Chapter 6 - The Ghost in the Machine
I dropped the burner phone on the floor as the flames consumed my only hope.
Marcus knelt beside me and put a comforting hand on my trembling shoulder.
He asked me what was on the screen.
I told him Connor just burned the original hard drives and Chloe had betrayed us.
I felt completely broken and defeated.
Brenda had successfully destroyed every single piece of evidence tying her to the embezzlement.
She was going to walk away with my money, my house, and my freedom.
Marcus suddenly stood up and started pacing across the empty living room.
He asked me if my father had ever taught me about the ghost ledger protocol.
I wiped the tears from my eyes and looked at him in confusion.
He explained that my father never trusted physical hard drives because they could be stolen or destroyed.
My father had built a hidden digital backdoor into the architecture of Apex Solutions before he retired.
The physical drives in the safe were nothing more than a decoy.
The real data was automatically uploading to a secure cloud server hidden in the dark web.
My heart began to race with a renewed sense of hope.
I asked Marcus how we could possibly access it without my father's master password.
Marcus smiled and pulled a worn leather notebook from his inside pocket.
He said my father gave him the encryption key on the day he died just in case something like this ever happened.
We rushed back out to Marcus's car and booted up his heavily encrypted laptop.
He typed in a long string of alphanumeric codes while I watched the screen nervously.
A loading bar appeared on the black screen.
It hit one hundred percent and thousands of financial documents cascaded across the monitor.
We had every single wire transfer, every fake invoice, and every hidden shell company record.
I spotted a massive offshore account that held the missing five million dollars.
I clicked on the account details to find Brenda's name.
The screen refreshed and revealed the true identity of the account holder.
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It was not Brenda.
It was Chloe.
