Seven days.
That was how long it took Ranchi to decide that the attack on a retired soldier's home in a residential lane was a tragedy worth discussing rather than investigating. The news cycle had moved on — redirected efficiently by forces that Kavya didn't fully understand yet but was beginning to map the shape of. The politicians had gone quiet on the subject overnight, which had struck her at the time as suspicious and now struck her as confirmation of something she couldn't yet name.
The city had returned to its ordinary rhythm.
She had not.
They had established a base of operations in Karan's house without formally deciding to.
It had happened the way most necessary things happened between them — without discussion, without announcement. The morning after Vikram was moved from the ICU to a monitored ward, Kavya had come to Karan's house because she could not go back to a hotel room and sit with her own thoughts, and she had not left since. Arvind uncle had said nothing about this. He had simply ensured there was a room with a desk and told them the wifi password.
The desk had become something by the third day.
Printed photographs pinned to the wall — news screenshots, satellite imagery pulled from public sources, maps of the lane and the surrounding area downloaded from mapping applications. Strings of notes written on paper because Kavya had decided early that she didn't trust anything digital for this. Timelines drawn out by hand. Questions written in red that didn't have answers yet.
Karan looked at it every morning when he walked in and thought it looked exactly like something that wasn't going to be enough.
He didn't say this out loud.
Kavya worked the way she trained — with complete absorption, no wasted motion, grinding until something gave.
She had started with the soldiers.
Twelve dead, three critical — all recovered by government authorities within hours of the attack in a handover that Inspector Sinha had described to her with careful professional neutrality as "moving through channels above my jurisdiction." No identifications released. No unit designations. No country of origin confirmed publicly. The three survivors had been transferred to a facility she could not locate through any channel she had access to.
She spent two days trying to access those channels anyway.
She found walls. Smooth, institutional walls with no handholds — not the walls of incompetence or bureaucratic inertia but the specific seamless walls of deliberate concealment. Someone had cleaned this up quickly and thoroughly.
She wrote WHO CLEANED THIS UP AND HOW FAST on the paper in red and pinned it to the wall.
Karan worked the weapons angle.
RPG fired from an aerial platform in a civilian neighbourhood — that was not something you sourced locally. He spent three days talking to people he knew from his father's network, carefully, indirectly, asking questions shaped like other questions. He found that certain people became very uncomfortable when the subject arose and changed it with a practiced smoothness that was itself informative.
He found that the weapons used were not domestically sourced.
He found that the helicopter had not filed a flight plan with any regional authority.
He found that it had appeared on exactly one private radar installation — a freight company's weather monitoring system in Kanke — for a window of four minutes before disappearing, and that the freight company had been contacted by someone the day after the attack and the relevant data had been deleted.
He wrote the four minute window on the map with the radar installation marked.
He did not tell Kavya how many people had stopped returning his calls after he asked certain questions. She would have found it alarming. He found it clarifying.
Arvind uncle watched them from his wheelchair in the doorway of the room sometimes.
Not always. Not obviously. He would appear in the corridor, seem to be passing, pause for a moment looking at the wall they'd covered in notes and maps, and then continue. He never commented on what they were doing. He never told them to stop.
Once — on the fourth day — Kavya looked up from a document she was reading and found him in the doorway looking at the timeline she'd drawn on paper. He was looking at the section covering the twenty years before the attack. The section that was mostly blank.
She watched him look at it.
He became aware of her watching. Met her eyes briefly.
Something in his expression — there and gone.
"Chai banwata hoon," he said. And moved on.
She looked at the blank section of the timeline for a long time after that.
The Major's week looked different.
He worked through channels that didn't appear in any organisational chart — the accumulated infrastructure of thirty years of service, the debts and relationships and back corridors of an institution that existed partially in official documentation and substantially in the memories of people who had served together in places that were never officially acknowledged.
He made calls at hours that suggested the calls could not wait.
He pulled records. Not through official requests — those had hit the same smooth walls that Kavya had found — but through the older, slower, more reliable method of asking the right person who knew the right person who had been in the right room twenty years ago.
He found nothing.
That was the thing that bothered him most — not the walls themselves but their quality. In thirty years he had encountered concealment of various grades. Political concealment was messy — motivated by self-interest, full of gaps where different people were protecting different things. Institutional concealment was tidier but left patterns. Criminal concealment was often surprisingly sophisticated but almost always had the faint smell of improvisation underneath.
This had none of those textures.
