Page 4 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

> I’m the Chaos Agent.

Immediately:

> Unlikely. That’s my title. You’re stealing my vibe.

I go completely still.

Chaos Agent.

Coined at sixteen in a public library in Duluth. Written once in a notebook I burned two years later. Never posted, never used as a handle, never spoken aloud.

He either arrived at the same language independently—our minds working in patterns close enough to be alarming—or he’s been inside something I’ve never shown anyone.

> I’m not trespassing. I’m fumigating. This money is dirty.

> That’s not why I’m here. Stop the burn.

Not why I’m here. Not here for the money—but still ordering me to stop. He’s asserting authority over something that has nothing to do with the Consortium’s funds.

It has everything to do with me.

It’s dangerously interesting.

I type before I’ve finished being unsettled by it.

> Make me.

I shouldn’t have sent that.

The connection spikes.

He launches an inverted Denial of Service attack. He’s not flooding me with traffic; he’s sucking the bandwidth out of the room. He’s crashing the router by starving it.

The lights on my modem flicker.

“Oh, you want to play rough?”

The modem goes amber. My secondary monitor drops frames. He’s collapsing the available bandwidth around me—a technique I designed two years ago in a hotel room in Lisbon and discarded as too aggressive for solo operations. He’s using it without hesitation. His version is cleaner. Faster.

I hate that I love it.

I stand. I grab the external hard drive containing the master ledger I just siphoned from the Cyprus server.

I kick the power strip.

Spark. Pop.

The monitors go black. The hum of the tower dies. The room plunges into darkness, lit only by the neon glow of the casino across the street.

I severed the link. He can’t trace a dead machine.

I grab my go-bag. It’s always packed. Cash. Passports. A Glock 43 I hate using but keep for the moments when code fails.

I move to the door.

My phone vibrates in my pocket.

My number is a burner. It changes every forty-eight hours. No one has this number except the broker in Singapore.