Page 10 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

The target is moving. She is, at this moment, somewhere in the Cotai Strip’s transit infrastructure, executing a pre-planned exit she’s been modifying in real time since the moment my message hit her screen. She’s fast, she’s resourceful, and she has three years of survival instinct backing every decision.

She will not expect me to already be in Macau. She’ll expect me behind a screen in Singapore, running algorithms, building triangulation models, working the problem remotely.

Working the problem remotely is slower. She is faster than her profile initially indicated.

Chaos Agent. Her phrase. Her title.

I look out the cab window at the Macau predawn. The harbor is going gray at the waterline, the container ships sitting low and dark in the water. Too many cab windows in too many cities. Tonight the operation fades behind the 4.1 seconds.

Taking 4.1 seconds to decide she’d rather be accurate than fast.

I do that.

I’ve never met anyone else who does that.

She’s wrong about who owns that title. But I take her point.

Somewhere in this city is a woman who’s been burning the Consortium’s money for three years. Who codes like she’s daring the system to catch her. Who named her malware after something that grows back stronger every time you cut it down.

She’s moving, and she has a head start, but I know which parking garage she’s heading for.

I’ve known for four days.

I’m better at this than she thinks.

3

The Wrong Rescuer

IVY

The parking garagebeneath the Venetian smells like exhaust and the specific kind of money that doesn’t sleep. The garage is quieter than the floor above it. A handful of vehicles from the airport. Casino staff cycling out, moving through the fluorescent concrete without looking at anyone.

Nobody looks at me.

I run a wide circuit of Level B before approaching the vehicle.

Habit. Not paranoia.

Paranoia eats resources. Habits just run. Three hours of it: surface streets, two cafés, the waterfront esplanade where the Pearl River was going gray at the edges, back through the casino’s public floors via three separate entrances.

Clean. Every check, clean.

Three hours since the hotel room. Three hours since a hacker with fast hands and a taste for theatrical terminal messages decided I was interesting.

Found you. Past tense. Confident.

The phone is dead in a cup of espresso on the fourteenth floor. The only version of that message still existing is the one I filed in the back of my skull.

I parse the operational data. His response time on the Kudzu sandbox: under five seconds.

Beyond impressive.

The inverted DoS—a technique I designed a variant of myself and discarded as too aggressive. His version is cleaner. He improved it.

I prefer bare hands.

My counter-surveillance circuit takes me through the casino’s east wing for the third time. Baccarat tables remain occupied at this hour, the dealers moving with the economy of people working a twelve-hour shift with three hours left to go.