ANTI-SOCIAL NETWORK (16 page)

He reached out for another bottle. Popping the lid, he took a tentative swig. This one was fine and Virkar relaxed, letting the cool liquid course down his throat. He popped a couple of pieces of the hot jhinga into his mouth. The spicy prawns mixed with beer made Virkar’s senses open up, his mind was beginning to mull over the events of the day. By now, he was sure that the Anti-Social Network, led by the mystery man, was able to remote access people’s computers and search them for intimate or sexually explicit photos, preferably of female college students or young women. They would then blackmail and extort money from these people. Sometimes, as in Naina and Virkar’s case, they also used computers to record videos through webcams and perhaps listen in through built-in microphones. What amazed Virkar was that the ASN was able to operate without any of the victims coming forward and making a complaint about them. It was surprising that most people just paid them off and shut up about it.

He took a long swig of beer and stretched out on the wooden bench. Glancing up at the black cloudless sky, he turned his attention to the twinkling stars. Something else was bothering him but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He let his mind drift in an attempt to let the buried thought rise to the surface and somewhere between sound of the waves gently lapping against the boat and the stars twinkling each time he looked at them, Virkar drifted off to sleep.

It was nearly dawn when his phone rang, jerking him out of his relaxed sleep. In the soft light, Virkar could see the Koli Queen approaching the Mumbai shoreline and realized that he had slept through the night. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes, trying to focus as he glanced at the screen; he thought it might be Naina calling, having arisen early and finding him gone. But his screen flashed an unknown number instead. Intrigued, Virkar picked up the call.

‘This is the man you’re looking for,’ a calm voice said. Virkar suddenly felt completely alert, sure that it was the mystery man calling. The voice spoke again, ‘How is the early morning breeze out on the sea?’ Greeted with silence on Virkar’s end, the mystery man laughed. ‘If I can record your bedroom antics, locating you is child’s play, isn’t it?’ There was no doubt that the mystery man wanted Virkar to know how was supremely tech-savvy he was.

Virkar decided to play along. ‘Yes, I understand how dangerous you are.’

The mystery man stopped laughing. His voice turned cold. ‘Believe me, Inspector, you have no idea how dangerous I can actually be.’

Virkar didn’t reply. For a few seconds there was complete silence. The first orange rays of the sun appeared over the horizon and the silence stretched to a point where Virkar felt that the mystery man was no longer on the line. ‘Hello, are you there?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I am here, Inspector.’ His voice sounded a little weary. ‘But I don’t want to be here. I’ve had enough of all this drama and I’ve decided to go away.’

‘Where?’ asked Virkar.

‘Far away,’ replied the mystery man. ‘So far away that you won’t be able to find me. Not that you can find me now,’ he chuckled.

Virkar waited till the mystery man’s laughter died down. He was about to ask a question when the mystery man spoke again. ‘Inspector, I want you to sit quiet for the next two or three days; after that, your troubles shall be over.’

‘And if I don’t?’ Virkar’s voice had a tinge of defiance in it.

‘If you don’t, not only will I post your sex video online but I will also post nude pictures of thousands of innocent girls from Mumbai online.’ Virkar sucked in his breath. The mystery man continued, ‘And it will all be routed through an email account that I have created using your identity. By the time you’re able to prove that it is not your account, I will be long gone and your reputation and career will be tainted beyond repair.’

Virkar realized that he needed to play it cool. ‘Okay, I’ll keep quiet, but I can’t help it if others come after you.’

The mystery man chuckled again. ‘Come off it, Inspector! There’s no one else who is after me. All your other colleagues are happy that the culprit has been caught and the case is closed. The Anti-Social Network operated by Akhbir has shut down. Everybody else thinks that it was Philo who went on a killing spree to eliminate the members of the ASN using Sagarika’s identity. It is only you who is still poking his nose where it doesn’t belong.’

Virkar decided to push the mystery man a little further and extract as much information as he could. ‘But am I right or not? You are the mastermind behind the ASN and you used Philo to eliminate all your associates…’

‘…and I’ve also eliminated the drug dealer who tipped you off about me.’ Virkar drew in a sharp breath. ‘I knew that would make you see sense. Look, all I am asking you to do is to back off. And I need a reply right now, in a simple yes or a no.’ This time it was Virkar who let the silence stretch out.

