night coffee-fuelled coding finally punched through the last barrier. The inbox looked almost sterile—archived folders, automated backups, and quarterly report chains—until she found a strange folder titled “Final Accounts.” Inside was a single unsent email, timestamped two days before Prakash’s death, set to auto-send at an unknown future date. Her pulse quickened as she opened it. The subject line was chilling in its simplicity: “To Whoever Survives.” The body of the message was part confession, part obituary for himself. Prakash wrote that he had uncovered enough proof to bring down an entire corporate cabal, but in doing so, he had crossed an invisible line from which there was no return. He described his growing paranoia—the feeling of being followed, the cryptic death threats slipped into his apartment mailbox, the sudden “routine” HR review that ended with him being locked out of the company systems. And then came the most gut-punching detail: he had hidden the final piece of evidence in the USB Meera now possessed, but it wasn’t just a storage device—it was a trap.
The email explained that the USB’s contents were laced with multiple booby traps in the data—dummy files with embedded viruses, fake spreadsheets with misleading numbers, and entire folders that were actually time-sensitive triggers. If opened without the correct sequence, they would self-delete, leaving only meaningless fragments. Prakash had done this not just to protect the information, but to ensure that whoever tried to access it would have to piece together the truth step by step, in a way that couldn’t be rushed or faked. But the protection came with a cruel catch—every person who had been given a piece of the “key” was now a target. According to him, there were fewer than a dozen people worldwide who could decrypt the data completely, each holding one part of a larger passcode. If even one of them was eliminated, the entire chain of evidence risked collapsing. Meera’s stomach tightened as she realised that the recent string of murders was not just random silencing—it was a methodical erasure of the keyholders.
Prakash’s tone grew darker toward the end of the email, almost resigned. He admitted that he had accepted his death the moment he named “Project Nandi” in his notes, because it was the kind of truth no one lived to tell. His last request was painfully direct: “If you’re reading this, you’ve survived longer than I expected. But survival isn’t enough. Finish what I started, or it will all have been for nothing.” Meera sat frozen, the hum of the server fans in her ears, the cursor blinking at the end of his final sentence like a heartbeat slowing to its last beat. Outside, somewhere in Bengaluru’s humid night, someone else on Prakash’s list was probably already dead—or about to be. She copied the email onto an encrypted drive, wiped her traces from the server, and stepped into the dark street, feeling as though she had just read a suicide note disguised as a mission brief. The rules of the game had changed—now, it wasn’t just about chasing the killer. It was about staying alive long enough to stop them before the USB’s last secret went dark forever.
Chapter 10
The air at the funeral was heavy with the humid press of August in Bengaluru, but beneath the black umbrellas and murmured condolences was an undercurrent of barely contained relief. The city’s business elite—polished shoes sinking slightly into the damp earth—believed the storm had passed. The dead CEO’s ornate casket sat beneath a canopy of orchids, the priest’s chants almost drowned by the clink of expensive watches as mourners checked the time. Meera moved among them in the subdued sari of a distant acquaintance, her eyes constantly scanning for the faces she’d memorised from Prakash’s files. They were all here—the polished CFOs, the icy-faced compliance heads, the shadowy “consultants” who never appeared in company directories. The man she was looking for lingered at the edge of the crowd: the internal auditor, middle-aged, bespectacled, as nondescript as Prakash had once been. But unlike Prakash, this man carried the calm of someone who knew exactly where the bodies were buried—because he’d arranged for most of them to fall.
The trap was deceptively simple. As the mourners filtered toward the post-ceremony reception, Meera, blending with the quiet chatter, began to circulate photocopies of a “leaked” audit report—one that named the assassin as a whistleblower who had turned against the network. It was bait designed to force his hand, and it worked faster than she’d dared hope. She caught the flicker in his eyes, the tightening of his grip on the leather folder under his arm, and then he was moving—swiftly, with purpose—toward the parking lot. Meera followed, recording discreetly as she confronted him between the shadow of a black BMW and the low wall of the cemetery. His voice was calm but cold as he confirmed what she already suspected: Project Nandi’s murders had been as much about control as about covering tracks. Every death had been a message. Every “accident” a warning to anyone who might imagine numbers were harmless. And yet, as he stepped closer, intending to silence her too, the murmurs from the reception turned into shouts—the police, tipped off by Meera’s anonymous message earlier, were streaming in, forcing him to freeze under the sharp click of cameras.
But the true ending unfolded hours later, not in the funeral grounds but across Bengaluru’s financial core. The encrypted files from Prakash’s USB—set to auto-release when Meera triggered the final key—flooded the internet, their pages of offshore accounts, shell transfers, and political bribes spreading faster than any PR team could contain. By midnight, corporate WhatsApp groups were melting down, journalists camped outside gated villas, and the stock tickers of implicated firms bled red. Meera watched from her small apartment balcony, the city lights glittering like data points on a vast, corrupt spreadsheet. She had forced the truth into daylight, but the victory came at a cost—her phone buzzed with congratulations from some quarters and polite “no longer associated” notices from others. In the corridors of power, she was now both the most respected and the most unwanted woman in the room. And somewhere in the quiet, she imagined Prakash’s ghost—shy, meticulous, and finally, unmistakably noticed—watching the empire he’d documented collapse exactly as he’d planned.
End
