Chapter 1 — The Spreadsheet

Prologue: The MessageLondon. November 9th, 2023. 2:34 AM GMT.She had not slept in four days.This was not unusual for Naina Mehta — she had been a detective for nine years and sleep was something she did when cases allowed, which was infrequently. But this was a different kind of sleeplessness: not the alert, productive kind that came from a live investigation, but the underwater kind, the kind where consciousness sat just below the surface of everything and nothing was quite real and the body kept going because the body was stubborn.She was sitting in the hotel room in Paddington — the one the High Commission had arranged, clean and anonymous and perfectly wrong for a person who had just buried her husband — with Arjun's laptop open on the bed in front of her. Not because she was working. Because she couldn't close it. Because the laptop was his and keeping it open felt, in the specific irrationality of grief, like keeping a door open.She was looking at the last file he'd worked on: a spreadsheet, date-stamped November 2nd, one day before the crash. Column headers she didn't understand. Rows of IP addresses, timestamps, location codes. The work of a man who had been working the night before he died.Her phone vibrated.She almost didn't look. She had been getting messages since the news — colleagues, family, the dense careful language of condolence — and she had stopped reading them on day two. She looked because the vibration pattern was wrong. A single buzz. Not the triple of a WhatsApp group message. The single of a direct message.She looked at the screen.The contact name read: Arjun ❤️She sat very still.She had not changed the contact. Of course she hadn't. Five days was not long enough to think about those things.She opened the message.Don't come home yet.Five words.She looked at it for a long time. Then she did what a detective did when presented with impossible information: she documented it. Screenshot. Time-stamp. She noted the message delivery indicator — two grey ticks. Delivered. Not read-receipts, because she had never turned those on for this contact. The message had been sent and delivered and she had seen it and the phone it was sent from was supposed to be in an evidence bag at a Thames Valley Police facility in Slough.She called the Thames Valley Police evidence officer at two thirty-seven in the morning."The Mehta case," she said, when he answered with the specific groggy alarm of someone whose phone only rang at this hour for bad reasons. "The personal effects. The mobile phone. Is it logged in your system?""I — yes, I'd have to check—""Check now," she said. "Please."She heard him moving, keyboard sounds."iPhone 14 Pro, IMEI ending 7742," he said. "Logged in at evidence receipt on the 4th. I can see it on the manifest." A pause. "Is there a problem?""What's its current status?" she said. "Is it at your facility?"More keyboard sounds."The manifest shows—" A pause. Longer this time. "The manifest shows it was logged in. The physical check from this morning shows—" Another pause. "It's not on the shelf."She sat on the hotel bed in Paddington at two thirty-nine AM with her dead husband's message on her phone and the knowledge that his phone was not where it was supposed to be.She typed back, to the number that should have been in an evidence bag: Who are you?The message delivered.No response came.But at two forty-one AM, her husband's phone sent its location to her Find My network. She watched the pin appear on the map.London. Canary Wharf. The building where CipherNet Security Consulting had its offices.She was dressed and in a cab in eight minutes.The office was empty when she arrived. The building security let her in — her High Commission identification and nine years of being the kind of detective who did not take no from security guards at three AM. She went to Arjun's floor.The phone was not there.By the time she arrived, the location had moved.It was pinging from Heathrow Airport.Terminal 3. International departures.She got back in the cab.She was twenty minutes too late.The phone had gone dark.The last ping showed it boarding a flight.She pulled up the departures from Terminal 3 in the forty-minute window. Nine flights.She looked at the destinations.Tokyo. Dubai. Bengaluru. Singapore. Frankfurt. New York. Nairobi. Istanbul. Seoul.She sat in the Heathrow terminal at four AM and looked at nine possible directions her dead husband's phone had gone.She thought: I am a detective. I have exactly one lead.She thought: Don't come home yet.She bought a coffee. She opened her notebook — physical, not digital, because physical notebooks couldn't be hacked. She wrote at the top of the first page: What did Arjun know?Below it: Who wanted him dead?Below that, after a pause: Is he dead?She underlined the last one.She started working.