Page 27 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

But this? This ruthless pragmatism? This willingness to see the truth simply because it’s the truth?

I’m out of my depth.

Julian straightens, stepping back from the chair. The sudden absence of his body heat feels like a sudden drop in cabin pressure.

“We need to sink the maritime server.” He walks back to his terminal. He drops into his chair and brings up a blank command interface. “A digital warrant won’t work on international waters. We need a brute-force exploitation.”

“I can build a localized denial-of-service packet.” I automatically step into the new rhythm. We hit the ground andstart running. “If we hit the satellite uplink with enough garbage data, the server will trigger an automated reboot to clear the cache. While it’s down, we rewrite the handshake protocol to reject Consortium credentials.”

“A forty-minute window.” Julian’s fingers fly across the keys. “It takes them forty minutes to reboot and recognize the lockout. Then they shift the routing to the third node.”

“Which is when we collapse the third node.”

“Agreed.”

We fall into a seamless operational flow state. The silence in the room is replaced by the rapid, percussive gunfire of two mechanical keyboards moving at maximum speed.

We argue. We argue viciously for forty minutes.

We argue about the size of the payload packet. I want it massive and devastating; Julian demands it be surgical and untraceable. We argue about the timing sequence. He wants a simultaneous execution; I want a staggered delay to test their response time.

But we don’t argue about the goal. Every friction point is a disagreement on methodology, not intent. It’s the most exhilarating, terrifying forty minutes of my life. I’ve never worked with someone who can see the architecture the way I do. I’ve never thrown an incomplete logic chain into the air and watched someone else catch it, finish it, and throw it back perfectly optimized.

“The third node.” I hit enter on a compiling script and spin my chair toward him. “It isn’t a server. It’s a person.”

Julian stops typing. He looks at me. “Explain.”

The operational high sings in my blood. The caffeine. The terrifying competence of the man sitting three feet away. My defenses are completely, utterly down.

“I have an inside contact.”

The words land in the silence of the room like a dropped wrench. I freeze, instantly realizing what I just did. In the world I operate in, an inside contact is a vulnerability. It’s a massive, glaring liability. You don’t tell the federal government you systematically communicate with the people they are trying to arrest.

I brace for the reprimand. I brace for him to shut down my terminal, to demand the contact’s identity, to tell me I compromised the intelligence.

Julian doesn’t blink. He just turns his chair to face me fully.

“Who.”

“I don’t know the name.” I deliver the truth with the flat, emotionless honesty of a woman who expects to be burned. “It’s someone inside the Consortium’s financial tracking department. They’ve fed me localized routing data for eight months. That’s how I found the Zurich node before they activated it. It’s a one-way dead-drop system. I don’t know if they’re a defector, an ally, or a trap.”

I wait. I wait for the arrogant, mocking player to return.

“Alright.”

He turns back to his keyboard. He opens a new partition block.

“You’re not going to shut them down?” My voice barely masks my shock.

“Shutting down an active intelligence asset is inefficient.” He doesn’t sound angry. He sounds perfectly, terrifyingly rational. “If it’s a trap, closing the connection tells them we know they’re watching. If it’s an ally, we need the data.”

He doesn’t panic. He takes the new variable and builds a structural safeguard around it.

“I’m running a parallel vetting algorithm on the dead-drop encryption.” His eyes track lines of code I can’t see. “Don’tstop using the contact. But assume everything they send is compromised until I tell you otherwise.”

I swallow hard. The unshakeable bedrock of his competence is deeply unsettling. I need to change the subject. I need to re-establish a wall between us before I accidentally tell him something else. Before I tell him the real reason the touch of his arm nearly short-circuited my brain.

“Your director.” I desperately pull a file reference from twelve minutes ago. “Task Force 9. The Kincaid breach. The file says your team provides localized protection for assets.”