The city lights of Jodhpur seemed dimmer as Neel Verma drove back to his office. The victory at Jaswant Thada was clean, the intellectual puzzle solved to perfection, but it felt distant, like a memory from another life. The satisfaction was a thin veil over the disquiet that had been growing in him since the anonymous note had appeared. One case was a game. This was something else entirely.
Back in the quiet solitude of his office, the air thick with the scent of old paper and cloves, Neel walked to his desk. It was 10:07 PM. The city outside was alive with the sounds of a Saturday night, but up here, it was silent. He ignored the blinking light on his phone—no doubt a call from a grateful, or perhaps confused, Pandit Mahesh.
Instead, his eyes landed on the single piece of yellowed paper he had left lying in the center of his desk.
It was from his past, a ghost in physical form. The watermark of the Central Bureau of Investigation was faint but unmistakable. On it were the two things that had consumed his thoughts: a set of GPS coordinates and a hand-drawn symbol.
The symbol was a serpent eating its own tail—the Ouroboros—but with a unique, stylized flaw: a single drop of blood falling from the serpent's eye. It was the signature of the killer in the case that had ended his career. The 'Jigsaw Killer,' the media had called him, a man who had left behind a trail of bodies and cryptic clues that had baffled the best minds in the country. A man Neel had been convinced was a high-ranking official, a theory for which he was ridiculed and ultimately fired.
The coordinates pointed to a place he knew: the ruins of the abandoned Chimanpura Fort, a desolate outpost twenty kilometers into the desert scrubland east of Jodhpur. A place of bandits and legends, long since left to crumble under the harsh Rajasthani sun.
A meeting with a ghost required preparation. Neel walked to the back of his office, to a large, heavy bookshelf filled with legal texts. He pushed against its side, and with a soft groan, the entire shelf swung inward, revealing a hidden alcove. The air inside was cool and smelled of steel and dust.
This was the part of his life he kept buried. Inside the alcove was a locked steel trunk. He opened it. It did not contain memorabilia. It contained the tools of his former trade: a set of high-end surveillance equipment, files stamped with CLASSIFIED, and, at the bottom, wrapped in oilcloth, a 9mm Browning Hi-Power pistol. His old service weapon. He checked the magazine, his movements precise and economical, and tucked the pistol into a holster at the small of his back, concealing it beneath his coat.
He grabbed a powerful, compact flashlight from the trunk before swinging the bookshelf shut. The click of the lock echoed in the quiet room, a sound of finality. He was no longer Neel Verma, the private investigator who solved art thefts. He was stepping back into the skin of Neel Verma, the CBI agent who hunted monsters.
He picked up the note from his desk, his gaze lingering on the bloody-eyed serpent. This wasn't just a case. It was a summons. And it was a challenge he had been waiting a decade to answer.
Without a second look at the office that had been his sanctuary for years, he walked out and down the stairs. The engine of his Royal Enfield roared to life, a growl in the night. He turned his motorcycle away from the city's comforting glow and headed east, into the vast, waiting darkness of the desert. The fort, and the ghost that haunted it, were waiting.