Please look under my coat before she sees you!
The gag order and Maya’s seizure left me reeling. Kowalski had to work quickly, knowing that every minute Maya was in Evelyn’s “care,” she was a pawn in Evelyn’s game. He burrowed into his old technical manuals, muttering about “spectrum analysis” and “rogue transmissions.”
Rachel, meanwhile, was equally tenacious. The new legal filings, especially the child welfare petition, had only intensified her journalistic instincts. She saw the pattern: secrecy, legal bullying, and the common thread of Apex Titan Security.
“This new residence for Maya,” Rachel said, tapping her tablet screen in my garage, where Kowalski was hunched over a soldering iron. “It’s listed under a shell corporation, a front for one of Evelyn’s campaign PACs. Not a private home at all, Lucas. It’s a secure facility. Probably one of Apex Titan’s.”
“They’re not just hiding her,” I realized, a fresh wave of horror washing over me. “They’re still using the collar. They have to be.”
Rachel’s eyes lit up with grim determination. “Exactly. That’s what I’ve been working on. If the collar is transmitting live audio, it has to have a destination.”
She had been running deep packet inspection on the data streams she’d collected, looking for the ultimate endpoint of the signal. Standard Apex Titan server farms were already mapped out, but this specific audio stream was elusive.
“It wasn’t where I expected it,” Rachel said, her fingers flying across her keyboard. “No commercial data center. No private campaign server. This stream… it’s going somewhere else entirely.”
Kowalski paused his work, looking up, intrigued.
Rachel turned her tablet screen toward us. On it was an IP address, then a detailed network map. “I finally traced the primary relay node. The unlisted IP address points to a subnet.”
She zoomed in. The subnet belonged to a familiar government entity.
“It’s inside the State Board of Elections facility,” Rachel stated, her voice low. “Not a public-facing server. An internal, unlisted server. Hidden within the state’s own infrastructure.”
A cold, sickening realization dawned on me. This wasn’t just about keeping Maya quiet.
“The State Board of Elections?” I repeated, my voice hollow. “Why there?”
“Because that’s where the regulatory officials are,” Kowalski said, his voice quiet, almost a whisper. “The ones who oversee campaign finance, ethics, election integrity. Evelyn’s trying to manipulate them.”
Rachel nodded. “Exactly. She’s not just recording Maya’s overheard conversations about the campaign finances. She’s potentially broadcasting that audio, live, onto a secure, unlisted server *within* the very body that’s supposed to regulate her.”
“They’re using the collar to listen in on the *Board*?” I asked, grappling with the sheer audacity of it.
“Or to broadcast specific, edited, or even generated audio *to* the Board,” Rachel corrected. “A way to monitor, influence, or even create a record without any paper trail. To tap directly into their regulatory communications, control what they hear and what they *think* they hear, all without leaving a trace on official state hardware.”
My stomach turned. It wasn’t just about the $4.2 million in campaign finance records Maya overheard. It was about weaponizing that information, or creating entirely new narratives, for Evelyn’s political advantage, right under the noses of the people sworn to uphold the law.
Maya wasn’t just a prisoner; her collar was a live, covert microphone, broadcasting her and Evelyn’s secrets into the very heart of the state’s regulatory body. A direct line for corruption, hidden in plain sight.
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