Over the past weeks she’d slowly used that access for her own purposes, to investigate the people she dealt with, the people the children dealt with: their tutors, the domestic staff, the programmers on Kade’s team, Lakshmi Dabir, all the rest. And she’d used it to investigate their home – this campus. This strange oasis of calm in the frenzied digital boomtown chaos of Bangalore.

It wasn’t so hard. She’d trained in data archeology. That was both her most common cover as an ERD operative and a real skill she used in unraveling the webs of organizations misusing emerging technologies. She applied it here.

She ran into walls, of course. There were files she simply didn’t have access to. Records that demanded credentials she didn’t have, authorizations she hadn’t been given. Exactly where she met those barriers, and what she could read prior to them, was informative. It defined a space of possibilities, scoped out a landscape of information containment.

What struck her more was what she couldn’t find.

Varun Verma. He existed. There was a record for him. It was almost plausible. A bio. A few scientific publications. A classified-but-accessible-to-her summary of his work in quantum computing.

But it wasn’t enough. She’d been an agent in the ERD. She knew what a top scientist looked like. This wasn’t it. This had been heavily redacted. With no indication that there was another file that codeword access or greater privileges would reveal.

And the building he worked in? The Advanced Computational Sciences building?

It was a shell. A front. Three floors. Half a dozen projects. Twenty staff.

Bullshit. She’d taken lunch out under the trees. She’d watched five times that many people go in and out of that building. She’d walked casually by, making sure to have a destination that put her on a course that required a close pass. She’d seen the ten centimeter thick armored glass that made up the façade. Glass too thick to shoot through. A pretty building. Nearly impenetrable.

She kept her eyes open, got a glance at a power distribution schematic for the campus during a routine fire drill. The power lines drawn to that building were thicker than those to all the rest of the buildings here combined. Oh, something was going on there. Something important.

She searched back in time, scraping away layers of digital sediment for the electronic spoor that all projects unwittingly leave. She dug into old DRDO records, into public records filed with the City of Bangalore, construction permits, requisitions. Further, into publicly available satellite imagery from the years of the campus’s construction.

What was that in the high-res images from space? She zoomed in, zoomed again. Heavy excavation equipment? Deep bore tunnelers? The kind you’d use to dig a deep vertical shaft?