Chapter 10 - Turning the Tables
I sat in the dark hotel room for a long time, watching the amber glow of my laptop screen illuminate the quiet walls.
Fear was a wasted emotion. Panic clouded judgment. In tactical aviation, when an enemy locks onto your tail, you don’t curl up and wait to be hit. You break hard into the turn, reverse your vector, and put yourself on their six.
I opened my laptop, bypassed our standard corporate firewall, and routed a secure, encrypted terminal connection directly to my headquarters in Austin.
Marcus picked up almost instantly on the secure audio channel.
“Boss?” Marcus’s voice sounded tense through the speaker. “It’s 3:00 AM in Texas. Is everything okay in Madrid?”
“Everything is fine, Marcus,” I said, my voice as steady and cold as steel. “Listen to me very carefully. I want you to pull all diagnostic logs from the enterprise hardware shipments we sent to Vanguard Tech last month.”
“Vanguard? Why? They’re just minority stakeholders now,” Marcus asked, confused.
“They aren't stakeholders, Marcus. They’re targets,” I replied, my fingers flying across the keyboard, executing a remote diagnostic backdoor into their primary server array. “They wanted to test my reflexes in the air. Now, let’s see how their core systems handle a full-system reboot from the ground.”
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A wicked, brilliant smile touched the corners of my mouth.
The game they started over the Atlantic was about to end. And I was going to rewrite the code.
