Chapter 3 - The Counter-Strike
By 4:00 AM, Sebastian was sitting in the subterranean server room of the Obsidian Tower. The glow of a dozen high-powered monitors illuminated his hardened features. He wasn't wearing his chef's apron, nor his cheap suit. He wore a black turtleneck, looking every bit the apex predator the financial world feared.
"Run a full deep-web diagnostic on Victoria Sterling," Sebastian ordered his chief of cyber-security, a brilliant hacker named Knox.
Fingers flew across keyboards. "She’s a ghost, boss," Knox said, pulling up redacted files. "Her degree from Yale? Forged. Her previous employment at that boutique PR firm? A shell company owned by Vanguard Holdings. She’s a cleaner. Vance uses her to infiltrate rival companies, extract their assets, and destroy them from the inside."
Sebastian stared at the screen. The woman he had proposed to—the woman he had shared a bed with—was a meticulously crafted weapon.
"Do we lock her out? Call the feds?" Knox asked, hovering over the kill-switch for the building's security.
"No," Sebastian smiled. It was a terrifying expression. "If she wants the master encryption key, we are going to give it to her. But we are going to build a slaughterhouse first. Knox, create a mirror server. Replicate all our offshore accounts, the property deeds, everything. But tie the mirror server to a honeypot trap. When she initiates the transfer, I want it to lock Vanguard’s entire mainframe and drain their accounts."
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"A reverse hack?" Knox grinned. "It’s highly illegal, but it’s brilliant."
"They started this war," Sebastian said coldly. "I’m just baking the final course."
