For ten days they built it together.
She was, when she was working on something, a force that had its own gravity. She pulled everything toward the problem. Her focus was complete, her methods rigorous, and she was faster than anyone he had worked with at moving from a hypothesis to its evidential test. The work moved faster than he expected and took directions he hadn't anticipated.
They brought in her CA friend — Shreya, sharp and sober-faced and visibly unimpressed by anything, which was exactly what the work required. Shreya spent a full night going through the Kapoor Industries structure with the technical precision of someone who had audited thirty companies and knew exactly what fraud looked like in a balance sheet versus court-ready documentation.
"This isn't just shell companies," Shreya said, at approximately two AM, over the very good chai that Priya made and the terrible biscuits from the chemist that had somehow become the night shift's food. "This is active money laundering. The subsidiaries aren't just misrepresenting the company's size — they're cycling money from a third source. There's an inflow that doesn't match any legitimate revenue stream. It goes into the logistics subsidiary, gets recorded as 'client advance payments,' and then gets distributed as 'vendor settlements' to shell entities that have no other business." She paused. "The inflow comes in within two weeks of major infrastructure contract announcements."
