Chapter 2 — Vayu

In the air, London to Bengaluru. November 10th.Nine hours was enough time to build a picture if you had the right starting points.Naina had, across her career, developed a specific approach to building pictures of companies she suspected of being more than they appeared. You started with the public record — registrations, filings, directorial information — and you worked inward, peeling the compliance layer to find the operational layer underneath. Companies that were clean on the outside and wrong on the inside left specific textures in the public record: director changes at particular moments, address changes that corresponded to investigation timelines, subsidiary structures that were more complex than the stated business required.Vayu Systems was a very clean company.That was the first thing she noted. Too clean. Founded 2016, registered in Karnataka, stated business: "enterprise cybersecurity solutions and threat intelligence services." Directorial record: three founders, two of whom had since departed, one remaining — a man named Suresh Lal who was listed as Managing Director and who had a CV that read well and a digital footprint that was suspiciously thin for someone with his apparent credentials.She found the 2020 investigation records through the RTI archive — a journalist had filed the requests and published them in a tech-policy newsletter that twelve people read. The investigation had concerned the alleged sale of a product called KAVACH — an enterprise monitoring tool that the government of one unnamed state had reportedly used to surveil journalists and opposition figures. Vayu had denied producing KAVACH. The investigation had not been able to establish that they had. The case was closed.The journalist who had broken the story — a wNaina searched for Preethi Anand.Her bylines dried up in mid-2021. Her Twitter accountoman named Preethi Anand, freelancing for various outlets — had published one follow-up piece six months after the closure and then stopped writing about Vayu. was deactivated. Her LinkedIn showed "Open to Work" in 2021 and had not been updated since.She wrote: Preethi Anand. Find.She read for another two hours, then put her notes away and looked at the flight map on the screen in front of her. The plane's icon crawling across the Caspian, then Iran, then the Arabian Sea. The specific geography of a journey that made no sense unless the destination was necessary.She thought about Arjun.Not the Arjun she was assembling from spreadsheets and encrypted notes — the work-Arjun, the one who had apparently been running an investigation of his own inside a company she was now realizing she had known very little about. The other Arjun. The one who cooked rajma on Sunday evenings and had specific feelings about the correct way to make filter coffee and who had, in eight years of marriage, never once suggested that he was carrying something she didn't know about.She thought: he knew something that got him killed. Or almost killed. Or—The last location ping. Heathrow. Terminal 3. Nine possible flights.If he was dead, his phone shouldn't be pinging anywhere.If he was alive, he had faked his death and not told her.Both options had a cost she had not yet calculated.She closed her eyes.She did not sleep.