‘I know, we traded the pendrive in return for the papers. Nalin had bought it off the sacked Snuggles CEO before he was bumped off. In fact, if Michael decides to sing, we have enough to embarrass him. But that’s not the problem, James.’
‘What is it that is bothering you, then?’
‘Too much of negativity around the whole issue, James. It’s suddenly become difficult to deal with it. We should have been careful with the team. In life, it’s not bad to be ambitious. It’s criminal to have a team which always dreams of personal glory. Desperate for success. When their aspirations are not in sync with what we need from them, it leads to trouble. Richard was the guy who should not have been on your team in the first place. He was a guy ready to sell his soul for his tenure. You failed the first lesson of leadership. You failed to select a team which would have helped you deliver.’
‘What do you mean, Lucier? Everything we did had your sanction.’
‘Well, that’s the way it was and that’s the way it will be … unfortunately.’
‘Pardon me?’
At that very instant there was a knock on the door. ‘Someone at the door. Let me call you back.’
‘Well, I am holding. We need to complete what we started, James. You attend to the door first.’
Deahl walked up to the door and opened it. ‘How may I help you?’
‘May we come in and speak?’ There were two men in suits. ‘We are from the special investigation team.’
‘What’s it about? And may I see your badges, please?’
Late at night when a team of officers from the homicide department of Boston Police landed up at the residence of James Deahl to take him into custody, they found his body sprawled on the living room floor. Blood from his temple had oozed on to the carpet and dried up. He seemed to have shot himself—or perhaps been shot—hours ago.
77
The next few years
Meier remained the provost. Antonio convinced him to continue till the end of his term and called off the selection process. It was a blessing that MIT had not officially announced the appointment of Cardoza as the new provost.
The basic toxicology screening for opiates, cocaine and carbon monoxide came back negative for Cirisha. It had been initially declared that she had died of a cardiac arrest and subsequent seizure on account of excessive running in an agitated state. It had been compounded by her extremely low blood sugar at the time of her death. She had been on medication for chronic diabetes, a hereditary problem, and had not eaten anything in the twelve hours preceding her death. In the circumstances, the cardiac arrest had proved fatal.
However, given the chronology of events leading to her death, Windle had pushed the coroner to agree to a more expansive investigation. A detailed autopsy revealed the possibility of death due to arterial embolism: gas bubbles in the bloodstream, leading to cardiac arrest or stroke. Strangely, in the first autopsy, once cardiac arrest had been established as the reason for the death, a few obvious signs had been missed. Minor indentations—divots just above her left breast, where doctors normally place their stethoscopes to check the heartbeat—had been overlooked. The divots indicated that Cirisha had been injected with something straight into her heart which caused it to stop beating. When the results of the pre-autopsy computed tomography were seen in conjunction with the results of the aspirometer analysis of the air originating from the heart ventricles, it was concluded that Cirisha had died as a result of an injection of 20–30 ml of air directly into the right ventricle of her heart. A clear case of homicide.
How and when the air was injected remained a mystery till the day Cardoza confessed. Getting Cardoza to confess was not easy. As expected, he initially denied everything. However, when confronted with the facts, the recording of the conversation with Deahl, the deposition of the shop owner in Riverdale identifying him as having accompanied Richard and taken delivery of the gun, a CCTV grab of Richard and him outside the gun trade fair in Riverdale, the access control details of the Academic Block and, most importantly, the forensic report of the crime scene, he didn’t have much to say. The courts convicted him for the ghastly murders of Richard Avendon, Henry Liddell, Sandy Gustavo and Frederick Lobo, and awarded him a thirty-five-year sentence. He knew that he wouldn’t survive long enough to outlive his sentence and was destined to spend the rest of his life in prison. Consequently, he cracked and confessed. His life now is truly Staring Down the Barrel.
Cardoza admitted in his confession before the jury that the day Cirisha was killed, she had called him and blasted him over the phone. An angry and worried Cardoza reached the Academic Block, only to find Cirisha away from her desk. When she returned from the duPont Center—the CCTV feeds confirmed that she had been there—Cirisha had an ugly showdown with him. The possibility of Richard having been exploited by Cardoza and the latter not standing up for the values she thought were integral to life in academia, was too much for her to bear. She even suspected that Cardoza’s relationship with Richard could have been one of the reasons for his death. After the confrontation, she left him and headed to the Boston Public Garden in an extremely agitated state of mind. She had perhaps felt that her morning jog would help her get a hold on herself.
