Neel Kashyap
Part 1: The Minister Who Knew Too Much
The monsoon had arrived early in New Delhi, but the rain did little to cool the simmering corridors of power. The South Block offices glistened under streetlights, guarded by protocol and paranoia. At 2:03 a.m., a white government Scorpio pulled into the back entrance of the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs. Inside, Minister Prabir Kundu sat motionless, his lips taut and fingers trembling over a brown leather file embossed with the Ashoka emblem. He shouldn’t have had this file. But he did.
Earlier that evening, Kundu had received an anonymous courier at his private residence in Jangpura—a small, creased envelope containing a pendrive, no return address, no sender. At first, he had almost tossed it aside, assuming it to be another bureaucratic leak or an opposition ploy. But something about the pen drive’s label caught his eye—”Protocol V – Eyes Only”.
Inside the drive was a 34-minute video. Grainy footage. Hidden cameras. Conversations between members of his own cabinet, discussing the strategic use of religious riots to influence voter behavior before the upcoming state elections in Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. But it wasn’t just discussion. There were dates. Names. Locations. Fund flow charts. Even mentions of fake intelligence alerts. And the voice that anchored the plan was unmistakable—Home Minister Tarun Bhagat, a man often hailed as the most “disciplined soldier of democracy.”
Prabir had served the ruling Janabhoomi Party for twenty-two years. He had survived reshuffles, scandals, and two heart attacks. But never had he imagined this level of orchestration from within. He felt sick. He wanted to throw up. But he couldn’t. Because he knew, the moment he possessed that video, he was no longer a minister—he was a threat.
That’s why he called his most trusted aide, Sanjeev, and ordered the car. That’s why he now sat alone, in the dim conference room of the Ministry, with only the hum of fluorescent lights and the ticking of a wall clock for company.
Sanjeev returned with two coffees and locked the door behind him.
“You shouldn’t have brought it here, sir,” Sanjeev whispered, voice taut with anxiety. “This office is bugged. Everything is.”
“Then let them hear,” Kundu snapped, sliding the pendrive across the polished table. “Let them know I know. I’m not a pawn in their game. Not this time.”
Sanjeev didn’t respond. He merely plugged the pendrive into his encrypted tablet and watched as the file loaded. Within moments, his face drained of color.
“Sir… this isn’t just political strategy. This is engineered anarchy.”
“I know.”
“Do you want to go public?”
“I want to do it right. If I call a press conference tomorrow, I’ll be found dead before sunrise. Car accident, sudden stroke, suicide note—their PR team already has the drafts typed. No. We need leverage.”
Sanjeev leaned forward. “There’s someone who might help. I’ve been in touch with her before. Investigative journalist. Used to be with The Sentinel until she exposed the Narmada scam. They buried her career, but she didn’t stop. Now she runs an underground portal—Project Kaali. Completely off-grid.”
“Will she trust a minister?”
“She might, if she knows the stakes. And if she knows you’re willing to put your life on the line.”
Kundu smiled faintly, a shadow of his old fire returning. “Then arrange it. Tonight.”
By dawn, the rain had stopped but the storm was only beginning. In a quiet corner of CR Park, in a shuttered bookshop basement that doubled as Project Kaali’s nerve center, Aarna Qureshi watched the footage on loop. She had covered war zones, infiltrated defense expos, and once spent six months disguised as a temple volunteer to uncover illegal land deals. But what she had just seen shook even her.
“You understand what happens if I publish this?”
“They’ll deny it. Call it doctored. Use their IT cell to smear your name again,” Kundu replied.
“And you?”
“I’m already dead in their eyes. I’m just trying to choose how I go out.”
Aarna took a deep breath. “Then we need insurance. If I take this live, I need three things. First, an off-site backup. Second, legal support in case I’m picked up. Third, someone inside the government who still has a soul.”
“That’s a tall order.”
“And this,” she said, waving the pendrive, “is a tall building set on fire. Either we jump, or we wait to be burned alive.”
That evening, at exactly 6:30 p.m., Aarna scheduled a timed post on Project Kaali’s server. The post was encrypted and would only publish if she failed to manually cancel it within 48 hours. Its headline: The Fifth Protocol: Inside the Riot Playbook of India’s Power Elite.
Elsewhere in Delhi, Home Minister Tarun Bhagat was already aware of the breach. His cyber surveillance unit had flagged the file transfer hours ago. In a soundproof chamber at the National Data Management Unit, he watched the same footage with a calm, expressionless face. His assistant, Ravi Narain, trembled beside him.
“Sir… Kundu has gone rogue.”
Bhagat finally spoke. “He was always weak. Idealists rot faster.”
“What do you want us to do?”
Bhagat leaned back, hands steepled. “Activate the Contingency Protocol. Contact Dev Ray.”
“Sir? But Dev Ray—”
“Is the solution. Not the problem.”
Across the Yamuna, in a dim housing complex in Noida, Dev Ray—ex-intelligence operative, dismissed for unsanctioned operations in the Northeast—received a silent ping on his burner phone. No name. No sender. Just one line:
“Clean the leak. By midnight.”
Dev smiled. Not because of the mission. But because it meant he was back in the game.
The clock was ticking. And every player had chosen their side.
Part 2: Shadows of the Republic
Dev Ray didn’t believe in the Constitution anymore. He believed in outcomes. Once a legend in the Special Activities Division, his name had been wiped from all official archives after the 2017 Mizoram operation—an unsanctioned raid that saved lives but exposed the existence of a secret surveillance unit. Since then, he had worked in the shadows, no badge, no loyalty, just contracts. Some called him a ghost. Others said he was the last patriot in a decaying system.
Tonight, he was both.
