The Chakravyuha Protocol

When a brilliant cryptanalyst unwittingly triggers a catastrophic regional blackout, she must team up with a lethal, presumed-dead operative to transport stolen physical ledgers across a thousand miles of hostile territory before a corporate cartel can use the manufactured crisis to stage a bloodless coup of the Indian republic.
The Chakravyuha Protocol is a relentless, geopolitical cyber-thriller set against the backdrop of a near-future India.

The story follows Dr Ishana Ray, a brilliant cryptanalyst working off-the-books for the National Technical Research Organisation. While analysing the live-television assassination of a state minister, Ishana uncovers a state-of-the-art steganographic payload hidden in the broadcast's audio feedback. However, solving the puzzle springs a trap engineered by her former mentor, Dr Raghavan Iyer: Ishana's counter-code acts as the cryptographic key to a dormant hardware logic bomb, plunging the entire state of West Bengal, and ninety million people, into absolute darkness.
The blackout is a manufactured crisis orchestrated by Devendra Vyas, the ruthless billionaire head of the Saptarishi cartel. By plunging the east into chaos, Vyas intends to terrify the federal government in New Delhi into declaring a national emergency and passing the Sovereign Data Act, a piece of legislation that will effectively privatise the digital sovereignty and democratic algorithms of a billion citizens.
Hunted by Vyas's private military, Ishana is rescued by Kabir Sen, a legendary deep-cover operative known as "Spectre," who survived a previous assassination attempt by the cartel. Together, the cryptanalyst and the operative embark on a gruelling, thousand-mile journey. They must breach the cartel's subterranean doomsday vault in the Sahyadri mountains to steal the physical hardware ledgers, the only proof of the conspiracy.