Chapter 9 - Decryption
Once we were back in the hotel room and Leo was safely occupied with a Spanish cartoon on the television, I locked the heavy wooden door, pulled the desk lamp closer, and emptied the contents of the manila envelope onto the desk.
There were three items inside:
1. A printed satellite telemetry log of our flight path from New York to Madrid, with a series of red coordinates marked miles off our civilian corridor.
2. A high-resolution photograph of a scorched circuit board component—bearing a specific defense-contractor serial number belonging to Pinebridge Systems' competitor, Vanguard Tech's dark-ops hardware division.
3. A handwritten note on heavy cardstock:
> “Your former employers aren’t looking for a pilot, Major. They’re looking for the architect who designed the encryption algorithms your company currently sells. Someone tried to test your reflexes over the Atlantic. They wanted to see if Spectre still flies.”
My breath hitched.
The pieces clicked together with terrifying clarity. The avionics failure wasn't an accident. It was an assassination attempt disguised as a mechanical glitch, orchestrated by corporate rivals who wanted to see if I would crack under pressure—or worse, eliminate a civilian airliner to target the former military pilot sitting in seat 8A.
They didn't just want to ruin my company. They wanted to measure my operational capacity.
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And I had walked right into their trap, standing up in the cabin, raising my hand, and proving to the world that Spectre was still very much alive and operating at full clock speed.
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