Chapter 29 - The Trap is Set
The honeypot script hummed quietly in the background of my primary workstation, a sophisticated digital snare disguised as an unencrypted vulnerability in our secondary regional routing table. If Victor Sterling’s remaining associates—or whatever lawyers he had left scrambling in his defense—tried to peer into our network again, they would walk straight into a trap that would trace their exact physical location down to the room and device.
I sat back in my leather chair, watching the real-time data stream flow across the auxiliary monitor. The minutes ticked by in total silence. The city outside was quiet, bathed in the soft, ethereal light of a crescent moon cutting through the midnight clouds.
Suddenly, the auxiliary monitor flashed a brilliant, aggressive crimson.
*BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.*
The trap had been sprung.
Lines of code erupted across the screen, parsing the incoming connection in real-time. The data packet wasn't coming from the Cayman Islands anymore. The relay had dropped, exposing the true originating IP address.
I leaned forward, my eyes narrowing as the location resolved on my screen. It wasn't a clandestine server in Brooklyn, and it wasn't a hidden syndicate hideout overseas.
The signal was originating from a private, high-security terminal located inside a federal holding facility just outside of New York City.
A slow, cold realization washed over me. It wasn't one of Sterling's thugs. It was Victor Sterling himself. Somehow, despite being locked inside a maximum-security federal detention center awaiting trial, he had managed to smuggle a secure communication device or bribe a corrupted corrections officer to establish a direct, encrypted data link to my corporate network.
He wasn't trying to hack my systems for financial gain. He was sending a message.
I opened the incoming data payload attached to the ping. It wasn't malicious code or a virus. It was a single, high-resolution digital image file.
May you like
I clicked to open the image. My breath caught in my throat for a fraction of a second.
It was a photograph of me—taken not years ago, but from across the street outside my current penthouse, captured through the very glass windows I was standing behind just hours earlier. And scrawled across the bottom of the digital photograph in bold, menacing letters was a single sentence: *“You think you locked me out, Ethan? The game only ends when I say it does.”*