‘Yes,’ he finally said into the receiver.

‘Good decision. Goodbye, Inspector,’ the mystery man’s cold voice rang in his ear for the final time before he cut the line. Virkar looked at the silent phone in his hand and kept it by his side. A childhood ditty began to ring through his head:
‘In pin safety pin, in pin out. Khelna hai toh khelo, warna get out.’

N
aina knocked on the door of Richard’s room in Khotachiwadi. A bleary-eyed Richard opened the door on the third knock. His tired features broke into a smile as soon as he saw the hot take-away cups of coffee in Naina’s hand. ‘God bless you, Naina ma’am,’ he said as he grabbed a cup and took a swig. Naina stepped into the room and gasped. The stench of stale pizza and beer fumes was too much for her at that morning hour. She took a step back out of the room and took a few gulps of fresh air before mustering up the courage to enter again. This time, the smell didn’t bother her as much and she focused her mind on what Virkar was doing inside. She was a little taken aback to see him peering intently at the information that was scrolling on the computer monitors in front of him with the air of an expert. Naina shot a glance at Richard who smiled and shrugged in response.

For the past twenty-four hours, Richard had been trying to locate the hidden server from which Virkar had received the video clip. As soon as he had returned to Ferry Wharf in the early hours of the previous morning, Virkar had hopped on to his Bullet and headed straight to Richard’s place. He had roused a sleepy Richard and told him about the mystery man’s threat of posting thousands of clips on the internet. Richard had become quite excited on hearing this. ‘Inspector, earlier I had thought that the mystery man was using cloud storage to manage his data but if he really does have that much video data, he would definitely need a server to house the heavy data.’

Virkar had nodded without completely understanding what Richard was saying as he continued, ‘Obviously the mystery man’s server is hidden and he’s using TOR to hide it further. But I’ve been researching TOR and I’ve found out that there is a way to dig out the location of a hidden server if I’m able to detect even a single hostile TOR node on the deployed network.’

At that time, Virkar had had no understanding of what Richard was talking about but having spent the next twenty-four hours sitting next to Richard in front of the monitors and watching him systematically comb through thousands of data streams, Virkar had gained some amount of knowledge on what they were looking for.

Virkar turned towards Naina as her perfumed presence broke his concentration. His eyes were bloodshot and his expression was cantankerous. Naina put the cup of hot coffee in his hand. ‘Drink,’ she said. Virkar gave her a glassy stare for a few seconds and then quietly lifted his take-away cup to his lips. Richard excused himself and stepped out of the room. By that time, Virkar had half-emptied the cup and had begun to resemble his usual alert self.

‘So why do you think he’s asked you to wait for a couple of days?’

Virkar replied only after he finished the entire cup of coffee. ‘I think he’s waiting for some kind of large payoff from somebody he’s blackmailing,’ he replied, clearing his throat. Even as he said this, a thought suddenly struck him. He got up and strode out the main door to look for Richard, who he found standing at the corner of the lane, smoking a cigarette. Virkar hadn’t told Richard about what the mystery man had done to the Bandra Boy. Over the course of the previous day, Virkar had asked the Bandra police station for information on any recent dead bodies found and had been told that Ronald Crasto, a small-time drug dealer, had been found dead in a manhole near his house in Chuim Village. The police had labelled it as an accident, but Virkar knew otherwise. He didn’t want to scare Richard, but he felt responsible for his safety.

Virkar called out to him, asking him to come back to the room. Richard reluctantly stubbed out the cigarette.

‘His phone. That’s what we should be after right now. He must be blackmailing or negotiating with someone so he will be using his phone,’ Virkar announced as soon as Richard stepped back into his room.

‘You know I already tried that. His SIM is untraceable.’

‘Not the SIM, the phone.’

‘I have done that too. He keeps changing phones,’ said Richard.

Virkar was excited now. ‘But he doesn’t throw them away, does he?’

‘Probably not,’ Richard said. ‘I think he just changes the SIMs.’

