Step Three

2026 · Gurgaon · 1:14 AM

The plan had forty-seven steps, and Puram loved every one of them.

He had written them by hand in a green notebook, then typed them, then printed them, then written them by hand again, because typing was how you made mistakes. Step one was the laundry van. Step two was the service lift. Step three was the guard on the thirty-first floor, who went to the bathroom at 1:20 every night, for eleven minutes, with his phone.

It was 1:14. Puram sat in the back of the laundry van with four screens and a cold cup of tea. On one screen, the Swarna Dynamics tower rose into the orange smoke of the Gurgaon sky, all glass and money. On another screen, a figure in a black jacket was walking down a corridor on the thirty-first floor.

Walking. Not waiting.

“Kanchi,” Puram said into his headset. “Where are you?”

“Corridor.” Her voice was low and happy. It was the happy that worried him.

“Which corridor?”

“The one with the guard in it.”

Puram put the tea down. “Step three is: you wait in the stairwell until he goes to the bathroom. You have read step three. We read step three together. You said, and I quote, ‘Fine, Puram, step three, I get it.’”

“He’s not going to the bathroom.”

“He goes at 1:20. Every night. I watched him for nine nights.”

“He looks bored, not sleepy. Bored men don’t go to the bathroom. Bored men look for something to do.” On the screen, the figure stopped at the corner. “So I’m giving him something to do.”

“Kanchi. No.”

She walked around the corner.

Puram watched the guard stand up. He watched Kanchi smile at the guard, and say something, and point back down the corridor. He watched the guard frown and look where she was pointing. Then the guard walked away down the corridor, fast, one hand on his radio, and Kanchi walked the other way, slowly, toward the vault door.

“What did you say to him?”

“I said I was from the cleaning company and there was water coming out from under the CEO’s door.”

“There isn’t.”

“There will be. I turned on his sink on the way up.”

Puram closed his eyes. “That’s not in the plan.”

“The plan is a suggestion.”

“The plan,” Puram said, “is forty-seven steps.”

“Forty-four now. I skipped three.” Her voice went quiet. “Door.”

The vault door was steel and glass, with a keypad, a card reader and a small black eye that looked at your face. Puram had spent a month on that eye. He typed, and the door found a face it liked, and clicked.

“In,” said Kanchi.

He switched to her jacket camera. The room was cold and white and very clean. Glass cases stood in rows, each with a light and a card. A jade horse. A page of a book in a language nobody spoke anymore. A gold coin with a king’s face rubbed flat.

“Look at all this,” Kanchi said softly. “He stole all of this.”

“He bought all of this.”

“From people who stole it. That’s worse. That’s stealing with paperwork.” She walked past the cases. “Where’s Lot 9?”

“Back wall. Case twelve. It has its own alarm, so don’t—”

“Puram.”

“What?”

“There’s no case twelve.”

He leaned toward the screen. The back wall had cases one to eleven, then an empty space, then a plain metal shelf. The kind of shelf you’d find in a garage. On the shelf, with nothing around it, no glass, no light, no card, sat a round, flat object the size of a small plate.

“That’s not right,” Puram said.

“It’s our thing, though.” Kanchi walked up to it. “Bronze. Old. Really old. Look at the green on it.” Her camera moved closer. The dial was green-brown with age, but around its edge ran a ring of small notches, and the notches were clean and bright, as if someone polished them every day. “Nobody puts something like this on a shelf.”

“Somebody did.”

“So it’s a trap.”

“Probably.”

“Great,” said Kanchi, and picked it up.

Puram stopped breathing. Nothing happened. No alarm. No lights. The white room stayed white and quiet. On the screen, Kanchi turned the dial over in her gloved hands.

“It’s warm,” she said.

“It’s been sitting under a lamp.”

“There’s no lamp.”

Puram looked. There was no lamp.

“Put it in the bag,” he said. “And come home. By the stairs. Step thirty-one.”

“What’s step thirty-two?”

“Step thirty-two is: don’t talk to anyone.”

“Boring,” said Kanchi, and he heard her smile.

She came out of the service door at 1:31, with the bag on her back and her hair coming loose, and got into the van, and sat down on the floor between his screens as if she had just come back from the store.

“Hi,” she said.

“You turned on a man’s sink.”

“It’s a nice sink. Marble.” She pulled her gloves off with her teeth. “Drive.”

Puram drove. The laundry van went out past the guard hut and the barrier and the palm trees in pots, and onto the empty road, and nobody followed them. He checked the mirror eleven times in the first minute. Nothing.

“Nobody’s following,” Kanchi said.

“That’s what worries me.”

“Everything worries you.”

“Everything should worry you. We just walked out of a billionaire’s vault with something he didn’t lock up.” He turned onto the highway. The city lights went past, yellow in the smoke. “Who puts the most valuable thing in the room on a garage shelf?”

“Someone who wanted it taken.”

Kanchi was quiet for a moment. Then she opened the bag and took the dial out and held it on her knees. In the passing lights, the bright notches around its edge shone one after another, like a string of tiny windows.

“Or,” she said, “someone who wanted us to take it.”

Puram kept his eyes on the road. “Don’t say things like that at two in the morning.”

“It’s one thirty-six.”

He looked at the clock on the dashboard. It said 1:36.

He looked at his phone. It said 1:36.

Ten seconds later, the dashboard clock still said 1:36. So did the phone. So did Kanchi’s cheap plastic watch, the one she had worn on every job for six years, the one she said was lucky.

Puram said nothing. He drove, and watched the minute, and it didn’t change. On Kanchi’s knees, the dial sat warm and still in the dark, and the van was very, very quiet.