Page 8 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

> I prefer bare hands. Who are you?

I type this without entirely planning to. It’s a true thing offered to an active target.

An operational deviation for me, but I do it anyway.

> I’m the Chaos Agent.

I stare at this for 0.6 seconds before I type back.

> Unlikely. That’s my title. You’re stealing my vibe.

It is my title.

Task Force 9 calls Julian Rhodes when something needs dismantling at the architectural level—the system, the network, the entire operational premise. Boyd is the wall. Dax is the blade. I’m the reason neither of them ever walks into a room that hasn’t already been opened.

I stare for 0.6 seconds because I found that exact phrase in her operational notes. A document I extracted from a dead message board server fourteen weeks ago, encrypted under a password she rotated quarterly and hadn’t rotated since the previous April. A working document—notes to herself, tool names, framing. Chaos Agent. No definition. She didn’t think it needed one. She’s using it back at me.

She’s performing confidence, or she’s treating this terminal like a conversation with someone worth being her actual self with.

She used it first. I note this.

> I’m not trespassing. I’m fumigating. This money is dirty.

> That’s not why I’m here. Stop the burn.

> Make me.

I don’t smile at live terminals. Personal rule.

Make me is the pure defiance of someone receiving a direct command and answering it as a dare. She’s got me grinning ear-to-ear.

I launch the inverted DoS.

Bandwidth starvation—collapse the available network around her rather than flooding her with traffic, forcing the local router to drop packets and crash the session. She’s routing two hundred million dollars simultaneously. Her local bandwidth is already stressed. She has forty seconds, give or take.

The connection dies at second twenty-two.

Clean severance, no error code. She didn’t wait for the crash. She manually cut the power—and a hard power cut on a rig that size registers to a directional antenna on a local cell tower exactly like a gunshot.

I pull the last metadata packet from the session. Router identifier. Building network address. Cell tower triangulation from the electromagnetic spike at power cut.

A wing. A floor. Three possible rooms in a hotel on the Cotai Strip, Macau, identified by the building network’s DHCP record.

I pick up my phone.

There is one active device in those three rooms. I mapped her burner cycling pattern: new number every 48 hours, Singapore broker is the relay. The last cycle logged 31 hours ago. She has 17 hours left on this number.

I type four words and send.

`FOUND YOU.`

I put the phone down.

She has ninety seconds before she’s out of the room. Sixty before she’s in the elevator. Thirty before she decides which exit she trusts.

I already know which one she’ll take.

I’ve been tracking her for eleven weeks. My profiles are thorough.