Chapter 9 - The Ghost in the Machine
The man on the other end of the line was an old friend of my late father.
His name was Elias, and he was one of the most dangerous cyber-security freelancers in the country.
He told me to bring the car to his secure garage in Queens immediately.
I drove straight to his location, keeping a close eye on the rearview mirror the entire time.
Elias met us at the heavily fortified steel door of his warehouse.
He took one look at my bullet-riddled car and immediately ushered us inside to safety.
I carried a sleeping Theo to a comfortable couch in the corner of the chaotic workshop.
Elias handed me a cup of black coffee and asked for the details of the offshore account.
I gave him the exact routing numbers and the forged authorization forms Drew had used.
His fingers flew across his mechanical keyboard, pulling up screens of encrypted data I barely understood.
Within twenty minutes, Elias broke through the Caymans’ banking firewall.
He discovered that the fifty thousand dollars was just a test run for a much larger theft.
Marcus and Drew had set up an automated script to drain all of my clients' accounts by midnight.
They were planning to steal over three million dollars and frame me for the entire embezzlement scheme.
If the script ran, I would spend the rest of my life in federal prison.
Elias told me he could stop the transfer, but we only had forty-five minutes left.
He started writing a counter-virus to wipe the offshore accounts clean and return the funds.
I watched the digital clock on his monitor count down with agonizing slowness.
With only five minutes to spare, Elias hit the execution command.
The progress bar stalled at ninety-nine percent, freezing the entire system.
Elias cursed loudly and slammed his fist on the desk.
Someone on the inside of the bank was actively fighting his code and manually blocking our override.
I looked closely at the IP address flashing in red on the error screen.
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The internal blocker wasn't Marcus, and it wasn't my ex-husband David.
The address belonged to the personal computer of my trusted business partner, Sarah.