Cardoza, who had tried to calm her down initially, followed her there. He tried his best to convince Cirisha, who would have none of it. She threatened to expose Cardoza and tell the world about his dalliance with Richard. Had she carried out her threat, it would have sounded the death knell for Cardoza’s career, family and reputation. At the fag end of his academic career, where reputation mattered the most, he could not afford to risk it all. After walking with her around the park for twenty-odd minutes, trying to talk her out of her resolve, Cardoza got lucky. Cirisha, who had had a stressful night and an even worse morning, collapsed. Medics attributed it to low blood sugar. She hadn’t had anything to eat the night before. She had left early on the morning of the 5th, probably in the hope of coming back in time for breakfast, which she couldn’t.
When he saw her collapse, Cardoza panicked, but he sensed an opportunity almost immediately. An evil thought crossed his mind. He recollected Erica’s research on suicides. It had listed air embolism as one of the common means of committing suicide. He ran to his car and pulled out the syringes and large needles that he had got for Champ, his ailing Dobermann. He rushed back to where Cirisha lay and, with a three-and-a-half-inch needle, he pumped in air directly into her chest. The three and a half inches were enough to penetrate her skin and muscle cover, and reach deep into her right ventricle. He repeated the procedure thrice, just to make sure he had pushed in enough air to make it fatal. He waited for ten minutes. By that time the gas bubbles had blocked the pulmonary valve. It prevented low-oxygen blood from moving into the lungs through the pulmonary artery to replenish their oxygen levels before flowing into the left ventricle and from there to the rest of the body. The cardiac arrest that resulted was so massive that Cirisha had no hope of survival.
After making sure that Cirisha was dead, he quietly walked away from the scene, only to resurface at her house in the next couple of hours to offer his condolences to an unsuspecting Aditya.
Deahl’s death and Staring Down the Barrel became highly discussed issues across America. Many felt that for a man who strongly advocated the use of guns and misused his position to lend credibility to a false cause, the manner in which he met his end was nothing but natural justice. The NRA was quick to dissociate itself from the research and stated that linking them to the fabricated data was politically motivated. It denied that its representative had ever met Michael Cardoza or James Deahl and lay low for a while till things cooled down. Lucier decided to visit his ancestral home and took off on a long vacation to a quaint French village in Aixen-Provence. The FBI could not find a shred of evidence linking anyone remotely close to him to the killing of Deahl.
The Bancroft Prize to Staring Down the Barrel was rescinded. In the general interest of the nation, the publishers withdrew unsold
copies of the book from the market and pulped them.
Windle confessed to a guilt-ridden Aditya one day that without him, they would never have been able to solve one of the most complex cases in Massachusetts. It didn’t matter much to Aditya: the pain of living with the knowledge that his wife’s last impression of him was that of an unscrupulous and morally bankrupt banker was still gnawing at him. The only way he could make it up to Cirisha was to give up his ill-gotten wealth and live life the way she would have wanted him to. He gave himself up to law enforcers. For having cooperated with them, he was let off with a lesser sentence of four years in jail, almost all of it on account of laundering money from Mexico into the United States of America. Over time, Aditya became a federal informer. Narayanan, who had by then recovered, was acquitted on the basis of Aditya’s confession.
Before giving himself up, Aditya had transferred back to Coimbatore the money that Narayanan owed to investors in his emu farms. Once the courts cleared him, Narayanan returned to India and paid back every rupee. Thankfully, the money was sufficient to pay back the invested amounts along with a reasonable interest. The authorities in India, however, booked Narayanan and he is being tried for money laundering offences in Coimbatore.
The money ripped from Snuggles Inc.—the millions Shivinder had transferred into his account with GB2, Geneva—was returned to Snuggles Inc. to compensate for the losses incurred in their India business on account of Shivinder’s and Aditya’s wayward ways. In return, Snuggles dropped the case against Jigar Shah. As a goodwill gesture, they even offered to replace, free of cost, the shoes of suspect quality that customers had bought from the stores that Shivinder had fraudulently opened.
Nalin Sud, the behind-the-scenes operator and suave investment banker—the one who set up Aditya’s meeting with Cambridge Partners, the one who struck a deal with Shivinder and collected the pendrive and photocopies from him before he was eliminated—remained free for some time. The world at large was oblivious to his involvement with the NRA, Cambridge Partners, Aditya or the gun movement.