He parked his black Royal Enfield under the flyover near DND toll plaza, pulled out a crumpled paper napkin from his pocket—standard protocol from Bhagat’s network. It contained two things: a scribbled address in CR Park and a name—Sanjeev Rathi.
Dev memorized it, then burnt it with his lighter. He had six hours to erase a minister, his aide, and a journalist from the living world.
The first stop was reconnaissance.
He slung his backpack, filled with modified surveillance gear and a silenced pistol, and merged into the Friday evening crowd of CR Park. The air was heavy with the smell of fish fry, incense, and rain-drenched earth. His target was the basement of a shuttered bookshop, inconspicuously nestled between two grocery stores.
From a tea stall across the lane, Dev watched. Aarna Qureshi came out twice—once to collect a brown envelope from a courier, once to smoke nervously. Sanjeev arrived at 7:15 p.m. and stayed exactly seventeen minutes. At 8:30 p.m., the lights inside dimmed. They were preparing to vanish. Dev could feel it.
He didn’t act yet.
Killing was easy. But to truly kill a threat, you had to erase their footprint.
He returned to his bike and texted a single word to Bhagat’s secondary number: “Stage-2.”
Meanwhile, inside the basement, Aarna was staring at the same screen for the fifth time. Kundu paced behind her, murmuring to himself. Sanjeev was glued to his phone, tracking chatter on private channels and police alerts.
“I’ve set up two mirrors of the Kaali server—one in Iceland, one in Manipur,” Aarna said. “If anything happens to me or if I go silent for twelve hours, the footage goes public with a signed affidavit and names attached.”
Kundu didn’t respond. He had aged ten years overnight. “I never thought Bhagat would go this far.”
“You gave him too much credit,” Aarna said. “Your generation kept mistaking ambition for service.”
Sanjeev looked up. “Sir, someone’s probing our router again. Military-grade script this time.”
“Which means they know,” Aarna whispered. “We don’t have till morning.”
“I have a cousin in Bhagalpur. A farmhouse. No phone signals, no electricity. We’ll go there,” Sanjeev offered.
“We’ll have to split up,” Kundu said. “They won’t expect that.”
“No,” Aarna said, voice firm. “We stay together. Our only strength is that we know the story better than anyone. We split up, and we’re just bodies in different ditches.”
Just then, the lights flickered. Once. Twice.
“Generator is internal,” Sanjeev said. “That’s not possible unless…”
The window shattered.
Dev Ray had entered.
Three shots echoed in the room. Sanjeev dropped first, a clean shot through the neck. Aarna ducked behind a metal cabinet, pulling Kundu down with her. The room plunged into chaos. Dev moved like a phantom—swift, methodical, emotionless.
He didn’t aim to kill Aarna yet. He needed her hard drives.
Kundu, bleeding from a shattered shoulder, tried to reach his pistol—a small, outdated revolver hidden under his shawl. Dev kicked it aside, pointing his gun at the former minister’s temple.
“You should’ve stayed retired,” Dev said coldly.
“Is that what they told you? That killing me will fix the protocol leak?”
“I don’t fix. I cleanse.”
Before he could pull the trigger, Aarna flung a bag of hard disks at his head, buying just enough time to grab the pepper spray from her boot. She sprayed it straight into Dev’s eyes and dragged Kundu through the back exit. As she ran, she hit the emergency trigger on her smartwatch.
The timed post on Project Kaali reduced from 48 hours to 2.
Thirty minutes later, in a candlelit room inside the Prime Minister’s residence, Tarun Bhagat poured himself a glass of scotch.
“We missed,” Dev’s voice crackled through the secure line.
“She hit the kill switch?”
“Two hours before the footage goes live. We need to ghost her now.”
Bhagat sipped slowly. “She’s gone underground?”
“Possibly. But she’s hurt. The minister is bleeding. They won’t get far.”
Bhagat turned to the man sitting across from him in silence—Cabinet Secretary Jaya Roy, one of the last few functionaries Bhagat truly feared.
“You’ve opened a gate we cannot shut,” she said, folding her hands. “Protocol V wasn’t even to be documented.”
“I didn’t document it.”
“But it was executed.”
Bhagat smiled grimly. “There’s a difference between planning violence and directing sentiment. Every party does it. We were just more efficient.”
“Don’t be smug, Tarun. You’ve made India into a furnace. And now the smoke is leaking.”
“I’ll handle the smoke.”
“Then you’d better find Aarna Qureshi before sunrise.”
Aarna and Kundu stumbled into a battered Innova waiting on the highway toward Greater Noida. Driving it was an old acquaintance of Aarna’s—Dr. Arnav Sanyal, once a human rights researcher, now a wanted man for leaking CRPF documents.
“I’ll get you to safety,” he said. “But we won’t last long unless we flip the game.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said, tossing her a new hard drive, “we don’t leak the video. We call a press conference with the footage, make it global, make it emotional, and make the minister confess on stage. Let them kill us in front of the world.”
Kundu coughed blood, but nodded.
“No half-measures,” he whispered. “Not anymore.”
Two hours left. Delhi slept under illusion. Somewhere between the truth and treason, the republic stood suspended.
Part 3: The Nation Wants Silence
At 2:34 a.m., while Delhi’s neon signs flickered and its air hung heavy with silence, Aarna Qureshi stood in the bathroom of a dilapidated lodge in Greater Noida, washing blood from her hands. Sanjeev’s blood. It hadn’t even dried on her knuckles yet. Prabir Kundu lay unconscious in the adjacent room, his pulse weak but holding, a blood-soaked towel pressed against his shoulder. Arnav Sanyal sat by his side, typing furiously on a burner laptop, rerouting the live stream triggers through onion servers across Eastern Europe.
“This won’t hold them off forever,” he muttered, without looking up. “We’re punching above our weight here.”
