She went back to the hotel. She went back to the laptop.Nine years of detective work had given her a specific skill set, and the most useful one at four in the morning in a hotel room in Paddington was not forensic analysis or witness interview technique. It was patience — the ability to sit with a document she didn't entirely understand and pull threads until the document became legible.The spreadsheet was encrypted. Not file-encrypted — password-protected in the basic Excel sense that Arjun had clearly applied quickly, the kind of password that was not meant to stop a sophisticated actor but was meant to stop a casual browser. She tried his standard passwords in order: the ones she knew because they were their anniversary, her badge number, the name of the street where they'd met. The fourth one worked.Their wedding date. Of course.The spreadsheet had four sheets.Sheet 1: IP addresses in a column labelled SOURCE, paired with timestamps and a column labelled GEO that showed city-level location data. Three hundred and forty-seven rows, spanning eight months.Sheet 2: A list of company names. Most she didn't recognise. Three she did: a London-based cybersecurity firm, a Dubai investment vehicle she'd seen mentioned in connection with a financial crime case two years ago, and a name that stopped her.Vayu Systems Pvt. Ltd. Bengaluru.She knew Vayu Systems. She knew it because the Delhi Cyber Crime Unit had been peripherally involved in an investigation three years ago into Vayu's alleged sale of surveillance software to a state government for use against journalists. The investigation had been quietly closed. The closure had never felt right to her.She made a note.Sheet 3: A column labelled SUBJECT, each row containing a code name — not real names, clearly invented, two-word combinations. AMBER COAT. DELTA NINE. SILK ROAD. IRON DOOR. Fourteen in total. Adjacent column: STATUS. Most read: MONITORED. Two read: CLOSED. One read: ACTIVE THREAT.Sheet 4: A single block of text. Not formatted as a spreadsheet entry — pasted in, raw, the kind of thing someone did when they needed to put something somewhere and didn't have another option. She read it twice.
If you're reading this and I'm not there to explain it — go to the Bengaluru office first. Not London. Don't trust the London office. Room 4C, server rack B, third from the left, bottom shelf: physical drive, red tape. Take it. Tell no one at CipherNet you have it. Find Rohan Verma at IISc. Only him.
Do not contact the police in any country. Not yet.
I'm sorry I didn't tell you more. I thought I had more time.No signature. No date.She read it four more times.He had written this. Before the crash. Before November 3rd. He had written this and locked the spreadsheet with their wedding date and left the laptop where she would find it.Which meant he had expected her to need it.Which meant he had known something was going to happen.She sat with the weight of this for a controlled two minutes. A detective's grief ration — feel it, note it, set it aside for later when the case was done. She had learned this in year three on the job. She did not know yet whether the skill was healthy. She had never had reason before to apply it to herself this directly.She closed the laptop.She opened her phone. She booked a flight to Bengaluru.Departure: 9:15 AM.She had four hours.She used them to read everything she could find about Vayu Systems Pvt. Ltd.