‘I was in a police cyber crime conference sometime back and I remember someone saying that the FBI in the US has developed a program that can track a phone even when it is off,’ Virkar said, looking hopeful.

Richard shook his head. ‘I’m not sure about that. Normally, turning a cell phone off cuts the connection to the cell phone towers and takes it off the grid. You can only trace it to the last point till it was connected.’

Virkar rushed back to the monitor. ‘I’m sure you can find the program that can trace a switched-off phone,’ he said as he sat down on the console.

Naina, who had been quiet up till now, looked at Richard, who wore an amused smile on his face. ‘Wow! Till yesterday he thought I was faltu and now he has as much confidence in me as he has in the FBI?’

Naina couldn’t help but burst into a peal of laughter and Richard joined her with a loud guffaw. Virkar turned to face them, looking stern. ‘If you’ve both had your fun, can we get back to work?’

Richard stopped laughing and said, ‘Sure. But leave me alone for a while. I don’t want any disturbances while working.’

Virkar looked reluctant to get up but Naina rose from her seat and pulled on Virkar’s arm. ‘C’mon, Virkar, you could use a break.’ Instead of answering her, Virkar cast a glance at the brick wall at the far end of the room and then at Richard. Richard shrugged. ‘I’m clean, Inspector. I’m off cocaine.’ Virkar nodded and followed Naina out the door. ‘Call me as soon as you find something,’ he said as he shut the door behind him.

Richard waited for a minute and took out his cigarette packet. He opened it and shook the cigarettes out. Hidden among them was a fat, rolled reefer. ‘But I’m not off grass,’ he chuckled as he lit up the reefer and took a long drag. Blowing the smoke out from his nose, he said out loud, ‘Thank God for Manali.’ Then he flexed his fingers and got to work on his computer.

T
hat Richard is good, yaar
, thought Virkar to himself as he walked down Bazaar Gate Street in Mumbai’s Fort area. He was pretending to look for a cover for his cell phone among all the small hole-in-the-wall cell phone shops that dotted the street. Earlier that afternoon, Richard had made a breakthrough. Although he had tried several times to locate the mystery man’s mobile phone, he simply could not pinpoint its location while it was turned off. However, during this exercise he had discovered that the phone had been used three times during the early hours of the morning in the Fort area before being turned off. In fact, the timing of the last instance when it was used in the Fort area corresponded with the call made to Virkar’s phone while he was out on the Koli Queen. Richard had communicated this to Virkar who, in turn, surmised that the mystery man’s base of operations was probably the Fort area, since the unearthly hour when the phone had been used indicated that the mystery man was indoors in an office or a home. Richard had identified the location to be somewhere in the vicinity of the Bora Bazaar in the Fort area.

Bora Bazaar lies sandwiched between the upscale Victorian buildings lining Pherozeshah Mehta road to the south and the General Post Office and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (commonly known as V.T.) to the north. The majestic D.N. Road borders Bora Bazaar on the west while the venerated Ballard Estate lies to its east. The buildings in this area are jammed together between narrow lanes that are choked with vehicles and people at all times. Small stationary shops jostle for space next to photo labs, mobile stores, electrical and hardware stores, stores selling computer spare parts, wholesale paper merchants and small printing presses. Basically, it is a conglomeration of vendors who supply material to the offices of Ballard Estate and the Fort area.

Above the shops, the rickety buildings stretch up to three or four storeys as is the norm in the Fort area. These buildings mostly have small cubby-holed offices of small traders, equally small law firms and fly-by-the-night tour operators. In short, the Bora Bazaar is a haven for a small, shady operator or someone with a flighty business.

A perfect place to operate a sextortion racket from
, Virkar thought to himself as he stood feeding the pigeons that nested at the small kabootar khana under the Bazaar Gate tower. From that position, he could look down three streets of Bora Bazaar. What he saw was not encouraging. The mystery man could be anywhere in the tight environs of the labyrinthine streets. For a few seconds, Virkar’s resolve was a little shaken but he pulled himself together quickly as he visualized the mystery man threatening him over the phone. Virkar did not like being threatened. He threw the last of the grains towards the hungry pigeons and turned towards Gunbow Street, making his way past the Jain temple into the heart of Bora Bazaar.