Aarna returned, her face paler than usual. “If we don’t go public in the next hour, we won’t have a weight to punch with.”
Arnav turned the laptop toward her. “I’ve set up a ghost-stream. As soon as we plug in, the footage will auto-disperse to six international human rights platforms—Amnesty, FreePressWatch, and others. But it’ll only trigger if we present a live face on camera. A voice. A name. No anonymous leak will work now.”
Aarna’s eyes settled on the minister. “He can’t speak. Not like this.”
“Then you’ll have to speak for him.”
Aarna shook her head. “No one elected me.”
“No one elected Bhagat either, not to write Protocol V,” Arnav snapped. “This isn’t about elections anymore. It’s about truth being louder than power.”
She sat in silence, letting his words hang in the air like smoke.
Back in South Block, a very different silence brewed. Tarun Bhagat stood on the eighth-floor terrace, overlooking a fog-smeared India Gate. His Chief Data Officer, Ravi Narain, stood beside him, eyes glued to a tablet.
“Qureshi has bypassed three surveillance networks,” Ravi reported. “She’s rerouting her signal through ghost servers in Serbia, Lithuania, possibly Kyrgyzstan. Our cyber unit can’t pinpoint the source.”
“And Dev Ray?”
“He lost them at the Okhla signal. Their burner car was found ditched outside the Sector 18 market. No fingerprints. Just blood.”
Bhagat exhaled slowly, the cold air slicing his breath. “Then we need something bigger.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Silence the narrative. Not the people.”
He pulled out his phone and made a call. “Wake up the I&B Secretary. Tell her we’re invoking Emergency Media Clause 17B—‘Digital Subversion Through External Interference’. We’ll shut down all independent portals till further notice.”
“But sir… that clause hasn’t been used since 1977.”
“Exactly,” Bhagat said, smiling. “That’s why no one will see it coming.”
By 3:12 a.m., India’s digital space began to go dark. One by one, media websites went offline. Independent YouTube channels reported technical errors. WhatsApp forwards of Aarna’s footage vanished mid-delivery. Even the ghost-trigger from Project Kaali failed to respond.
“Someone just cut the internet nerve,” Arnav muttered, frantically checking his firewalls. “They’re not just blocking us—they’re erasing every path.”
Aarna felt her throat go dry. “Then we’re out of options.”
“Not entirely,” said a new voice from the door.
Dev Ray stood at the threshold of the room. Gun lowered. No malice in his eyes. Just something stranger—hesitation.
“How did you find us?” Arnav asked, pulling out a pocket knife.
“Easy,” Dev said. “You booked this lodge using an old activist alias—your own. And frankly, I wanted to be found.”
Aarna narrowed her eyes. “What game are you playing now?”
“I watched the footage again,” Dev said. “Not the first time. The tenth. I saw myself in it. Not literally, but philosophically. You think I kill for Bhagat. That’s not true. I clean up for a country that’s already dirty. That’s the lie we tell ourselves. But now I see—cleaning the dirt means becoming it.”
“And you just had that revelation in the middle of an assassination mission?”
“No,” Dev said, dropping a pendrive onto the table. “I had it after I hacked Bhagat’s secure server five minutes ago. That drive contains something worse than Protocol V.”
“What could be worse?” Aarna asked.
Dev looked at the minister on the bed. “Protocol VI.”
Arnav grabbed the pendrive and plugged it in. Within seconds, images loaded—satellite maps, blueprints, military deployment simulations, fake terror alerts planned for eight border districts. Operation Kranti Mirage. Designed to simulate a false cross-border attack days before elections to trigger a nationwide martial law.
Aarna staggered. “He’s planning a staged war?”
“No,” Dev said grimly. “He’s planning a staged democracy. One final illusion.”
She turned toward the camera.
“I’ll go live.”
At 3:49 a.m., a lone broadcast pinged alive on a rogue satellite frequency typically used by radio astronomers. Aarna’s face appeared on screens in Norway, Canada, and Peru—six international press bodies watched in stunned silence as she spoke directly to the world.
“My name is Aarna Qureshi. I am an Indian citizen. A journalist. And tonight, I risk my life to share with you evidence of something horrific—evidence that the government of India, under the guise of national interest, has engineered communal violence to manipulate elections.”
She paused, as Arnav queued up the footage.
“But that’s not all. What you are about to see is not just corruption—it’s calculated chaos. Protocol V is the past. Protocol VI is the future. And unless the world sees it now, there will be no tomorrow to fight for.”
The screen flickered.
The footage played.
In less than twenty minutes, #ProtocolV trended worldwide. International media picked it up. Amnesty issued an urgent bulletin. The UN Human Rights Council called an emergency review. Journalists across Europe translated the subtitles live.
Back in India, most citizens remained asleep, their Wi-Fi throttled, their networks frozen. But in pockets of resistance—in university hostels, in underground cafes, in slum tech hubs—people shared the broadcast via Bluetooth, radio, and even pen drives.
The republic was whispering again.
Bhagat watched it all from his home office, eyes twitching but face calm. He turned to Ravi.
“Activate final fallback.”
“What is it?”
“Push the security emergency. Arrest Aarna Qureshi. Frame her for sedition. Link her to foreign agencies. Paint her as a national threat. Tell the people she was never one of us.”
“And if they don’t believe it?”
Bhagat leaned back.
“They always believe what they fear more than what they know.”
In the distance, dawn broke over a silent capital. But the silence was cracking.
Part 4: The People’s Algorithm
By the time dawn broke over the grey skyline of New Delhi, the story had already split the nation like a fault line. In some corners, it was met with disbelief; in others, it was confirmation of long-whispered suspicions. But in the circles that mattered—the political corridors, security chambers, media war rooms—it was pure, nuclear panic.