However, everything changed the day Aditya confessed to the authorities in the US about the modus operandi in the Step Up Shoes fraud. He implicated Nalin as the mastermind of the scam and also led them to uncover his unexplained dealings with the NRA and Cambridge Partners. Wasn’t he the one who had put Aditya in touch with Cambridge Partners in the first place?
In a face-saving measure, GB2 launched an internal investigation into Nalin’s business dealings. That’s when the skeletons came tumbling out of the closet. GB2 Private Bank had invested heavily through a complex, structured investment paper in gun-manufacturing units at the behest of and as a front for Cambridge Partners, many of those transactions not passing the muster as fair and legal deals.
Lucier had not lied when he had mentioned to Aditya that they had a 22 per cent investment in gun-manufacturing units. When Windle’s team had investigated, they couldn’t establish it because it was all on the books of GB2, with Chinese walls between GB2 and Cambridge Partners preventing anyone from linking the two. However, when the economic offences team from the FBI and the bank’s internal control team reconnoitred in detail, it was just a matter of time before these transactions showed up.
Today Nalin is facing serious charges of forgery, fraud and embezzlement. When convicted, which he is sure to be, he stares at the possibility of a compounded jail term of over forty-two years.
Aditya more than paid for his sins. He had lost his wife. His banking career was over. The trauma he went through in 2008 was unparalleled. However, when he walked out of jail in end-2012, he was a reformed man. Windle, who by then had moved on to an influential position in the economic offences team in New York, offered him a job there. It was not something that would tickle the senses of a hotshot investment banker, but Aditya had moved on. Not wanting to return to the world of investment banking which had taken away everything that he loved, he dedicated his life to the prevention of economic crime. How long his resolve will last is difficult to say, but as of now, he is doing a great job.
The Democrats came to power in 2008 and again in 2012. But they did nothing to stem the easy availability of guns. Gun control still remains one of the most passionately debated subjects in modern-day America, with the Second Amendment probably being the most discussed topic. But that’s how it stays—a perennial discussion.
6th June 2013: A gunman armed with an assault rifle kills six people on the streets of Santa Monica, before being gunned down by the police in a college library. The incident reignites the debate on gun rights vs gun control. Nothing has changed since the time Lucier met Cardoza for the research on gun crime in 2006. The game continues, only the players have changed.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Penguin Books India 2013
Copyright © Ravi Subramanian 2013
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously; they are not accurate portrayals of real persons, places or events. Any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-143-42138-2
This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-9-351-18298-6
Table of Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
1. 21st April 1999
2. 5th June 2008, 9.25 a.m.
3. Early March 2008
4. Summer of 2000
5. June 2004
6. November 2004
7. February 2005
8. February 2005
9. May 2005
10. End-May 2005
11. May 2005
12. May 2005
13. July 2005
14. July 2005
15. August 2005
16. October 2005
17. March 2006
18. April 2006
19. Mid-2006
20. Mid-2006
21. January 2007
22. April–June 2007
23. May–June 2007
24. July–September 2007
25. Early October 2007
26. 3rd October 2007
27. Mid-October 2007
28. Mid-October 2007
29. November 2007
30. December 2007
31. End-February 2008
32. March 2008
33. March–April 2008
34
. April 2008
35. First quarter of 2008
36. April 2008
37. April 2008
38. March–May 2008
39. May 2008
40. May 2008
41. 26th May 2008
42. 26th May 2008
43. 27th May 2008, morning
44. 27th May, night
45. 28th May 2008
46. 29th May
47. 30th May
48. 31st May 2008
49. 2nd June 2008
50. 3rd June 2008, morning
51. 3rd June 2008, evening
52. 3rd June 2008, night
53. 4th June 2008
54. 4th June 2008
55. 5th June 2008, 10.45 a.m.
56. 7th June 2008, morning
57. 7th June 2008, evening
58. 8th June 2008
59. 9th June 2008
60. 9th June 2008
61. 9th June 2008
62. 10th June 2008
63. 11th June 2008
64. 11th June 2008
65. 11th June 2008
66. 11th June 2008
67. 11th June 2008
68. 11th June 2008, night
69. 12th June 2008
70. 12th June 2008
71. 12th June 2008
72. 12th June 2008
73. 12th June 2008, same time
74. 12th June 2008
75. 12th June 2008
76. 12th June 2008, evening
77. The next few years
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