A long silence.
"Which contracts?" Priya said. She was taking notes in her compact, almost-shorthand — a habit from LSE days, Arjun had gathered.
Shreya gave the dates. Priya spent twenty minutes cross-referencing them with the municipal infrastructure contract announcements database she had access to as part of her consultancy licence. When she looked up, her face was very careful. "Four of the six contract announcements that correlate with the inflows are contracts that were under political dispute. They had competing bids, they should have gone to cheaper providers, they went to Kapoor-linked companies at premium pricing." She looked at Arjun. "He's not just laundering money. He's taking payment for contract influence. Someone is paying him to steer contracts to particular vendors."
"Which someone?" Shreya said.
"I don't know yet. The vendor entities are opaque." Priya looked at the wall of documentation they had assembled — printed, organised, annotated in her handwriting and Arjun's and Shreya's. "But someone has been paying Rohit Kapoor to use his family's business relationships to influence public infrastructure spending. And I found the financial structure that proves it." She was very still. "That's why he needs me quiet. This isn't just protecting a fraud. If the contract influence element comes out, it implicates people beyond Rohit. It implicates whoever is on the other end of those contract awards."
"Which could be political," Arjun said. Carefully.
Priya looked at him. She understood immediately what he hadn't said. "I need to know if my father's name appears anywhere in this," she said. Quietly but clearly.
"It doesn't appear in anything we've found. But if the contract influence implicates members of his party or his alliance—"
"It becomes a political crisis regardless of whether he knew," she said. "He didn't know." Not defensively — analytically. "My father's flaw is not corruption. His flaw is wanting good alliances for bad reasons. He didn't look hard enough at what it was advantageous to." She picked up her pen. "Which is his problem to deal with. My problem is building this case correctly."
On the tenth day, Dev came to the apartment with the last piece they needed: a traced transaction link between one of the shell vendor entities and a political fundraising vehicle. Combined with everything they had, the case was undeniable by the standards of any regulatory body with jurisdiction.
"This goes to the Enforcement Directorate," Arjun said. "Not the local police. Not a journalist first. The ED has the mandate and enough independence from parliament that it won't be immediately manageable from inside Malhotra's alliance."
"My father needs to know before it goes anywhere," Priya said.
"Yes," Arjun agreed. "Tomorrow morning. You come with me."
