Bankerupt (Ravi Subramanian) (36 page)

Whosoever tried to use the machine next, would call the maintenance personnel who would take another forty-eight hours to respond. In any case, Cirisha’s colleagues who shared the room had been out for three weeks and weren’t expected any time soon. By the time they would realize that someone had tampered with the Xerox machine, the job would hopefully be done.

Behind the space occupied by the circuit boards was a large black box. On it was written ‘100 GB, Seagate (for Xerox)’. He snapped it out of the slot, pulled the wire connecting it to the rest of the board and placed it next to him. It was about five times the size of his mobile phone.

Reassembling the machine took all of three minutes. All he did was stuff everything inside and cover it up with the back panel.

He reached out for the telephone lying on the workstation of Cirisha’s colleague, right next to the Xerox machine. While trying to dial a number, his sweaty fingers slipped and pressed the redial button. He quickly disconnected and dialled Windle’s number. Even before Windle’s phone could ring, he hung up. He was a bit unsure of Windle. The phone call the night before and the events after that had shaken him up. He picked up the hard disk, dropped it into his bag and quietly made his way to the door.

His hand was on the handle and he was about to pull the door open when the phone rang. Aditya froze. It was the phone next to the Xerox machine. Who could be calling at that time? That early in the morning. He was in two minds. His eyes wandered to the Xerox machine next to the phone. ‘Shit!’ he exclaimed. He had left two circuit boards lying on the floor. While taking them out, he had carefully kept them behind him and in his hurry to finish, he had forgotten to stuff them back in.

If he let the phone ring and left the room, Louisa might hear it and walk in. She would then surely see that something had been tampered with. That helped him decide: he walked back to the phone and picked it up.

‘Good morning.’

‘Who is this?’ He had heard that voice before.

‘Sir, I am from …’ and he hesitated. What should he say? His eyes searched around for clues. Then he saw the name. Sterling Automation. He stammered a bit but recovered fast enough. ‘I am from Sterling Automation. Here to fix the photocopier. There was a complaint.’ The label on the back of the machine was the inspiration.

‘Sure. Someone called me from this number.’ The voice sounded familiar. But he couldn’t place it.

‘Mistake, sir. I was calling my office and would have pressed the wrong button. My sincere apologies.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘It’s fine. Thanks.’ He was about to hang up when he heard a noise in the background. ‘Who is it …?’ When he heard the name just before the click, he knew why the voice had sounded familiar. He clicked a few buttons on the phone. From the redial list he noted down the number, just in case he needed it later. Hurriedly he took the two circuit boards and dumped them inside the dustbin. He bent down next to the Xerox machine, noted something down and walked out. Cirisha’s access card came in handy. Thank God for administrative inefficiencies. Just as with Richard’s card, Cirisha’s access ID card was still active.

He walked straight out of the Academic Block.

The shuttle to the Cambridge area was just leaving from a spot fifty metres from the Academic Block. He got into the shuttle and took a seat at the rear end. The hoody came up and he drew it tight over his head.

In thirty minutes the bus reached Cambridge. He got out. He knew he had a two- to three-hour lead over his pursuers. As the bus was leaving the university, he had seen a black SUV enter the gates. It looked like the one that was parked outside his house the night before. He couldn’t say for sure. Maybe he was hallucinating. But thus far all his hunches had been right.

70

12th June 2008

North End, Boston

North End, one of the oldest residential neighbourhoods in Boston, was a place initially inhabited by the original settlers. Waves of the Irish followed, only to be joined by the Portuguese and the Jewish. Throughout the twentieth century, the Italians had been the dominant immigrant community. No surprise, then, that the area was dotted with Italian restaurants.

Aditya got off the bus at a busy intersection. Clutching the backpack in his hand, he hastened through the hustle and bustle of a midday crowd that was stepping in and out of restaurants. He walked for about fifteen minutes till he reached Pavers Mansion, a quaint three-storeyed, brick-walled building. He stopped outside the building which was to his left and looked at the address he had hurriedly scribbled on a note. He was at the right place. He walked in. There was no elevator so he sprinted up the stairs to the top floor.

A plump lady at the reception desk smiled at him. He smiled back. ‘What can I do for you?’ The place smelt of fish. It was lunchtime.

‘I hope I am not intruding during your lunch hour. I can wait.’ He knew that this was a sure way of winning over the lady.

‘Not at all. I just finished mine,’ she replied.

‘I’m coming from MIT,’ and he flashed Cirisha’s ID card covering her photo. ‘We are in a bit of a jam. We have to submit a research paper day after tomorrow. We had photocopied all the research data and sent it to the sponsors. The person carrying both the originals and the copied documents had an accident. You would have heard of the terrible accident on the Massachusetts Turnpike yesterday afternoon. That’s the one. While our associate is safe, most of the papers were lost under the wheels of the fast-moving cars on the highway.’ Aditya saw that the receptionist’s badge had her name: Merissa. She looked on with puppy eyes as Aditya fed her his story.

‘Thankfully, all the papers were photocopied on one machine. I pulled out the hard disk from the photocopier hoping that you would be able to retrieve the data for me.’

‘You said MIT, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. MIT.’

‘We used to service their machines until a few months ago. They’ve changed their service providers now.’

