Page 12 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

A sensation runs down the back of my neck. Different from the cold of the gun.

The vine is a thing I built at twelve years old on a borrowed computer in a public library in Duluth, a small piece of code that I kept because I liked it, and then kept attaching to sessions because it was mine.

He knows my name.

The sensation in my chest lacks a name. Fear is cold. This is hot.

I holster the Glock.

The Consortium doesn’t introduce itself. Doesn’t aim and then flip the weapon around. The Consortium sends men who go straight for the kill. None of them have ever looked like they were enjoying the job.

He waits.

“Have you heard of me?” That same cocky grin spreads across his face.

“I’ve heard of your work.” I keep my eyes forward. “You cut the Macau breach team off from their network during the Kincaid extraction. Six hours before they understood it wasn’t a systems failure.”

“My team did that.” The corner of his mouth moves. “I just designed the failure.”

I push the start button. The engine turns over. “You had the counter built before I deployed.”

“Six days before.”

“The Cayman server.”

“Fourteen bytes in the session log.”

Fourteen bytes. I ran the verification sequence on that server twice. “That breach was clean.”

“Close.” No gloating in it. Just a reading. “Fourteen bytes. It was enough.”

Fourteen bytes. He built a counter to my Kudzu code from that, and waited six days while I ran three operations thinking I was invisible.

Fourteen bytes isn’t a random catch. You only find a fragment that small if you already know exactly what to look for. The Cayman server wasn’t his starting point. He had my outline before he ever pulled those logs.

He tracked me before that breach. Long before.

“How long?”

“Eleven weeks.”

That sits there for a moment.

Eleven weeks of server rooms, hotel corridors, and dead-drop timings worked out to the minute.

Eleven weeks of moving like I was clean because I was certain I was.

You were always knocking. He doesn’t say it.

He doesn’t have to.

Eleven weeks of him, in some server room somewhere, watching the residue of my work.

Eleven weeks of him uncovering something about me that I’ve never told anyone.

“What do you know?”

“Oculus Holdings.” He delivers the words like map coordinates. “Apex Global. Meridian Logistics.”