Page 66 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

If she did, I’ll never find her.

My heart beats a slow, heavy rhythm against my ribs.

Then, at 13:14, the terminal violently wakes up.

A massive, elegant surge in processing demand hits the external firewall. It doesn’t brute-force the server. It slides through the microscopic gaps in the authentication protocol with terrifying precision.

The ICE reverse-trace illuminates.

The attacker bounces through a proxy in Reykjavik, then a ghost server in Mumbai, then a hollowed-out block in Virginia. It’s a chaotic, untraceable mess to any conventional security system.

But I’m not a conventional system.

The attacker’s syntax is brilliant, reckless, and unapologetic. It’s the same coding architecture that kept me alive in Luxembourg.

“I have you.” The words are a rough whisper in the empty room.

She tries to dismantle the node. I don’t stop her. I let her unravel the outer layer of the simulation, giving my reverse-trace enough time to cut through the proxy chain.

Virginia drops. Mumbai falls. Reykjavik shatters.

The physical IP address hits the primary monitor in sharp, glowing white text.

Shinjuku, Tokyo. Japan.

My pulse hammers a brutal rhythm against my ribs. Fourteen days of suffocating tension dissolve. The coordinates lock on the screen, pinning a transient apartment building in the center of the neon district.

I don’t wait for her to realize she’s trapped. I sever the connection. The honeypot deletes itself, scrubbing the digital trail, leaving her staring at a dead signal in Tokyo.

The chair scrapes sharply against the concrete floor as I stand.

Wraith appears in the doorway. He looks at my face, then looks at the glowing coordinates on the screen.

“I found her.” I grab my jacket off the back of the chair.

“The DOJ indictments require a dual sign-off tomorrow morning.” Wraith doesn’t move from the door.

“Forge my signature.” I walk past him. “I’m going to Tokyo.”

21

The Breach

IVY

The connection dies at exactly03:14 AM.

The digital severance is brutal and complete. I stare at the dark monitor in my Shinjuku apartment. The green line of code tracking the intruder vanishes, replaced by a flat, empty black screen.

He didn’t just find my IP address. He completely dismantled the proxy chain, bypassed the secondary firewalls I spent three days writing, and burned the connection straight to the ground.

It was an execution. A digital statement.

He found me.

The survival instinct honed over three years screams at me to move. Pack the go-bag. Burn the hard drives in the bathtub. Walk out the fire escape, blend into the predawn crush of the neon labyrinth, and vanish. I know the protocols. I wrote the protocols.

But I don’t move.