At 6:07 a.m., national television channels, all under soft control of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, ran a synchronized breaking news alert:
“SHOCKING REVELATIONS: AARNA QURESHI LINKED TO PAK TERROR GROUPS. GOVT TO INVESTIGATE FOREIGN HAND IN DIGITAL RIOTS.”
Images of Aarna, doctored and deepfaked, began circulating on social media—one showed her receiving an envelope from a shadowy man in a skullcap; another edited her into an old Kashmir rally. Hashtags like #JournalistOrJihadi and #KaaliConspiracy trended. News anchors screamed hoarse about “national betrayal.”
It was a move straight out of Protocol V’s playbook—contaminate the truth by flooding it with fear.
But something didn’t go according to plan.
In a cramped hostel room at Jadavpur University, a 19-year-old coding prodigy named Nishant Ghosh, who had been following Project Kaali for years, decided to act. With four friends from different cities, he initiated an underground data cascade—a script designed to spread the unedited footage through encrypted PDFs embedded in academic journals, open-access libraries, and even image files. He called it The People’s Algorithm.
“Every time they delete a video,” Nishant said over a Discord call, “we’ll replace it with a thousand new ones. Truth is now a virus.”
By 9 a.m., tens of thousands of students across India had the video on their phones. Some universities organized silent sit-ins, others began reading Protocol V aloud during lectures. The footage leaked onto Chinese and Russian networks. Global civil rights forums began putting pressure on the Indian ambassador in Geneva.
And in the middle of all this, inside a basement in an undisclosed safe house near Hapur, Aarna Qureshi was breaking down.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” she whispered, hugging her knees. “One second I’m a journalist. The next I’m an accused terrorist.”
Dev Ray handed her a cup of black tea. “That’s exactly what they want. To make you forget who you are. To make people doubt your voice.”
She looked at him, tired. “And what about you? Who are you now?”
Dev smiled faintly. “A ghost who missed his chance to vanish.”
Arnav entered, holding a satellite phone. “Bhagat’s forces are tracing our tower. We have three hours max before they send drones. We need to move the minister.”
Kundu, barely able to speak, gestured to them. His voice was hoarse. “I… will speak. On live feed. Before they shut everything.”
Aarna crouched beside him. “Are you sure?”
“Let me die as a man who tried to fix something.”
Arnav began setting up the rig again—this time connecting to two independent radio stations in Prague and Bucharest willing to relay audio as a global emergency transmission.
At 10:12 a.m., Prabir Kundu’s voice went live.
“This is Prabir Kundu. Former Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs. I confirm the existence and execution of a covert operation called Protocol V, orchestrated by Home Minister Tarun Bhagat. I confirm the engineered incitement of communal violence. I confirm the planned false flag under Protocol VI. And I take responsibility for staying silent too long.”
The recording was cut off midway. But the impact had already begun to ripple.
In Bhagat’s war room, things were unraveling. Protests had started in Bangalore. Students occupied a railway station in Kolkata. A professor in Pune resigned and uploaded a fiery letter holding the government accountable. Celebrities abroad began tweeting support for Aarna. Several foreign embassies flagged internal memos advising caution in dealing with Indian government outreach.
“We can’t arrest her now,” Ravi said, pacing. “She’s no longer just a journalist. She’s a symbol.”
Bhagat slammed his fist on the table. “Then symbols must bleed.”
He called the head of NSIB (National Security Intelligence Bureau). “I want her apprehended or erased before nightfall. I don’t care how. No more discretion. This is war.”
But the system wasn’t entirely loyal anymore.
In a quiet server room in Hyderabad, a mid-level NSA engineer named Meera Pillai watched the feed scroll across her screen—anonymous signal routes, download bursts, media suppression trails. Her job was to identify digital threats. But what she saw was not a threat to the nation. It was the truth screaming beneath a firewall of lies.
She opened a terminal and typed a single line:
sudo bypass_censorship –distribute=kaali_packet_v6
And with that, she joined The People’s Algorithm.
By noon, the footage was playing in barber shops in rural Maharashtra. In train compartments across Bihar. On projection walls in Kerala tea stalls. And in WhatsApp groups of army families in Uttarakhand. You couldn’t kill the message anymore. It had outlived its messengers.
Aarna watched it unfold on Arnav’s screen. “What have we done?”
“You didn’t expose a government,” Arnav said. “You exposed a design. That’s much harder to kill.”
Dev checked his watch. “We have less than ninety minutes before their aerial team tracks us. If we stay, we die.”
Aarna looked at the minister. He was unconscious again, slipping in and out of breath.
“We carry him. And if we die, we do it in motion.”
At 1:42 p.m., two blacked-out military SUVs arrived at the lodge.
They were empty.
The targets were already gone.
But in the bathroom mirror, written in crimson lipstick, someone had left a message:
“TRUTH MOVES FASTER THAN BULLETS.”
Tarun Bhagat, watching the photo of the message on his phone, muttered, “Not if I control the guns.”
He walked into the press room of South Block and took the podium.
“India is under attack,” he declared. “Not from outside, but from within. A new breed of cyber-activists, in collusion with foreign intelligence, is attempting to destabilize our democracy. They are using doctored footage, weaponized media, and digital propaganda to cause unrest. But let me be clear—truth does not come from illegal leaks. It comes from law. And law will prevail.”
But even as he spoke, over 200 cities worldwide displayed large screen projections of Protocol V’s footage. The truth was now ambient, embedded, irretrievable.
Aarna, sitting in a moving truck heading north, whispered to herself, “Law may prevail. But history watches differently.”
