Chapter 15 — The Last Ping

Delhi. March 2024.Four months after the arrest of Richard Hayworth.Three months after Arjun came home.Two months after Naina gave the deposition that the UK prosecution team called "the most precisely evidenced chain of custody documentation we have received from an international witness."The Hayworth trial was scheduled for September. The Vayu trial in India was in preliminary hearings. The parliamentary inquiry in Japan had released its first interim report. The international press coverage had been the kind of sustained attention that complex corporate crime cases rarely received and which, Kenji had said on a call last week, was directly because of the simultaneous multi-jurisdiction publication strategy — once it was in five countries at once, no single government could quietly manage it.Naina was at her desk on a Tuesday morning when her phone showed a notification.Find My: Arjun's iPhone — Last location update.She looked at it. He was at the market, two blocks from their house. He had gone to get vegetables. He went on Tuesdays. She knew this. She had known where he was.She looked at the notification.She thought about four months ago — the same notification, in a London hotel room, and what it had meant and what it had cost. The same application, the same interface, a pin on a map. The exact mechanism of the sixty-one days she had just come through.She deleted the notification.She went back to her case file — a new one, unrelated to Vayu, a financial fraud case in Gurgaon that was its own specific tangle.Arjun came home at eleven with vegetables and two cups of coffee from the place on the corner and put one on her desk and sat on the sofa and opened his laptop."Anything?" he said. He was consulting — independent now, not CipherNet, not the cover job. RAW was his actual work, more openly acknowledged now, within the appropriate limits."The Gurgaon case," she said. "The shell company structure is more complex than the initial assessment suggested.""Shell companies," he said, with the tone of someone who had spent three years following shell companies and had strong feelings about them."Shell companies," she agreed.They worked.At one point he looked up from his screen: "The Preethi Anand family. Have they been told everything?""Her father met with the investigation team last week," she said. "Full briefing. They're being kept updated." She paused. "The father said something. He said: 'What my daughter wrote — the story she was trying to tell — is it out now? Fully? Not one article. Fully?'""What did you tell him?" Arjun said."I told him it was out in five countries simultaneously and it was going to be in court in September and the people responsible for what happened to his daughter were going to answer for it." She looked at her screen. "He said: 'Good. That's what she would have wanted. Not the justice for her specifically. The story out. She always said the story was the point.'"