This was something else. Cleaner than political. More comprehensive than institutional. And carrying underneath it the absolute absence of improvisation — the smell of something that had been planned for contingencies that hadn't even arisen yet.
Whoever had done this had prepared for people like him looking.
By the fifth day he had exhausted his primary network.
By the sixth he had gone deeper than he had gone in years — into contacts he used carefully and rarely, people who operated in the spaces between official structures, who owed him things he had never called in before. He called them in now.
He found the same walls.
He found one thing — one single thread that wasn't quite nothing.
The funding for the operation — and there was funding, substantial funding, moving through channels so layered and redirected that following it was like trying to hold water in open hands — that funding had touched, at some very distant and thoroughly obscured point, something domestic. Something that should not have had anything to do with international operational capacity.
He could not follow it further.
He wrote it down and looked at it and knew it wasn't enough to act on. It wasn't even enough to theorise on. It was the shadow of a shadow of a thread.
He slept four hours on the sixth night.
The tip arrived on the seventh day.
The Major's phone. A number that didn't exist — not untraceable in the way of a prepaid burner but untraceable in the way of something that had been deliberately constructed to leave no origin point. He had encountered maybe three communications of this technical quality in his entire career.
A voice. Modulated — not disguised exactly, but processed in a way that removed identifying characteristics without making it sound artificial.
"Major Verma. You've been looking in the right direction but the wrong distance. Look closer to home. There is a student organisation operating out of Ranchi University. They call themselves Neev. Find them."
That was all.
The call disconnected.
He sat with his phone in his hand for a full minute.
Then he opened his laptop and began looking for Neev.
He found them.
Which was itself the first problem — they were not difficult to find. A student collective registered with the university, three years old, officially dedicated to social activism and community development. Twenty-three members. A website with photographs of clean-up drives and blood donation camps. A social media presence that was active and unremarkable. Meeting minutes filed with the student union office.
A group of college students.
He read through everything available in forty-five minutes.
He sat back.
His instincts — thirty years of them, tested against every kind of deception he had encountered — were making a specific sound. Not the sound of discovery. The sound of a door that had been left open specifically for him to walk through.
"Look closer to home," the voice had said.
He thought about that phrasing. Closer to home. As though home was where he had been looking from. As though the tip was oriented around his perspective specifically.
Someone knew he was investigating.
Someone knew how he was investigating — the direction, the methods, the channels he was using. And had waited precisely long enough for him to exhaust those channels before offering him a new one.
A group of college students with a website full of blood donation camps.
He could think of two explanations.
The first: Neev was exactly what it appeared to be and was somehow, inexplicably, connected to an operation that required helicopters and RPGs and the kind of financial infrastructure that could erase itself from official records within hours.
The second: someone had constructed this trail specifically for him to follow and had delivered it at exactly the right moment through exactly the right channel to feel like a genuine break rather than a manufactured one.
He knew which explanation his instincts preferred.
He also knew that instincts, in the absence of contradicting evidence, were not a reason to dismiss a lead. However suspicious. However perfectly timed. However neat.
He could not afford to be wrong in either direction.
He called Deepak.
"I need someone inside Ranchi University," he said. "Quietly. Student, faculty, staff — anyone. I need eyes on a group called Neev." A pause. "No — don't ask anyone obvious. Someone peripheral. Someone they wouldn't notice noticing them." Another pause. "Yes I know it's a strange request. I'll explain when there's something to explain."
He ended the call.
He looked at the Neev website on his laptop screen. A photograph of smiling students at a community event. Banners. Sunlight.
He thought about the call. The untraceable number. The modulated voice that had known his name and known he was looking and known exactly when to call.
Someone wanted me to find these students.
The question — the question that would keep him up tonight and possibly several nights after — was whether that someone was trying to help him or trying to bury him in something that would cost him time and attention and lead precisely nowhere.
He closed the laptop.
He did not tell Kavya and Karan.
Not yet. Not until he had something more than a suspicious phone call and a student group with a blood donation camp.
He would verify first.
He would find out what Neev actually was before he decided what to do with the information.
And somewhere underneath all of that — underneath the professional caution and the thirty years of trained skepticism — something small and cold had settled in his chest.
Someone had known he was looking.
Which meant someone was watching.
Which meant the walls he'd been hitting all week weren't just concealment.
They were surveillance.
He sat in the quiet of the room and thought about what it meant to be hunting something that already knew you were there.
END OF CHAPTER 5