Part 5: The Archive of Shadows
The truck rumbled through the narrow roads of Uttarakhand, its tyres splashing through post-monsoon sludge as it climbed into the lower Himalayas. Arnav drove in silence, eyes fixed on the winding bends ahead. Aarna sat in the back, her laptop balanced on her knees, typing furiously. Beside her lay Minister Prabir Kundu, unconscious but stable, his shoulder now dressed with proper gauze and medicine they had picked up from a village dispensary two hours ago.
Dev Ray sat by the window, watching the pine trees rush past. He had shed his signature leather jacket and wore a plain brown shawl that made him look more like a retired forest officer than a former assassin. But nothing could erase the sharpness in his eyes.
They were heading toward Tehri, not the touristy town, but a ruined village down the abandoned trail near Old Tehri Dam. The place hadn’t seen official habitation since the dam submerged most of it two decades ago. It had one advantage—it was off-grid, beyond the range of drones, satellites, or digital eavesdropping. And it held something even more valuable than silence: a backup.
In 2011, a fringe academic movement had tried to build a decentralized archive of political memory, away from internet dependency. They called it the Archive of Shadows—a physical repository of hard drives, tapes, and microfilm cartridges documenting corruption cases, false flag operations, and suppressed dissents from post-1975 India. The project was laughed at, mocked, and forgotten. But Arnav had helped build it.
And now, it was the only place that might keep Protocol V and VI alive, in case they were killed.
“I’ve rigged a delay post,” Aarna said. “If we make it to the archive, I’ll install the final dump. If we don’t, it’ll release it on the darknet in seven days.”
“You think they’ll let us breathe that long?” Dev muttered.
“Long enough to burn their lies into history,” she replied.
The sun dipped low behind the hills as they crossed a half-broken wooden bridge. Below, the Bhagirathi River flowed wild and restless. Much like the country they were trying to protect.
In New Delhi, Tarun Bhagat was slipping.
His press conference had drawn mixed reactions. State-controlled media toed the official line, but civil society had splintered into factions. One side bought his narrative of cyber-anarchy; the other raised questions that refused to die. Why were media websites down? Why was Aarna being called a foreign agent without a trial? Why hadn’t Kundu resurfaced?
In the Prime Minister’s absence—he was conveniently on a five-day diplomatic visit to France—Bhagat had seized administrative control. But the clock was against him. The world was watching, and his usual spin doctors couldn’t paint over this storm.
He summoned Ravi Narain and the Intelligence Bureau Chief.
“Where are they?” Bhagat demanded, pacing his drawing room.
“Still off-grid,” Ravi said. “But we traced a relay signal bouncing off a repeater in Uttarkashi. Likely a decoy, but worth investigating.”
“Send a Black Echo unit,” Bhagat growled. “And contact Colonel Joshi. Tell him we’re invoking National Integrity Clause 93.”
The IB Chief raised an eyebrow. “That authorizes aerial strikes, sir.”
“Exactly. No more shadows. I want them reduced to ash.”
In Tehri, the road ended near an abandoned temple complex covered in moss and crumbling plaster. Arnav got out first, stretching his aching back.
“The archive’s behind the temple, two levels underground. We encrypted it into the old irrigation tunnels. No signals. No doors. Just rocks and memory.”
They carried the minister on a makeshift stretcher down a slope lined with overgrown shrubs. The air smelled of wet stone and rotting leaves. Aarna’s fingers trembled slightly, not from fear, but awe. She had read about the Archive of Shadows. She never believed it existed.
As they descended into the dark stone shaft, the light disappeared. Arnav flicked on a lantern and led them into a circular chamber lined with racks and rusted metal cabinets. There were no guards. No passwords. Just dust and time.
“This is it,” he said. “History’s vault.”
Aarna connected her laptop to a dormant terminal, an ancient ThinkPad rigged to offline archival systems. As it booted, she began transferring the entire dump—videos, voice recordings, Bhagat’s server logs, satellite blueprints of Protocol VI, and most crucially, Minister Kundu’s live confession.
When she hit enter, the screen blinked:
Data Ingested. Protected by Red Lotus Encryption. Time-locked to Public Release – T+14 days.
Aarna sank to the floor, her back against cold stone. “Even if we die now, this won’t.”
Dev looked at her. “You won’t die. Not yet.”
“But you might,” she said quietly.
He nodded. “That’s why I stayed.”
They sat in silence. Above ground, clouds thickened, signaling a storm.
At that very moment, Bhagat’s convoy arrived at the Military Cyber Operations Wing near Dehradun. He strode through the hallway with the precision of a man cornered but unwilling to surrender. The room was lined with live satellite feeds, signal intercepts, and biometric scan logs. A junior officer approached him, hesitant.
“Sir, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has requested India’s appearance before an emergency council session.”
“Decline,” Bhagat said.
“But sir—”
“Decline it. And jam every route to Tehri. Air, land, signal. I don’t care if you have to ground planes or fabricate landslides. I want that mountain sealed.”
“And if the footage releases anyway?”
Bhagat narrowed his eyes. “Then we build the next fire so big, no one will notice the ashes.”
In the archive, Arnav was installing thermal detonators at the tunnel entrance—an old failsafe to collapse the entry if needed. Dev checked the periphery above, binoculars scanning the cliffs. He spotted a drone too late.
“MOVE!” he shouted.
The team scattered as a whirring flash lit up the sky. A small-caliber projectile hit the slope, igniting a controlled explosion. Mud and rock slid down violently, blocking the outer path but sparing the tunnel.
Inside, dust rained from the stone ceiling. Aarna shielded Kundu, her ears ringing.
“They’ve found us,” Arnav gasped.
“We’re not leaving,” Aarna said. “We make our stand here.”
Dev nodded, loading his pistol. “Then let’s give them a headline they’ll never forget.”
