Day One — Saturday.
Aarav assembled his team in a room he'd rented at a guest house in Sector 18, Noida — not the Crime Branch office, not any government building. If the Saxena family had thirty years of connections, any official space could be compromised.
The team: Pankaj Mishra (logistics and legwork), Dr. Sahil Mehra (behavioral analysis), DSP Kavita Sinha (reluctantly, after a two-hour argument in which Aarav told her that her personal connection made her a liability and she told him that her twenty-eight years of tracking this case made her irreplaceable — she was right), and two officers from the Delhi Police Special Cell whom Kavita had recruited off the books.
"Here's what we know," Aarav said, standing in front of a whiteboard he'd bought from a stationery shop on the way. "Dr. Arun Saxena, seventy-one, founder of LifeCare Diagnostics, has been running a ritual abduction operation for approximately thirty years. He selects women in their twenties who are in perfect medical health, using LifeCare's patient database. His son Raghav handles the operational logistics — the database access, the properties, the supply chain. His daughter Aditi provides the psychological framework. They work in cycles of nine victims. The current cycle has four women held in a farmhouse near Sinhagad village. Five more are targeted, including our informant, Shalini Jain."
"The completion is planned for next Friday — the new moon," he continued. "That gives us six days. We cannot move before Friday because any premature action risks the four captive women and triggers an emergency protocol we don't fully understand."
"What emergency protocol?" Pankaj asked.
"We don't know. That's the problem. Thirty years of operation implies contingency planning. If they're spooked, they could move the women, destroy evidence, or worse."
"So we plan the takedown for Friday," Kavita said. "At the moment of the ritual, when all the principals are present, and all the victims are in one location."
"That means allowing three more abductions to proceed," Sahil said. "That's ethically —"
"Terrible. I know." Aarav looked at the whiteboard. "But if we intervene now, we save three women who haven't been taken yet, and we lose four who have. Friday gives us a chance to save all nine."
The room was quiet. The arithmetic of rescue was brutal — and everyone in the room knew that the margin for error was essentially zero.
Day Two — Sunday.
Aarav drove to Shalini Jain's flat in Sohna Road, Gurgaon. He went in plainclothes, in a borrowed car, at an hour when the neighbourhood's vehicular traffic was thick enough to hide in.
She opened the door after a long pause. She was what her voice had suggested — mid-twenties, slight build, with the precise diction of someone who worked phones for a living and the tired eyes of someone who hadn't slept properly in weeks. Her flat was small and meticulously clean, as if order was the only thing she could control.
"You came in person," she said. Not a question.