‘Oh my God. So are you saying you can’t help?’

‘I’m afraid you will have to go to your existing service providers. We will have to charge you if you want us to do anything. They might even do it for free.’

‘Oh, you go ahead and charge us. We are running against time. If you are able to help me, I will definitely put in a word that you were there for us when we had an emergency and we should not have moved to another service provider. In any case, MIT isn’t very happy with Sterling Automation.’

Merissa smiled. ‘Let me see the hard disk.’ The moment she asked him, he knew the job was done. Merissa opened the door behind her and went inside. She came back in five minutes. ‘We will do it as an exception. It will be six hundred dollars. And we will print out all the pages for you. It will take us about half an hour to decrypt the data and then we should be able to print it out. You got lucky. Your photocopier was configured to save an image of every paper photocopied or printed on it.’

‘Thanks a ton, Merissa! You have no idea what this means to me.’

Aditya waited at the reception while the service personnel decrypted the hard disk. He had retained an interest in his previous profession and had kept track of the developments in the photocopier space. Sometime in 2002, the industry had made a giant leap, developing photocopiers with embedded hard disk drives which stored a digital image of every document copied or printed on it. Though some organizations had taken cognizance of it and put in certain data security and privacy measures, most companies hadn’t thought of it. When he pulled out the hard disk drive, he was hoping MIT was not one of those institutions that had taken such measures and disabled this feature. His wish had come true.

After the phone call, Aditya had carefully examined the sticker of the maintenance firm on the photocopier and figured out that there was something beneath it. He had peeled off the sticker, only to find that it was stuck on top of the address of the previous service providers. He had thought of taking the hard disk to Sterling Automation at first, but expecting that the previous maintenance agency would be happier to be of assistance—keen as they would be to win the relationship back—he had taken a chance and come here.

While waiting at the reception he scanned a few magazines. There were a few old newspapers but they bored him. He fiddled with his iPhone. There were a few pictures of Cirisha: memories of their honeymoon came rushing back to him. He flipped through the pictures one by one till he arrived at the last one. He zoomed in on the image and read the email again—the email which Richard had sent Cirisha. The cryptic email. He read it again. And again. Trying to make sense of it. The image he had on his phone was of the second message. The one in which Richard had said that it was ‘sent by mistake’. In the image he could also see the beginning of Cirisha’s complaint about Shivinder’s Dharavi factory to Richard. Cirisha had sent this image to Aditya’s phone when they were both trying to crack open Richard’s locker.

‘Sir.’ Aditya’s string of thoughts was interrupted. It was Merissa. ‘Do you want any other information to be printed out?’

‘As in?’

‘The file size, the time it was printed, the file name … Obviously there wouldn’t be any file names for the photocopied files, but they would be there for the files whose printouts were fired from the computers.’

‘That will be lovely. Thank you.’

‘Sir.’ Merissa nodded and went inside to give instructions, while Aditya went back to his phone.

He went over it line by line, word by word, letter by letter. He didn’t want to miss anything in the email. He flipped the image and looked at the top of the page. And that’s where he saw something.

The first mail containing the cryptic words was from Richard’s MIT email ID. But the second mail was different. While it was from Richard’s MIT email ID and was sent to Cirisha’s ID, there was a small variance. A minor addition, which would not have caught a casual observer’s eye. But Aditya wasn’t one; instead, he was trying to spot contradictions everywhere. While sending the second email to Cirisha, Richard had also copied himself in on his personal Gmail address. Why would someone do that? Was that a normal thing to do if the first email was genuinely a mistake?

When you are information starved, any additional bit of it seems like a gold mine. Aditya’s mind started working at a furious pace. ‘If I were to send a message to someone by mistake, I would just forward the message to the same person and tell him that I had sent the message erroneously. Worst case, I would do a “reply all” and send it back to the same group, stating it was an error. I’d definitely not add another email ID to it,’ he said to himself. ‘There has to be a message in it. Surely Richard didn’t add the second email ID without reason.’

‘Sir, it will take another forty-five minutes,’ Merissa’s voice broke his trance.

‘Is there an internet café nearby? Might as well do some work while I wait.’

‘There is. Not the best of places, but functional. Adjacent to the third building to the right is a small lane. If you go down the lane, you will find a café on your right. It might be a little shady-looking but it is safe.’

It took him three minutes to walk down to the address Merissa had given him. There was no one else in the café at that time. He took the cabin towards the end with just a wall behind him.

He settled down on the chair and looked at the watch. He was expected back at Merissa’s in thirty-five minutes. Not knowing where to begin, he googled the two cryptic codes but not the locker code. Google threw up nothing of significance. He tried various permutations and combinations. Nothing helped. He didn’t know what to do. Just to give his mind a break, he logged into his email. Nothing of significance there either. After he left GB2, his email traffic had come down tremendously. No one felt the need to be in touch with him.

He logged off. The screen in front of him was the Gmail home screen. It asked for an ID and password. He was staring at the screen blankly when a brainwave struck. He looked at the image on his phone. Richard’s personal email address was a Gmail ID. He keyed in the ID. From the same image he keyed in one of the codes, the third one from Richard’s email. He moved the mouse to bring the cursor to the ‘sign in’ button and clicked. His breathing became heavy as he waited for the hourglass cursor to disappear.