Patel’s mutilated body was wheeled into the morgue along with another gurney. Patel’s body was transferred to a surgical table, waiting to be dissected like a laboratory rat. The autopsy technician placed a block of wood under the corpse’s shoulders, making it look as though it was sitting. He then made an incision from the top of one ear to the top of the other and pulled the skin from the top and middle of the head down over the face. Patel’s face was now grotesquely inside out. The technician used the Stryker saw to cut the skull and expose the brain for tissue sampling and weighing.
In the meantime, the second body was uncovered and placed on the nearby surgical table. The autopsy technician took a quick look. He knew who it was. He had received a call from Ibrahim about him. Whenever Ibrahim needed to eliminate someone without having the headache of body disposal, he would send the case to him.
“I don’t have time for this one right now,” he said, putting on a casual face. “Put him in the refrigerator and I’ll deal with him later.”
The assistants wheeled Santosh Wagh into the refrigeration chamber, opened one of the refrigeration drawers, placed him inside it, and slammed the drawer shut.
Chapter 63
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THEY WERE IN the Private Delhi conference room.
“Where is he?” asked Jack.
Nisha tried Santosh’s cell phone once again. A message indicated that the phone was either switched off or outside the coverage area.
“What did he go out for?” asked Jack.
“He had several meetings lined up,” replied Nisha. “One was with Thakkar, the CEO of ResQ. He also had a meeting with someone called Iqbal Ibrahim near Jama Masjid.”
“I have some bad news,” said Neel.
“What?” asked Nisha.
“I tried to find the IP address of the person calling himself Dr. O. S. Rangoon,” said Neel.
“Wouldn’t he have been using a proxy server?” asked Nisha.
“Exactly,” replied Neel. “He was using a proxy server to hide his IP address from the administrators of the systems that he was posting on. But all individuals who hide behind proxy servers always leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs. I tried following the breadcrumbs.”
“And?” asked Jack.
“Dr. O. S. Rangoon used a single proxy server to mask himself. I figured that if I could access the proxy server logs, I would be able to find his connection requests to the target server.”
“Go on,” said Nisha.
“The proxy server is located in Russia. Usually such companies would demand a court order to reveal their logs but the idiots had left their own server exposed and I was able to access their logs.”
“Excellent,” said Jack. “You have the source IP?”
Neel nodded. “It belongs to Iqbal Ibrahim, the man Santosh went to meet. Dr. O. S. Rangoon and Ibrahim are one and the same.”
“But the phone number Santosh asked us to trace—which turned out to be that of Ibrahim—was not the same as the number listed on the website by Dr. O. S. Rangoon,” argued Nisha.
“He’s obviously using two phone numbers,” said Neel.
“Is Santosh’s RFID chip working?” asked Jack. “I’m authorizing you to track it.”
All employees of the Private organization across the world were required to be fitted with a small locator chip embedded under the skin of the upper back. It enabled the Private team to locate them during emergencies. In order to prevent misuse, only Jack Morgan had the power to authorize tracking.
Neel logged into a laptop that generated an email to Jack. Jack clicked on the authorization link and entered his password.
“Can’t locate it,” said Neel after a minute. “He could be in a basement or a vault, preventing the signals from being picked up.”
“He took his spy glasses with him, Neel,” said Nisha. “Don’t those glasses have GSM? Can you track the signal?”
“No luck,” replied Neel after a minute. “He’s definitely in an area without signal.”