Prologue
11th March 1993,
He walked into the cyber chamber, the blast of AC chilling him but he knew the chill was due to another reason. The buzz of the machines that usually fanned his passion for the cyber world and its intriguing realm held no interest today. His anxiety was shooting up along with his blood pressure and he had just taken today’s dose of his meds.
He strode to his computer and unlocked it. A toothless smiling face of his cherubic little girl, Nitya stared back at him as the desktop took its own sweet time to boot up. His anxiety increased by the minute… there was no time. his colleagues would be in any minute.
Seated in this top-secret building in Yemen, a small country in the Arabian Peninsula, he had come on a special project. He was a scientist, way ahead of his time and India had not acknowledged his importance. But his childhood friend Jafar-ul-Mansood now based in Riyadh had.
Just a year ago, on Jafar’s insistence, he had quit his job at IISc and flown to Yemen to join this company meant to build high-tech software for augmenting world peace, at least that’s what he was told. He had written so many codes that he had lost touch with reality. Till a couple of days earlier when he heard Jafar speak with someone on the phone. He mentioned something about blasts in Mumbai… what?
He had probed in further and found out the company that paid him huge bucks was a farce… just a front for something sinister…. And just last night he realized, something called the D gang had planned an evil crusade against his motherland.
Unknowingly he had walked into a trap laid out by someone whom he trusted. His greed had surpassed all rational thought. His wife who was about to deliver their second child had pleaded with him not to go… he should have listened to her. His little Nitya, all of 3 yrs… oh how much he missed her. He wondered if she would ever remember him… His wife had severed all contact after informing him they now had a son and he didn’t even know her whereabouts. He just hoped his latest gift he had clandestinely arranged to be delivered to his old home was received. It was a special gift for Nitya….
The desktop beeped indicating the completion of the booting up. His trembling fingers flew on the keyboard trying to erase all he could… but the information on those codes was missing. Did they eliminate the data already? How was it possible?
He moved over to his latest project which was about 70 percent complete. He compared the codes to the research papers he gathered over the weekend…
Oh No… torpedoes… what on earth were these low-lives planning? He hacked a site he had been trying to get into…
Oh, sweet Lord. The location of the head office of his company was Karachi. That only meant one thing… Something was coming up in a day or two and there was this massive project hell-bent on destroying his country and he just became privy to it.
He wiped the sweat off his brow. What was he thinking? He had to act… act fast.
He typed in his back door… something he had ingeniously built for protecting himself. He couldn’t rectify the current mission or whatever the crap was going to unfold but he had to prevent future disaster. He couldn’t remove the codes so he began to scramble them. It was in a particular order that only a super genius could decode. But he knew these fanatics were blinded by their stupid missions and their pea-sized brains wouldn’t be able to encode his work unless they got in someone like him. As of now, he was sure he had done a marvelous job. This second mission stood stranded…
As he pressed the enter key and the codes began to realign according to his brainwave, a loud gong went off. Oh did these people have an indicator like a warning signal?
Before he could react a group of armed men rushed into the room followed by Jafar and a couple of people he hadn’t met.
“Bhaijaan what did you do?” Jafar looked stricken.
“I should have asked that to you Jafar before I agreed to this… I will not betray my country.” He stood up to the men.
“In that case…” one of the men with a golden tooth glinting as he grinned, walked forward. “…Doctor miyan, we gave you so much money. And you destroy our work… You know too much so… you know the punishment, no?”
He snatched a gun from one of the men.
The room reverberated with the staccato bangs of the bullets pumping into the scientist, whose name tag now stained crimson, read, Dr. Parikshit Mohandas.
As he fell writhing, as the last ounce of breath left his body, Parikshit’s unmoving orbs stared after his handiwork… a copy of which passed on to an undisclosed location only known to him, before destroying itself.
On 12th March 1993, a series of 12 terrorist bombings took place in Bombay, Maharashtra. The single-day attacks resulted in 257 fatalities and 1,400 injuries….
©priyagole
(Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and just the imagination of the author running wild. It isn’t intended to reshape history or distort facts. However, anything such observed is purely accidental.)
