The Blood Mystery: Chapter 10
The room was sealed. No electronics. No recording devices. Just five people: Sumedha, Veer, Sunjana, Indra, and Sunjay. The air was heavy, drawn tight with tension and silence. For once, there were no formalities, no ranks, just shared urgency.
Veer leaned forward, fingers steepled. “We need to flush the leak. We feed false information. Something tempting. Sensitive.”
Sumedha nodded slowly. “The safest bait is the one already being hunted.”
Sunjana didn’t flinch. “You want to use me.”
Veer looked at her. There was no room for sugarcoating. “We make it look like you’re being transferred. A top-tier government facility. Maximum lockdown, black-listed. We leak it to only one person.”
“Ravikant Bera.” Indra said. “Senior administrative officer. Internal clearance. Trusted for decades.”
“Too trusted.” Sunjay added grimly. “If someone was going to slip under our radar, it’d be him.”
Sumedha glanced at Sunjana. “This stays between us. Only us. No logs. No digital trails. No shadows.”
Sunjana met her gaze. There was fear, yes. But deeper than that, determination. “Let’s do it.”
Later that evening, Veer knocked on the open frame of Ravikant Bera’s office. The man looked up, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, surrounded by neatly organized papers and protocol documents.
“Veer.” He said warmly. “You look tense.”
“We’re transferring Sunjana.” Veer said quietly, placing a thin file on the table. “Level Seven clearance. Immediate action.”
Ravikant opened the file, expression blank as he read. “This is... sudden.”
“We’ve had too many close calls.” Veer replied. “Central approved an ultra-secure black site. No names, just coordinates. Route is off the records.”
Ravikant glanced up. “And you want me to...”
“Authorize the quiet transport. It can’t go through usual channels. Just shielded, secure passage. That’s all.”
He nodded after a moment. “Understood.”
Three hours later, in the IPPF surveillance hub, the five core members watched a blinking red signal appear on Veer’s screen.
“Unauthorized drone.” Veer said immediately. “Exact coordinates of the fake route.”
Sumedha leaned forward. “That’s our answer.”
Indra’s eyes narrowed. “No way that was coinIPPFence. It confirms what we feared.”
“Ravikant Bera.” Sunjay muttered. “He took the bait.”
Veer didn’t say anything. His expression had hardened.
Sumedha’s voice was like steel. “And now we know exactly where he stands.”
While the revelation stirred unease, another puzzle gnawed at Veer’s mind. The threats hadn’t stopped. Even with Arjun in custody, things kept escalating.
The message under their office door. The drone. The timed server glitches.
Nothing added up.
That evening, Veer walked down the steel-reinforced corridor toward the high-security wing. Two guards at the gate nodded and unlocked the doors. Inside, under 24-hour surveillance, sat the man they believed to be Arjun Dutt.
Veer entered, pulling the chair opposite the cell door.
The man looked up, unshaven but composed. His eyes were sharp—intelligent, calculating.
“Arjun.” Veer said flatly. “We need to talk.”
The prisoner smiled faintly.
“I think you’re mistaken.” he said.
Veer blinked. “Excuse me?”
“My name isn’t Arjun.”
Veer sat back, heart slowing. “Who are you?”
“Abhay Dutt.” the man said calmly. “Arjun’s Twin brother.”
Veer’s blood ran cold. “That’s impossible.”
“No.” Abhay replied. “Just undocumented.”
He leaned forward. “Arjun was never supposed to be caught. I volunteered. Gave him the window he needed. You’ve been watching the wrong man this whole time.”
A barrage of biometric tests confirmed it. Identical DNA. Same blood group. But micro differences in bone density, old injury markers—Veer had no choice but to accept the truth.
He stormed back into the central office.
“We never had Arjun.” He said. “It was his twin.”
Sumedha looked up from her screen. “Excuse me?”
“Abhay Dutt. Twin brother. They staged the capture. Arjun is still out there.”
Sunjay slammed a hand on the table. “He’s been mocking us.”
Indra was already pulling up traffic cam data. “And we walked right into it.”
Sumedha stared at the wall, a muscle in her jaw twitching. “He knew. He knew everything about our system. Because someone fed it to him.”
Veer’s voice dropped. “Ravikant Bera.”
They returned to his office that night. It was empty.
His ID card was still active.
His terminal was still logged in.
But the man himself had vanished.
On his desk, beneath a closed notebook, lay a single slip of paper.
Handwritten. Sharp. Precise.
"Thank you for sheltering my brother. He’s family, after all." "The move gave me exactly what I needed." — A.D.
Back at Sumedha’s apartment, Veer paced restlessly.
Sunjana sat curled in a chair, silent. Indra monitored external sensors. Sumedha sat at her desk, eyes unreadable.
“He planned it all,” Veer said aloud. “The mole. The switch. Abhay. And we never saw it.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Sumedha said. “We saw what we were supposed to see. That’s what makes him dangerous.”
Sunjana looked up slowly. “So what do we do now?”
Sumedha’s answer was quiet. But it was firm.
“We stop playing his game.”
Indra stood. “And start rewriting the rules.”
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