Page 20 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

The sound grounds me. The familiar resistance of the switches, the immediate response on the screen. The frantic drumbeat in my throat slows. My racing pulse levels out, converting from panic into computational focus.

This is my territory. Out there in the cab, on the ferry dock, in the rain—he had the advantage. I don’t know the rules of his game. But in here? Behind a keyboard?

I am the apex predator.

I open the root directory. The file size is massive. Three gigabytes of encrypted text and localized images.

I start reading.

If Julian Rhodes is arrogant, it is entirely justified. The Task Force 9 operational summary is a masterpiece of architectural analysis. It doesn’t just list the Consortium’s known assets; it maps the logic of their money-laundering systems. It traces the latency in their shell company transfers to predict the physical location of their servers.

I read fast. My eyes scan the lines of data, processing the logic chains, skipping the political summaries to focus exclusively on the network topography.

Ten minutes pass. Julian places a ceramic mug of dark, perfectly brewed coffee on the corner of my desk. He doesn’t speak. He just goes back to his terminal.

I take a drink. It’s strong. It burns the back of my throat. It’s the best thing I’ve tasted in three days.

I reach page forty-two of the technical summary. A map of the Consortium’s secondary routing through a bank in Luxembourg.

My fingers stop on the keyboard.

I read the paragraph again. Then I trace the IP logic he outlined.

No.

“This routing cascade.” I don’t look away from the screen. “You mapped the Luxembourg hub through a delayed packet response in their DNS server.”

“Yes.” Julian’s voice is flat from the desk beside me. The sound of his keyboard doesn’t stop.

“Your math on the latency assumes they’re clearing the transactions locally before passing them to the Caymans.”

“Because the timestamp differential is exactly four point twelve seconds.” Julian doesn’t look up from his monitor. “That’s the clearing window for that specific financial software.”

“It’s a false window.” I lean closer to the monitor, tapping my fingernail against the screen. “They aren’t clearing locally. They’re bouncing the authorization through an automated holding shell in Zurich. The four point twelve seconds isn’t processing time; it’s a deliberate ping delay to mask the Zurich node. If you hit the Luxembourg server based on this assumption, you’ll trigger a recursive failsafe. They’ll drop the data into a burn file before you breach the firewall.”

The typing at the desk beside me stops.

Total silence.

I blink, suddenly realizing what I just said. The heat creeps up the back of my neck.

I slowly turn my head.

Julian is sitting perfectly still, staring at me. His hands rest on his keyboard. His expression hasn’t changed. He isn’t frowning. He isn’t surprised. He looks like a man peering into a dark room and seeing the monster inside.

“The Zurich node.” Julian goes still.

“It’s an automated holding shell.” I keep my voice as steady as his. “I found it six months ago when I breached their Cyprus cluster.”

Julian doesn’t move. “Task Force 9 spent eighteen months building this operational summary. We have a team of fourteen forensic accountants and six data scientists. We didn’t find the Zurich node.”

“You weren’t looking at the ping delay as an architectural feature.” I deflect, shifting back to the screen. “You were treatingit as an environmental latency. It’s an easy mistake to make if you?—”

“Ivy.”

My name on his lips cuts through my rationalization like a scalpel. I stop talking.

“You didn’t stumble into the Cyprus cluster.” The quiet certainty in Julian’s voice is terrifying. He isn’t putting pieces together; the pieces just snapped into a flawless configuration in his mind. “You’ve been inside their core routing.”