Page 2 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

I check the time. 03:00 local.

The Consortium’s accountants in Cyprus are waking up. They’re pouring their coffee. They’re logging in.

In thirty seconds, someone spills that coffee.

Alert. Intrusion Detected.

A red window pops up on my secondary screen.

My jaw tightens.

It isn’t the system admin. The admin is lazy; he uses a standard brute-force detection script I bypassed three days ago.

This is a probe. Sharp. Fast. Surgical.

I pull a diagnostic on the secondary screen and run the intrusion signature against the known pattern libraries.

Law enforcement standard suite: no.

Commercial penetration software: no.

Military-grade architecture: closer, but the movement is wrong. Military code advances in formation. This is a single operator, improvising in real time.

I know what improvisation looks like because I do it myself.

The probe hits my honeypot layer—a convincing false directory structure I built for exactly this scenario—and passes through it as if it wasn’t there.

Not broken through. Through, around, as though the honeypot was a thin coat of paint on a surface the probe already had a prior sketch of.

My honeypots are good. I spent a month on them.

The cold moving through my chest is the recognition of a problem I haven’t seen before, which is rarer than fear and considerably more dangerous.

He’s not using a toolkit. He built one. Don’t know why I think he’s a “he,” but female coders, like me, are rare, especially in the darker corners of the web.

That takes resources, or it takes a very particular kind of mind—the kind that looks at an established system and sees the assumptions it runs on.

I know that mind.

I have it.

I’ve never run into it pointing the other direction before. Meaning, pointing at me.

I lean forward, putting the coffee down. My fingers hover over the mechanical keyboard.

“Who are you?”

The intrusion signature is aggressive—tearing through my outer decoy layers like a knife through wet paper. It’s a hunter.

Someone was tracking the money. Now, they’re tracking me.

I type a counter-command. Misdirection.exe.

I throw up a mirror server, a digital hall of mirrors designed to send the tracer ping-ponging between a server in North Korea and a toaster in Idaho.

The intruder ignores it.

He—the arrogant, loud signature—sidesteps the trap, and goes straight for the kernel. He’s trying to override my lockdown. He wants the keys to the vault.