Outside, down in the approaching darkness, came the sound of boots. Black Echo had arrived.
And history, for once, was ready to resist.
Part 6: The Mountain Will Test the Fire
At 4:17 p.m., the first echo of boots ricocheted through the upper shaft of the abandoned temple complex. It was faint, almost ghostlike, but unmistakably rhythmic. Dev Ray heard it first. He didn’t flinch. Instead, he calmly slung his rifle over his shoulder and motioned for Arnav to disable the surface lanterns.
“They’re above us. We’ve got ten minutes, maybe less,” he said, voice low and steady. “Black Echo teams move fast but deliberately. They’ll want to flush us out without damaging the archive.”
“And if they don’t care about damage?” Arnav asked.
“Then they’ll come with fire.”
Aarna stood in the middle of the stone chamber, her hands still on the ThinkPad. The files were uploaded, encrypted, and time-locked. Even she couldn’t access them now. A failsafe code would be sent to journalists around the world in exactly fourteen days unless she cancelled it from this very terminal. The archive, in essence, had swallowed the truth whole.
She looked at Minister Kundu, who had regained consciousness and was now sitting against the wall, trembling from pain, but lucid.
“We can still run,” she whispered to him.
Kundu shook his head. “I’m tired of running. If this country’s going to burn, I’d rather stand in the fire and remind it who lit the match.”
Dev checked the last of his traps—low-grade charges in the upper tunnel rigged to create controlled rockfalls. They wouldn’t kill, but they would confuse. Delay. Sometimes, resistance wasn’t about winning. It was about surviving long enough for the message to outlive the messengers.
“I need all power shut down except the emergency terminal,” he said. “No signal, no heat signature.”
“Already done,” Arnav replied. “We’re invisible unless they literally fall on us.”
And that, ironically, was becoming more likely with each passing second.
High above, Lieutenant Colonel Aaryan Joshi adjusted his thermal goggles as he surveyed the slope from a vantage point camouflaged in scrubland. The eight-member Black Echo unit behind him stood poised. Fully armed, facial expressions unreadable behind black helmets. Their mission wasn’t retrieval. It was erasure.
Joshi had read the directive twice. From the Home Minister’s own encrypted device:
“Eliminate the leak. Salvage not required. No engagement beyond visual ID. No bodies to be found.”
He didn’t ask questions. He had seen too many operations spiral when politics entered the battlefield. His job was to execute, not debate.
He gave the hand signal.
The team dispersed.
Back inside the tunnel, Arnav heard a distant metallic clank—boot against pipe.
“Time’s up,” he said, standing.
Aarna checked her bag. One camera. Two data chips. Her press ID. No weapon.
Dev handed her a pistol anyway. “You don’t need to use it. But sometimes holding one makes them think twice.”
She nodded, heart pounding. “And if I get captured?”
“Say nothing. Not even your name. You’re more dangerous when they can’t define you.”
Kundu chuckled softly, coughing blood. “You’re a poet for a killer.”
“No,” Dev said, his voice suddenly heavy. “I’m just tired of being useful.”
Footsteps echoed louder now. Shadows flickered at the mouth of the tunnel. A flashlight beam danced on the far wall. The first two Black Echo soldiers entered the stone corridor, rifles raised, silent as phantoms.
Dev fired first.
The shot wasn’t fatal. He aimed for the shoulder of the first man, throwing him off balance. The second ducked, returning fire—but his bullet struck a ricochet pad Dev had placed earlier. The noise amplified, confusing the rear team.
“MOVE NOW!” Dev barked.
Arnav grabbed Kundu, dragging him into the rear chamber while Aarna took position near the entry curve, capturing live footage on her camera. She wasn’t broadcasting—just documenting. For history. For the courtrooms of a future India.
Another burst of fire.
The stone wall cracked.
A fragment tore across Dev’s upper arm. He winced but didn’t stop.
He tossed a flash grenade down the passage, blinding the intruders for seven seconds—just enough to collapse one of the internal barricades with a remote trigger. Rock and smoke filled the corridor.
Silence returned.
But only briefly.
A voice crackled through a radio—the leader of the Black Echo team.
“This is Lt. Col. Joshi. Stand down and surrender. You are surrounded. You have no exit.”
Dev switched on his own comm device.
“Colonel Joshi, this is Dev Ray. Former SAD. You know me.”
There was a pause. A long one.
“You should’ve died in Mizoram, Ray.”
“So should’ve your conscience. But here we are.”
“You’re aiding traitors. Journalists funded by foreign lobbies. Ministers turned anarchists. This isn’t patriotism.”
“This is patriotism when your orders smell like treason.”
Another silence.
Then Joshi spoke. “You have one chance. Step out. The others can be dealt with later. You walk out, I call off the drone.”
Dev looked at Aarna, then at Kundu, who was slipping into unconsciousness again.
“Tell me, Colonel,” he said, voice calm. “In your next report, how will you explain the death of a sitting minister?”
“You think the truth matters anymore?” Joshi said flatly.
“No,” Dev replied, “but history does.”
And with that, he pressed the final switch.
The fallback explosives didn’t kill anyone. But they did collapse the main tunnel shaft, blocking entry completely. A storm of dust choked the cave. Black Echo pulled back to avoid injury.
Inside, sealed by stone and silence, Arnav activated the tunnel’s ventilation backup.
“We just bought ourselves a day,” he said, coughing.
Aarna turned to Dev, her hands trembling.
“We’re buried.”
“We’re hidden,” Dev corrected.
And in the sealed chamber behind them, the red light on the Archive terminal blinked steadily—heartbeat of the truth, locked and waiting.
Aarna sat down, wrapping her arms around herself, whispering a single line.
“Let them try to erase us. We’ve already etched the truth.”
