Chapter 5 - The Inside Man
The revelation hung in the sterile air like a live grenade waiting to detonate.
"Marcus Thorne," Richard said, speaking the name as if it were actual poison on his tongue.
"Thorne has been trying to launch a hostile takeover of my company for a decade, and he must have been using Henry to steal our internal trade secrets," Richard explained.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard as the true scope of Henry's betrayal finally became crystal clear.
He hadn't just ruined our marriage; he had sold his soul to a global corporate terrorist.
"Henry can't pay Thorne back because his embezzlement was discovered, so now he needs my death settlement to clear his massive debt," I realized aloud.
"And Thorne will happily dispose of Henry and Emily the second he gets that money," Chloe added grimly through the radio comms.
I aggressively typed in a new sequence of commands, tracking the live IP address of Henry's active burner phone.
"I can see Henry's digital footprint; he just tried to access the offshore account from a public Wi-Fi network," I shouted.
"Where is the signal coming from?" Richard demanded, leaning over my shoulder to look at the glowing screen.
"It's pinging from an abandoned shipping yard near the industrial docks," I confirmed, tracing the red dot on the digital map.
Richard immediately grabbed his phone and dispatched two dozen heavily armed security contractors to the docks.
"We have him cornered, Amy; it is only a matter of time before we get Emily back," Richard promised.
My father held my hand, silently praying as the minutes ticked by at an excruciatingly slow pace.
Suddenly, my laptop screen flickered violently, and the offshore banking portal began flashing a bright red warning.
"Someone is remotely wiping the Cayman accounts," I gasped, furiously typing to block the override command.
"Henry isn't smart enough to bypass this level of encryption on his own," I realized with a sickening twist in my gut.
"He has a hacker helping him," Richard deduced, looking furiously at the rapidly deleting files on the screen.
I traced the origin of the hacking signal, expecting it to point back to Marcus Thorne's corporate headquarters downtown.
Instead, the IP address flashed across my screen with a very familiar corporate domain name.
My breath caught in my throat as I read the geographical location of the enemy hacker.
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"Richard, the person helping Henry wipe the accounts isn't at the docks or at Thorne's headquarters," I whispered in absolute horror.
"The hacking signal is coming from a laptop logged into this exact hospital's guest Wi-Fi network."
