Chapter 5 - The Night Operation
The dial tone hummed against my ear like a buzzing wasp.
Before the phone could even slip from my numb fingers, Eliam snatched it out of my hand, staring at the screen with wide, horrified eyes.
“They tapped our local cell relay,” Eliam whispered, his face completely pale. “They’re watching the house right now.”
Instinct—sharp, defensive, and cold—took over every logical fiber of my training. I wasn't just an actuary anymore; I was a woman whose home and family had just been threatened by corporate thugs.
“Pack a go-bag,” I said, my voice dropping into a razor-sharp command that made Eliam blink in surprise. “Now. Where is Marcus right now?”
“He... he’s at his apartment across town,” Eliam stammered.
“Call him,” I ordered, grabbing my car keys from the console. “Tell him not to go home. Tell him to meet us at the red-brick building in twenty minutes. If those bastards want the encryption keys, we’re going to give them a counter-surveillance surprise they’ll never forget.”
Twenty minutes later, our sedan tore into the empty parking lot of Vance Ventures & Biomedical Research.
The red-brick building stood dark and imposing against the midnight sky, its security lights humming softly. Beside the front entrance, Marcus’s black sedan was already parked sideways, and Marcus himself was jogging toward us as we stepped out of our car, breathless and wide-eyed.
“Maya? Eliam? What the hell is going on?!” Marcus hissed, clutching his laptop bag to his chest. “I got your text—someone threatened you?!”
“They threatened both of us, Marcus,” I said, marching straight up to the glass doors. “And instead of hiding in our apartments like frightened rabbits, we’re going to use their own surveillance against them.”
Marcus stared at me as if I had lost my mind. “Use their surveillance? Maya, these people broke into a lab in Boston!”
“And I’m a senior corporate actuary who audits high-risk commercial security liabilities for a living,” I snapped, pulling a small metal keycard out of my blazer pocket—a spare key Eliam had dropped on the kitchen counter two days ago. “Your biomedical firm has state-of-the-art encrypted servers, doesn't it?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then let’s invite our uninvited guests inside.”
We rushed through the front doors, the security alarm chirping softly as Eliam punched in the master override code. Inside, the minimalist lobby was illuminated only by the faint green glow of exit signs.
Working with frantic, synchronized precision, Marcus raced to the server room to isolate the building’s external IP address, while Eliam and I set up a secure proxy trap on the main boardroom terminal.
If corporate mercenaries wanted our encryption keys, we were going to broadcast a fake digital beacon that would route their connection straight through the federal cybercrime division’s honeypot server in downtown Chicago.
“Almost... there,” Marcus muttered over the intercom from the server room, his fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard. “Routing the proxy... tracing their incoming ping... Maya, they’re pinging our external firewall right now!”
“Execute the trap,” I said firmly, standing behind Eliam as he hit enter on the boardroom terminal.
On the massive wall-mounted display screen, a glowing world map flickered to life. A bright red digital tracer beam shot across the Atlantic, bounced through three offshore server hubs in the Cayman Islands, and suddenly zeroed in on a local suburban van parked three blocks away from the red-brick building.
Got them.
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“Marcus! Call the FBI field office downtown!” I shouted. “Give them the exact GPS coordinates of that van! Tell them corporate extortionists are attempting a physical breach of a biomedical research facility!”
Within four minutes, the wailing sirens of local police cruisers and federal unmarked vehicles shattered the quiet night air outside.
