Hyderabad – June 15, 2025
The crash site perimeter was tightly controlled—layers of fencing, armed security, and government officials moving with rehearsed solemnity. But outside that boundary, past the last line of yellow tape and media vans, stood Naveen—a quiet figure with a battered notebook and tired eyes—and Anushree Rao, posture stiff, sunglasses hiding the sleepless weight in her gaze.
They'd been watching each other for minutes before either spoke.
"You think she faked it?" Naveen asked, voice low but direct.
Anushree didn't flinch. "I think she didn't die in that crash," she replied after a pause. "I don't know what that means yet. But I'm going to find out."
Her tone was measured, professional. But he could tell there was more beneath it—grief, anger, guilt. Maybe all three.
Naveen studied her: the way her shoulders held tension like armor, the precision in her speech, the way she scanned her surroundings as if assessing every variable. She was trained. Dangerous, in the way only people used to power and secrets could be.
She, in turn, noticed his composure—too steady for a civilian, too focused to be chasing tabloid nonsense. There was something unspoken in the way he looked at the site: like he was searching for something, not someone. She didn't ask what.
Reluctantly—wordlessly, at first—they agreed to work together.
They made an odd pair. A foreign intelligence officer and a would-be detective from Chennai. But in the next few days, they moved with surprising synchronicity.
Together, they sifted through surveillance archives from the airport and surrounding roads. They flagged anomalies in the flight's digital manifest—duplicate seat numbers, timestamp mismatches, and at least one boarding gate camera mysteriously offline during Rathnadevi's supposed check-in.
Security logs from the VIP terminal were missing. Not redacted—erased.
Then, a lead.
A local contact of Naveen's—an amateur radio enthusiast in Warangal district—tipped them off. A man in a remote Telangana village had gone to the local constable, claiming he'd seen a woman wandering near the forest edge just hours after the crash. Disoriented. Alone. Dressed in dark clothing. He hadn't recognized her until days later, when her face appeared on every news broadcast in the country.
She looked like Rathnadevi.
Anushree went pale when she read the report. "That's 300 kilometers from the crash site," she whispered. "No one could've walked that far overnight."
"Unless she never boarded that plane," Naveen said quietly.
A silence stretched between them.
They didn't say it aloud, but they both felt it:
The story the world believed was beginning to fall apart.