Menon's voice was a rasp now from the night's work, but he did not slow. He had pried loose names, routes, shell companies — the skeleton of an empire. Yet even as Yethi spilled the docks and the warehouses, there was a gap in the map Menon couldn't ignore.
"They can't bring in military-grade stuff through normal channels," Yethi croaked, throat raw. "Not without tripping alarms, not with the customs checks—those are compromised, sure, but not that compromised. So they stopped using the usual smugglers. They started using… strangers. People who come from the sea like shadows."
Menon leaned forward. The bulb above hissed. Chandra's pen stuttered across the page.
"Who are these strangers?" Menon asked.
Yethi's eyes slid to the far wall, as if he could see through concrete to the black water beyond the harbor. For a moment he seemed to gather himself, digging for the single bit of truth that had been bought with every inch of flesh Menon had taken.
"There's a man," he whispered. "A single name most men don't speak without looking over their shoulder. DEVA." He spat the name like a curse. "Not one of their gang boys. Not Muthuvel's lieutenants. He's older, from the coast. They call him a diver, a captain, a ghost. He brings the weapons in — not in containers or false manifests, but in the dark between waves. Small crews, stripped-down dhows, fishing boats that look like nothing but nets. They cut the wiring on scanners by using the sea itself. Deva's people dive — take crates from the hull, tie them to improvised floaters, and the dhows pick them up at pre-arranged buoys. The bombs—naval explosives, detonator cores—come in bits, sealed inside barrels and weighted to the seabed until Deva's men come for them. No manifest. No paper trail. Just salt and men who do not speak."
Menon breathed the name out and tasted it. DEVA. The syllable landed heavy in the room. It fit the missing piece — the strange, maritime method of moving things that ordinary smugglers could not.
"Where is he based?" Menon demanded.
"Not in one harbour," Yethi said. "He's mobile—coastal villages, coves outside Chennai, sometimes Kattupalli at night, sometimes off the coast near Tuticorin. Maduraii Raj pays him in gold when the run is clean. No one sees the gold move; it's melted into cheap jewelry, then recast and routed back through Imtiaz's Gulf channels. Deva answers to Maduraii Raj only because Raj pays more than anyone else. He does his work for a price—and a certain kind of silence."
Menon's mind shifted like a predator assessing a flank. Weapons first, gold second—that was the pattern Yethi had described all night. Heavy ordnance and detonators and then the quiet laundering of riches. The combination explained why previous attempts had failed: no paper trail at sea, no manifest to seize, no container to inspect.
"Names. Buoy coordinates. Which dhows," Menon pressed. His tone carried the same thin thread of menace he had used all night.
Yethi's hands trembled so hard the straps creaked. Between coughs and gasps he named a captain—Raju—from a village near Tuticorin who'd been used twice, a buoy marked by a rusted red can half-buried at the old fisherman's rock, and a dhows' signal — a single lantern in the shape of a crooked triangle. He gave a time window: new moon nights, between midnight and the witching hour, when scanners and patrols were lax. He gave the code word used by Deva's men: "Maram". He even muttered a whisper about a rendezvous point off Kattupalli's west jetty where low tide would reveal the line of the cargo.
Menon let the details fall into the file Chandra kept. He did not celebrate. He had learned the city's rot, not cured it. But this — DEVA — was more than a name. It was a method, and methods could be anticipated.
"You said Raj pays in gold," Menon murmured, tapping the list. "How much are we talking? Enough that they can buy judges and Directors?"
Yethi's face was a mask of mud and tears. "Shipments of gold—small, dense bars, unmarked—come in on the same boats sometimes, hidden inside kerosene drums. The last clean run was worth crores. Raj laundered it through a refinery in Maduraii, jewelry houses that make wedding sets for whole districts. That's how he buys silence. Weapons to fund his force, bombs to keep the city scared, and gold to buy the law."
Menon held the word crores a moment, letting the arithmetic of corruption line his next moves. Guns and bombs were immediate threats; gold was the lubricant that kept the wheels turning. Cut off either and the machine stuttered. Cut both and you might starve the beast.
He sat back and let the bulb swing a little slower. His voice was near-somnolent, a lullaby for the damned. "Deva. Kattupalli. Raju. 'Maram'. New moon runs. Buoy at the Fisherman's Rock. Unit 14 at Dharavi. Kamal the bomb-maker. Imtiaz in the Gulf. Ledger in Maduraii."
Chandra read it aloud, each name a pebble dropped into a still pond. The ripples could reach Maduraii; they could reach the Prime Minister's office, too—if Menon chose to touch the right insect with the wrong stick. He knew what would happen when this list started moving: phone calls would be intercepted, bribes offered, and threats might come with the polish of a handshake. He also knew that to act slowly was to act cowardly.
He looked down at Yethi, a man who no longer had the muscle to threaten. "Deva," Menon said softly, tasting the name again. "If he's the tide, we'll have to learn how to outswim him."
Yethi's eyes closed. Whether from pain or the exhaustion of betrayal, Menon could not tell. For a moment, the man's confession felt final, as if he had poured the last of his sins into the room and had nothing left. But Menon had the ledger now — the method of smuggling, the midnight ways, the single maritime name that tied the weapons to Maduraii Raj. That was enough.
Outside, the city began to wake, unaware that a new hunt had a map. Menon dialed numbers with the same calm he'd used to dismantle Yethi's defences. He ordered surveillance teams to Kattupalli and Tuticorin, told plainclothes to sweep coastal hamlets, and instructed a trusted few to watch Unit 14 in Dharavi. He requested a covert naval asset be put on alert for the next new moon. His hand hovered over one last line: an instruction to send a photo of Deva's last seen vessel to the CID liaison in Chennai.
When Chandra hesitated over the last request, Menon's voice was flat as iron. "Do it, or you'll be the one I have to convince."
Chandra's fingers moved. He knew what Menon was doing wasn't pretty. He also knew there was no other map on the table.
Menon ended the call and stared at the single name on the page: DEVA. In it was a sea of questions and the faint, ugly possibility of answers. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl up, as if it might become a signal to the men who moved between tides.
The chase had a new axis now—land and sea—and Menon welcomed the brutality of its logic. DEVA was a thread. Follow it and you might reach Maduraii Raj's safehouse, his ledger, the gold. Or you might find men waiting in dark coves, guided by lanterns shaped like crooked triangles, ready to sink any ship that asked too many questions.
Menon ground the cigarette out and looked at Yethi one last time. The gangster was spent, eyes half-lidded, the map of his life now inked across Chandra's paper. Menon felt something like hunger—methodical, patient—and the city's hum outside the interrogation room sounded like the beat of a monstrous heart.
"Secure him," Menon said. "We move tonight. And find me Deva."