Chapter 7 - The Unseen Threat
The ashes of the Prague letter had barely cooled in the grass when the first digital anomalies began to ripple through the Blackwell financial empire.
It started on a Thursday morning. I was in my high-security underground bunker beneath the estate, reviewing encrypted offshore wire transfers, when the main terminal screen flashed bright crimson.
ALARM: UNAUTHORIZED DATA PACKET ACCESSED FROM EXTERNAL IP.
I slammed my fist onto the master console, calling Vance down immediately.
"Talk to me," I ordered before he even reached the bottom of the steel spiral staircase.
Vance dropped a heavy tablet onto the metal desk, his face grim. "It's not Rossi’s crew, Boss. They're scattered to the winds. This is coming from a ghost server routed through Zurich, bouncing through three proxy nodes in Eastern Europe. Someone is systematically downloading our secondary fallback accounts—the emergency funds we keep liquid for high-level contingencies."
"How much?" I asked, my fingers flying across the custom-built mechanical keyboard as I initiated a counter-trace protocol.
"Three million in the last six minutes," Vance said. "And they're accelerating. At this rate, our entire European reserve will be wiped out by midnight."
I stared at the scrolling cascade of binary code on the screen. Only one person on earth outside of my inner circle had the specific encryption keys required to access those legacy Swiss accounts.
Grace.
Or someone who had inherited her clearance codes.
"The Prague contact," I whispered, the realization hitting me like a physical blow. "The ledger. They didn't just want to send a warning; they were using the data packet to piggyback onto our network infrastructure."
"What do you want to do, Boss?" Vance asked, his hand dropping to his sidearm. "We can lock down the mainframe, sever the transatlantic cables. Cut them off completely."
"No," I said, a dangerous glint hardening in my eyes. "If we cut them off, they go dark and scatter. I want to draw them out. Let them think they're winning."
I typed a sequence of override commands into the master terminal, setting a digital tripwire—a honey-pot file containing a high-resolution tracker hidden inside a dummy ledger file.
"Route the next transfer through the secondary node in Vienna," I ordered. "And prep the Gulfstream. We're flying to Europe tonight."
May you like
"Europe?" Vance hesitated. "Boss, what about the girls? With all due respect, leaving the estate right now—"
"The girls stay here," I interrupted firmly. "Protected by three rings of perimeter defense and twenty of our best men. Aris is on-site. Nobody gets in, and nobody gets out." I looked up at Vance, my voice iron-clad. "You and I are going to Vienna to close an old account once and for all."