Above them, the mountain rumbled. Below, the fire waited.
Part 7: The Trial That Never Was
At precisely 8:05 a.m. the following morning, a special media bulletin interrupted national programming across all major Indian television channels. A stern-faced anchor from RashtraVaani stared directly into the camera.
“Breaking News: Former Union Minister Prabir Kundu is confirmed dead following a terror-related confrontation in Uttarakhand. Sources claim he was found in the company of known anti-national elements, including journalist Aarna Qureshi. The Home Ministry has ordered a nationwide alert and initiated sedition proceedings under Section 124A against all accomplices.”
They didn’t show a body. They didn’t need to.
The narrative had already been written.
Within hours, carefully curated footage was released—a grainy video, conveniently blurry, allegedly captured by a Black Echo drone, showing armed resistance inside a forested area. Dev Ray’s face was framed like that of a terrorist. Aarna’s image—plucked from old Project Kaali videos—was used in every possible way to ignite doubt. The footage never mentioned the truth. It never had to.
The trial of truth had begun—but only in the court of public perception.
And the courtroom was rigged.
Inside the sealed archive beneath the Tehri hillside, Aarna listened to the broadcast on a low-frequency radio receiver Arnav had repaired from rusted parts. Her hands shook as the announcer declared her dead for the third time that morning.
“They’ve buried us,” she whispered.
“No,” Dev said, crouched against the wall, rewrapping his wounded arm. “They buried their version of us. That’s very different.”
Kundu lay in a semi-conscious state, drifting in and out of awareness. He hadn’t spoken since the collapse. His pulse was faint but present. Arnav had done everything possible with limited supplies: sterilized cloth, antibiotics, and sheer stubbornness.
“Their story will hold unless we break it,” Aarna said. “We have thirteen days until the Archive opens. Until then, we’re ghosts.”
“Then we use that,” Dev replied.
Aarna blinked. “Use being ghosts?”
“Yes,” Dev said. “We don’t need to be seen to make a move. We just need one crack in the system. One person who still believes in truth more than narrative.”
He turned to Arnav. “Do you still have contact with your source inside the High Court?”
“Justice Vijay Rao?” Arnav asked, startled. “He’s retired. But he still mentors legal interns. Why?”
“Because we need someone to file a case,” Dev said. “An anticipatory counter-petition. Not to defend us, but to preserve the Archive’s release. To tell the judiciary that the footage exists and that it’s time-locked to global disclosure. Once it’s on record, it’s harder to suppress.”
“But how do we contact him?” Aarna asked. “We’re under a mountain. No signal. No satellite.”
“We send a courier,” Dev said.
“You mean…?”
Dev nodded. “Me.”
Arnav stood. “You won’t make it past the ridge. There are patrols everywhere.”
“I’ll make it,” Dev said. “Because I’ve lived as a shadow longer than anyone here. And this time, the only thing I’m carrying is truth.”
Aarna placed a hand on his arm. “If you’re caught…”
He met her eyes. “Then you’ll be the last voice left. Make it count.”
Two hours later, just after noon, Dev Ray crawled out through an emergency shaft lined with stone and moss, half-choked with dust. He emerged into sunlight for the first time in two days, squinting into the brightness. The world looked unchanged—but he knew it wasn’t.
The file he carried was encrypted, signed by Minister Kundu’s biometric thumbprint, and sealed with an affidavit from Arnav. A simple legal request to prevent the suppression of evidence related to “an imminent constitutional threat.”
He walked without hurry, wearing an old shawl and cap, resembling a monk rather than a mercenary. He passed checkpoints disguised as a wandering sage. He avoided cameras by slipping through dry stream beds and goat trails.
By nightfall, he had reached a roadside teashop near Rishikesh. From there, a trusted driver—one of Arnav’s old NGO contacts—drove him toward Dehradun.
He didn’t sleep. He didn’t blink. He didn’t breathe easy until the steel gates of Justice Vijay Rao’s ancestral home creaked open, and the old man appeared, wearing a shawl and suspicion.
“You’re Dev Ray,” he said, voice hoarse.
“Yes.”
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“That’s why I’m here. The living are rarely heard.”
Vijay Rao took the file in silence, opened it, and read. His face changed by the second—horror, disbelief, finally a cold and profound fury.
“Do you have any idea what this means?”
“Yes,” Dev said. “And I need you to make sure the court does too.”
Three days later, a quiet notice appeared on the High Court registry:
“In re: Preservation of Digital Evidence linked to Ministerial Misconduct – A matter of constitutional importance pending verification.”
The government tried to block it, calling it ‘frivolous’, ‘fabricated’, and ‘internationally manipulated.’ But Justice Rao’s legal acumen kept it alive—he cited precedent after precedent, argued for preservation, demanded independent review.
Suddenly, Bhagat’s legal team was forced to acknowledge the existence of something they were trying to erase.
In a secure meeting in the Prime Minister’s War Room, a retired General posed the question no one wanted to ask aloud:
“What happens when the timer hits zero? When the footage floods the world?”
Bhagat didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “We blame the judiciary. We say the court was misled by terrorists and activists. That the leak is foreign propaganda.”
“And the people?”
“They will follow the flags I wave. Not the truth they fear.”
But Bhagat didn’t realize something had already shifted.
In small towns, people whispered again. Aarna’s name returned, not as an insult but as a question: What if she was right? Temple priests in Madhya Pradesh began reading parts of Kundu’s affidavit as part of their evening prayers. A group of retired IAS officers filed an open letter to the President.
The story was no longer under control.
The trial that never was had started—in tea shops, classrooms, bus stops, WhatsApp groups, and community halls.
And in a sealed tunnel under a mountain, Aarna waited. Her eyes were no longer red from grief. They were sharp. Ready.
