Hyderabad – June 18, 2025
The path to the truth was never straight.
After days of combing through customs archives, diplomatic logs, and layers of corrupted surveillance data, Anushree and Naveen found themselves chasing shadows—and the faint trail of a woman presumed dead by the entire nation.
It was a single frame from a toll booth camera that changed everything: a blurry image of a woman, wrapped in a shawl, wearing dark glasses, crossing a checkpoint east of Hyderabad at 12:17 PM—barely hours after the official time of the crash. The facial match was incomplete, but Anushree knew. In her gut, she knew.
The timing wasn't coincidence. It was escape.
More anomalies followed: a gas station transaction logged in a pseudonym known to RAW handlers. A shortwave signal detected by a telecom engineer in Vizag—encrypted, bounced through an outdated defense satellite, pulsing from deep within the Araku Valley.
That was enough.
Naveen secured an old contact to get them clearance past local patrols. No digital trail. No record. By the time they reached the base of the hills, fog clung low to the forest, and the only sounds were birds and the distant hum of unseen drones.
They found her at dawn.
A weathered cottage nestled between abandoned tea rows, half-consumed by moss and time. As they approached, the front door creaked open—slowly, deliberately. She was already waiting.
Rathnadevi.
Even stripped of office and ceremony, she had presence. A force, not just a figure. She looked older than her photos—grayer, thinner—but her eyes were sharp, calculating. And tired in the way only someone who's spent weeks surviving could be.
She didn't flinch when she saw them.
"You finally connected the threads," she said simply. "Good. Come in."
Inside, the air was heavy with damp wood, stale tea, and something harder to name—secrecy, perhaps. Papers were stacked with surgical precision, a laptop running behind a Faraday shield, old signal-jammers and frequency splitters scattered like relics from a covert war.
Anushree didn't waste time.
"You knew the plane was going to crash."
Rathnadevi met her gaze without hesitation. "Yes."
"How?"
She sat down slowly, as if the answer carried weight. "Because they told me."
Silence.
"I see things others don't. A month ago, a junior intelligence analyst forwarded me a flagged communique—buried under procurement data. Hidden, but not well enough. It outlined a pattern: the Skyrise-800s had systemic faults. Covered up for years. Ignition failures. Suppressed flight reports. There had been five near-misses globally. One fatality. Quietly erased."
Anushree clenched her jaw. "The Directorate of Civil Aviation signed off on that fleet."
"They did," Rathnadevi said bitterly. "Under pressure. I confronted the Transport Ministry. They denied everything. But the data was real. So I ordered a full internal review."
Her fingers traced the rim of a chipped tea cup.
"That's when I saw the bigger picture. The Skyrise crash was never about cost-saving negligence. It was an opportunity. An excuse to eliminate liabilities. Onboard Flight AS-279 were not just diplomats and businessmen—there were three civil auditors, two retired judges tied to the 2019 procurement hearings, and Maya Kapoor, an investigative journalist with a sealed target file in Intelligence Bureau archives."
Naveen's voice was low. "And you."
Rathnadevi nodded. "I was meant to be the headline. The tragedy. The distraction."
"But you didn't board," Anushree said, stepping closer. "You changed your plans."
"I had to. One day before the flight, I received an untraceable tip from someone inside the National Cyber Cell. They told me my travel itinerary had been cloned and flagged by a backdoor system used for covert operations. I checked my schedule—several meetings had been quietly wiped. My personal assistant reassigned. The final warning came when my encrypted line went dead."
"So you disappeared," Naveen said.
"I escaped," she corrected. "Rerouted by car. No phones. No entourage. I had to make it look like I was on that plane—long enough for the system to commit."
She opened a locked steel case and pulled out a heavy black data drive.
"This contains everything," she said. "Procurement fraud tied to foreign defense firms. Illicit surveillance programs buried under counter-terrorism budgets. Land grabs disguised as development initiatives. The documents from AS-279 were just the beginning. What I uncovered… it's enough to dismantle half the cabinet."
Naveen flipped through one file, his face hardening. "Project Sundarban. That's paramilitary deployment disguised as ecological monitoring."
"Exactly. Dozens of operations like it. Legalized corruption, legitimized murder."
Anushree asked, more softly now, "Then why not release it? Why hide?"
Rathnadevi looked at her for a long moment.
"Because if I went public too soon, I'd be silenced. Like Maya. Like the auditors. Like the others. I had to vanish to finish the work. To gather everything. To choose who I could trust."
"And now?" Naveen asked.
She looked between them. "Now… you found me. That means you're either brave—or very foolish. Either way, I'm done hiding."
Anushree met her eyes. "Then let's bring it all down."
And for the first time since the crash, Rathnadevi let herself believe they might actually win.