Chapter 7
Then the screen cleared, and a single line of green text began to scroll across the center of the display.
The vault is breached.
My hand stayed on the edge of the desk, frozen as the cursor blinked at the end of the sentence.
The command structure on the screen used a proprietary nesting technique that I had never shared with anyone outside my own development team.
I opened the active routing directory and ran a trace on the command’s origin point, watching the progress bar fill slowly in the blue light.
The data was not being sent to an external server in Berlin or Virginia.
The destination IP address was registered to a secure node within our own building, just two doors down from my office.
The security threat was originating from inside my own network.
Rachel Mercer sat behind her mahogany desk, her fingers pressing into her temples as she stared at the printed sheets of the Berlin transaction log. The traffic at nine in the morning on Constitution Avenue hummed through the double-pane glass of her brick office, a steady, low vibration that matched the headache starting behind my own eyes. On the table between us sat two paper cups of cold black coffee, untouched and filmed with a thin skin.
“The receiving account is registered in Munich,” Rachel said, sliding a highlighted page toward me. “It belongs to a private security entity called Vektor Group.”
I leaned forward, adjusting my glasses to focus on the alphanumeric routing strings. The transfer of sixty-four thousand dollars had been cleared using my own digital signature, a string of forty-eight characters I knew by heart. It was a perfect match for the cryptographic sequence I had designed for the agency three years ago.
“I have never heard of Vektor Group,” I said.
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“You wouldn’t have,” Rachel said, her voice dropping into a rapid, legalistic rhythm. “They operate under a series of offshore holding structures. But their primary contract is for logistics and tactical support in eastern Turkey.”
She tapped her finger on the Munich registration number, which was printed in small, purple ink at the bottom of the page. The paper was crisp, high-grade secure document paper that rustled as she moved it.