“History will break open,” she whispered to the cold walls.
And the walls whispered back: “Let it.”
Part 8: The Fourteenth Day
On the morning of the fourteenth day, the first light broke through the jagged clouds like a blade, slicing across the ridges of Tehri. Aarna Qureshi stood at the edge of the sealed tunnel’s emergency shaft, the same one Dev had used to vanish into the world two weeks ago. Now, she waited for a different return—not of a man, but of a signal.
Inside the chamber, the Archive’s red light blinked steadily, then suddenly pulsed green.
The timer had reached zero.
The final release sequence had begun.
All over the world, encrypted keys sent out from Red Lotus systems unlocked the contents of Protocol V and VI. Journalists from Tokyo to Toronto, Stockholm to São Paulo, received identical packages: the raw footage, Minister Kundu’s audio confession, the digital blueprints for Operation Kranti Mirage, and server logs showing the role of the Home Ministry in orchestrating violence.
The files weren’t just published—they were dissected, authenticated, examined by open-source analysts and AI verification platforms. Within hours, it was no longer a “leak.” It was evidence.
And India, ready or not, had been stripped bare in front of the world.
In Delhi, Tarun Bhagat faced his first moment of true silence. Not the performative pauses of press conferences or the strategic silences of plausible deniability. This was real.
His office phone did not ring.
His personal number went offline.
The TV in his war room was frozen on a BBC World banner:
“India’s Truth Exposed: Largest Coordinated Political Disinformation Campaign of the 21st Century.”
At 6:03 a.m., the President of India issued a statement calling for a special parliamentary session.
At 7:17 a.m., the Chief Justice of India admitted a suo moto PIL into Protocol V and VI and placed Bhagat under investigational freeze—no travel, no media statements, no portfolio access.
By 8:00 a.m., Bhagat’s convoy had quietly rerouted itself from South Block to a discreet villa in Gurugram. The media was outside. Protesters had started gathering at Jantar Mantar. Placards read:
“We Were Never The Enemy.”
“Truth Is Not Anti-National.”
“Kaali Lives.”
Bhagat picked up the only thing he still trusted—his private satellite phone.
“Activate internal escape protocol,” he muttered.
But no voice answered on the other end.
Only a dull, disconnected beep.
Back under the mountain, Aarna wept.
Not from relief. Not even grief. It was something stranger—a kind of hollow release. She hadn’t dared believe they’d live to see this moment. But it had arrived, cold and clear, like the wind that now blew through the ventilation shafts of the Archive.
Arnav entered with a wrapped parcel—two fresh air cylinders and a flask of tea. “The border guards reported Bhagat tried to leave through Sikkim. They blocked him. He’s grounded.”
“And Dev?” she asked.
Arnav hesitated.
“We don’t know yet.”
They sat together in silence.
Kundu lay beside them, breathing shallow but alive. He had asked for one thing when the files went live—that his confession be played not just abroad, but in India’s villages. His voice now echoed in temples, mosques, and schools.
“I was wrong. I stayed silent. I watched them break this country in the name of saving it. But the country doesn’t need saving. It needs remembering. It needs voices, not fire.”
In the courtroom of Justice Vijay Rao, a hushed silence had fallen.
The judge looked at the screens before him—multiple live feeds from global media, independent reports, and internal government memos now made public. On the bench behind him sat a panel of senior advocates, constitutional experts, and digital rights activists.
“India stands at the edge of something very fragile,” Rao said softly. “And we must decide: is the nation a territory, or a truth?”
The petition filed by Dev Ray under the name “Citizen 1088” had requested one thing only: formal recognition that Protocols V and VI represented a breach of constitutional trust and a suspension of democratic ethics.
“I hereby direct the formation of an independent truth commission,” Justice Rao announced. “This court recommends criminal investigation against all involved officials and constitutional protections for whistleblowers and independent journalists. Let it be known—this court does not rule by perception. It rules by proof.”
The room erupted.
Some in applause. Some in shock. But all in awareness.
At exactly 4:32 p.m., a helicopter descended onto the ridge above the old Tehri trail. Dust swirled. Soldiers jumped out, not with rifles, but with white flags painted with the emblem of the judiciary. They carried orders of amnesty, humanitarian medical access, and official safe passage for the survivors in the Archive.
Aarna stepped out first, shielding her eyes.
She did not raise her hands in surrender.
She raised them in acknowledgment.
History had come to collect them. And it came not with cuffs—but with questions.
Three days later, in a café near Majnu ka Tila, Dev Ray watched the news quietly.
He was in civilian clothes now. No longer tracked. No longer hunted. His name had been cleared in the court of law, though it would forever remain ambiguous in the court of memory.
Aarna entered, hair still dusty from the hills, her camera slung over her shoulder.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure I should.”
She smiled. “The Archive is going to be made public domain. School textbooks. University courses. Civic workshops. Truth is going to be printed. Spoken. Remembered.”
Dev nodded. “And what about you?”
“I’ve been offered a position at the new Truth Commission. But I think I’ll keep writing.”
He sipped his tea. “You’re brave.”
“No,” she said. “I was just terrified and stubborn.”
They sat in silence again, the weight of what they had lived through folding quietly into the moment.
Then she asked, “Would you do it again?”
Dev didn’t answer for a long time.
Finally, he said, “Not for the country. But for the people? Yes.”
One week later, Tarun Bhagat stood in front of a closed courtroom, escorted by plainclothes officers. His trial had begun. No cameras. No statements. Just evidence.
The people watched from outside.
Some silently.
Some with rage.
But all with memory.
India, broken and burning and breathing, stood on the other side of denial. The Protocols had failed. The shadows had lost.
And the truth, at last, had spoken.
— End —
