I watched Arthur’s retreating back disappear through the heavy brass door. The silence he left behind felt like a physical weight in my office, pressing down on the fluorescent hum of the servers. My hand still tingled from where his thumb drive had landed on my desk.
Four million dollars. By morning. Or Mia would be framed.
I picked up my phone, the screen still glowing with the illicit freight logs. My stomach churned. There was only one person I trusted to untangle this mess without alerting federal authorities directly—yet.
“Dr. Reyes,” I said, my voice tight, as he picked up on the third ring. “Evan Driscoll. I need a raw server extraction. Independent, discreet. Immediately.”
He asked for details, his tone professional but wary. I gave him the bare minimum—a suspected external exploit, a need for forensic analysis that bypassed all internal safeguards. He quoted a steep fee, then agreed to be at Apex Tech by midnight.
By the time he arrived, the office was dark, save for the blue glow of my monitors. Dr. Marcus Reyes was a lean man in his late forties, glasses perched on his nose, a worn leather bag slung over his shoulder. He moved with a quiet efficiency, plugging specialized hardware into my main server rack.
“This will take a few hours,” he mumbled, eyes fixed on lines of scrolling code. “I’m pulling everything—active, deleted, metadata. A full mirror.”
I sat across from him, sipping cold coffee, the tension coiling tighter in my chest. Every minute felt like an hour.
Around 3 AM, Reyes pulled a small, nondescript USB stick from a port on his equipment. He looked at it, then at me. His usual detached expression had shifted.
“Evan,” he began, his voice barely above a whisper. He glanced around the empty office, then leaned forward. “This isn’t standard.”
He slid the USB across the desk. It wasn’t the full server dump.
“There’s a hidden partition,” he said, tapping a finger on the drive. “Tucked deep in the system, masked as a driver update. I almost missed it.”
My eyes narrowed. “What’s on it?”
“A communication log. Encrypted, but I cracked enough to see patterns.” He lowered his voice further. “Text messages. Between your father, Arthur Driscoll, and a network of offshore lenders.”
My breath hitched. “Arthur?”
“Yes. It outlines the setup. How he pushed certain software onto Mia’s work laptop, disguised as ‘intern utilities.’ How he remote-accessed her login. The specific nodes he targeted in your freight servers.” He paused, his gaze fixed on mine. “He laid this trap deliberately.”
A cold certainty settled over me. It wasn’t just extortion. It was a calculated, pre-meditated attack.
“This drive,” he continued, pushing it closer. “It’s not part of the official report. This is… an unofficial recovery. I shouldn’t be giving it to you this way.”
He met my gaze. “This puts me at professional risk, Evan. But what I saw… it wasn’t just a hack. It was an attack on your family.”
I picked up the drive, the cool plastic heavy in my palm. The proof I needed. Arthur’s leverage, suddenly, was mine.
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