Chapter 5 - THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE
Marcus's fingers blurred across the keyboard. He was initiating a brute-force attack on the internal firewall, leveraging a vulnerability in the building's outdated printer network to pivot into the main broadcast mainframe. It was sloppy, loud, and left a massive digital footprint, but it was fast.
"I'm in the sub-network," Marcus said, his eyes darting across lines of cascading code. "I'm routing the halon trap execution logs into a video file. I just need to compile it and push it to the main feed."
Suddenly, Marcus's screen flickered. The terminal froze. A cartoonish, grinning skull appeared on the monitor, formed entirely of ASCII text.
HELLO, IT DEPT. TRYING TO PLAY HERO?
Marcus swallowed hard. "We have a problem."
Julian stepped behind the chair, staring at the skull. "Vance’s lead hacker. He employs a freelancer named Cipher. The kid is a sociopath."
"He just caught my intrusion," Marcus said, his hands flying back to the keyboard, trying to force-quit the connection. "He's back-tracing my IP. He's trying to fry this terminal."
"Can you beat him?" Julian asked, his voice steady.
Marcus looked at the billionaire. He was a guy who fixed paper jams and reset passwords. Cipher was a world-class cyber-mercenary.
"I don't have to beat him," Marcus muttered, his eyes narrowing. "I just have to break his toys."
Marcus stopped trying to defend his connection. Instead, he leaned into the attack. He opened a direct port to the building's automated smart-infrastructure—the system that controlled the lights, the temperature, and the blinds. If Cipher wanted to trace Marcus's location, Marcus was going to make sure the entire building went crazy.
Marcus injected a chaotic feedback loop into the environmental controls.
All around them, the Marketing floor went insane. The overhead fluorescent lights began to violently strobe, flashing blinding white light. The automated blast-blinds on the massive windows slammed down, flew up, and slammed down again in a deafening, rhythmic clatter. The temperature controls plummeted, venting freezing air, then rocketing to maximum heat.
"What did you do?" Julian yelled over the mechanical cacophony.
"I caused a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the building's brain!" Marcus yelled back. "Cipher can't pinpoint this terminal if every single smart-device in the tower is screaming at him at the same time!"
The skull on the monitor glitched, pixelated, and vanished. The upload progress bar reappeared.
UPLOAD: 45%...
BZZZZT.
The heavy double doors at the far end of the Marketing floor burst open. Three mercenaries spilled into the room, their suppressed weapons raised. The strobing lights and thrashing blinds created a nightmare of moving shadows, blinding them momentarily.
"There! By the PR desks!" one of the mercenaries shouted over the noise, spotting the glow of Marcus's monitor.
Thwip-thwip-thwip!
Bullets tore through the cubicle walls, shattering monitors and sending plastic shrapnel flying.
"Get down!" Julian tackled Marcus, pulling him to the floor just as a round decimated the ergonomic chair Marcus had been sitting in.
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UPLOAD: 70%...
They were pinned. The mercenaries were advancing, moving in a practiced tactical wedge, clearing cubicle by cubicle. Marcus and Julian were trapped behind a flimsy fiberglass partition. It wouldn't stop a bullet.
