Chapter 4 - THE COUNTER-STRIKE
Harrison Vane was a man who believed money could buy invincibility. Sitting in his velvet-lined private club in Manhattan, smoking a Cuban cigar, he waited for the call from Sterling.
Instead, his phone buzzed with an encrypted message from an unknown number.
The Duca deal is dead. But I have something better. - S.R.
Across the city, in a damp, dimly lit warehouse, Sterling Rock was sweating through his Zegna suit. He was tied to a metal chair, a bruised cheek swelling rapidly. Alessandro stood in the shadows, letting Giovanni do the talking. Cassidy sat at a folding table nearby, her laptop open, typing the messages to Vane under Sterling's account.
"Tell him you have the master flash drive," Cassidy instructed Sterling, her voice surprisingly steady despite the violent environment. "Tell him you downloaded all of Duca's illegal accounts—the ones he kept from his father's days—and you'll sell it to him for twenty million."
Sterling coughed, spitting a mixture of blood and saliva onto the concrete. "He'll never believe it. Vane knows Duca has been scrubbing those accounts for years."
"He'll believe it," Alessandro stepped out of the shadows, the dim light catching the cold steel of his gaze. "Because Harrison Vane is an arrogant man who desperately wants to destroy me. He wants that flash drive to hand to the FBI. Type it."
Sterling typed the message with trembling fingers.
The reply from Vane came three minutes later: Midnight. The old Navy Yard. Come alone.
"Perfect," Cassidy said, hitting a key on her laptop. "I've loaded the flash drive. It doesn't contain your accounts, Mr. Duca. It contains a Trojan horse. The moment Vane plugs it into his system to verify the files, the malware will copy his entire hard drive and send it to our servers. We get his real books. His bribes, his offshore accounts, his connections to the fake EPA certificates."
"And if he doesn't plug it in?" Giovanni asked.
"He's a control freak. He won't trust the data until his own analysts see it. He'll plug it in."
Alessandro looked at Cassidy. In the span of a week, she had gone from serving him coffee to acting as the architect of his revenge. There was a brilliance to her that was intoxicating.
May you like
"You aren't just an accountant," Alessandro murmured. "You're a tactician."
"I told you," she replied, meeting his gaze without flinching. "Invisible people see everything. And we know how to survive."
