Chapter 8 - The Shadow Spy
The police arrived within ten minutes and dragged my weeping mother out of the server room in handcuffs.
She screamed my name, begging me to save her, but I did not even blink as the elevator doors closed.
Julian and I retreated to his penthouse office, placing the infected flash drive inside a digital quarantine safe.
He poured two glasses of expensive scotch, his mind clearly racing to understand the scale of the attack.
He explained that a virus of that magnitude was only used by top-tier corporate espionage syndicates.
My father was a pathetic, low-level thief, completely incapable of engineering a cyber weapon that sophisticated.
I sat on the leather sofa, racking my brain to figure out who my family was actually working for.
I remembered the time Madison had bragged about her new boyfriend, a wealthy tech investor she had met online.
She had always kept him away from the house, claiming he was too busy traveling for international business.
I pulled up the security camera footage from the day Madison forged my signature on the loan documents.
I zoomed in on the reflection of her computer screen in the dark window of the home office.
She was not on a regular phone call; she was on an encrypted video chat with a man sitting in a dark room.
Julian leaned over my shoulder, his eyes narrowing as he recognized the logo on the man's jacket in the reflection.
It was the emblem of a rival financial conglomerate that had been trying to destroy Julian's company for a decade.
Madison had not just forged a loan to buy designer clothes; she had sold her own family to a corporate syndicate.
Julian smiled a dangerous, predatory smile and told me it was time to end this war once and for all.
We spent the next forty-eight hours compiling every single piece of evidence into a massive digital dossier.
We handed the entire file over to the FBI, including the financial fraud, the espionage, and the attempted cyber attack.
By Friday morning, the federal authorities raided my parents' home and my father's workplace simultaneously.
I watched the live news coverage from Julian's office, feeling a profound sense of closure as my father was arrested on national television.
But as the news anchor listed the names of the suspects taken into custody, a cold dread washed over me.
My father was in jail, and my mother was being held without bail in Chicago.
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But the FBI spokesperson announced that Madison's bedroom had been completely cleared out before the raid even began.
My sister had vanished into thin air, leaving our parents to take the fall for everything.
