Chapter 13 - The Serpent in the House
Maya didn't panic; she acted. She immediately summoned her chief security engineer and Julian to the private conference room.
“Marcus sent this,” Maya said, sliding the letter across the glass table. “I don’t care about his apologies, but I do care about the warning. Can we verify if Ray ever had backdoor access to the core server migration?”
The security engineer, a sharp young woman named Tara, pulled up a diagnostic console on the wall screen. “When we migrated the servers from Apex to Vanguard, we audited all primary credentials. But Ray had administrative override privileges during the 2025 system rollout. If he left a persistent rootkit in the legacy architecture, it might have migrated alongside the core files.”
Tara’s fingers flew across her keyboard, running deep forensic algorithms through three years of system logs. The room fell dead silent as the progress bar ticked upward.
At 87 percent, the console flashed an amber alert.
“There it is,” Tara breathed, zooming in on an active data pipe. “An automated script scheduled to execute at midnight on Friday. It’s set to mirror the proprietary hydrogen-storage schematics to an offshore server hosted in Zurich. The encryption key tied to the extraction matches Ray’s old executive hash.”
Julian stood up, pulling out his phone. “I’ll call the U.S. Attorney’s office right now. We can have a warrant for Ray’s arrest before sundown.”
“Wait,” Maya commanded, her eyes fixed on the code.
May you like
Julian stopped, phone in hand. “Maya, he’s trying to steal the entire commercial foundation of your company.”
“I know,” Maya said, a cold, brilliant smile touching the corners of her lips. “And we’re going to let him try. Tara, don’t kill the script. Rewrite the destination payload. If Ray wants to steal something, let’s give him something he’ll never forget.”
