Page 26 of Filthy Little Fix
"Huh? Oh," Nicole stammers. "Just that it's amazing. And that Trent's ransomware attack last year was external, but this is... internal. It seems bad."
Malakovs.
My mind, which had been searching for a solution, a lever against Dante, clicks. The pieces fall into place.Internal. Ransomware. Malakovs.
Theperfectthreat.
This is it. I'll use the Malakov's network. They have historic problems with the Volkovs; they have aratinfiltrated among them, if Dante didn't already shoot everyone he deemed a suspect. I'll corner Dante. I'llforcehim to make a choice.
And that choice will be me.
After Chad makesa ridiculous show of "rebooting" the now-fixed server and "thanking" me with a limp handshake and the promise of a stale pizza party, I pack up my laptop and Nicole approaches my cubicle with a hesitant smile. Her messy bun is, as usual, on the verge of collapsing.
"Hey, Leo," she says. "Um, I know you've been, you know, indisposed, but I was wondering... there's this new ramen place that opened downtown. I heard it's really good. Would you, uh, want to check it out sometime? As a thank you for coming in today."
I pause, hovering my hand over my laptop bag. Ramen. Tonight. My mind instantly conjures the image of Dante's face. The thought of spending an evening making small talk with Nicole, dissecting noodles, feels like a punishment, and not the good kind.
And I don't see a single utility she'd have for me. Why would she even want my company to eat ramen, anyway?
"Thanks, Nicole," I say, already picturing myself back home, lost in the Volkov's network. "But I can't tonight. Got a lot of... catching up to do. With my tropical disease. Maybe another time."
Her smile falters slightly. "Oh. Right. No worries. Just thought I'd ask." She fiddles with a pen, avoiding my gaze. "Well,get well soon. And, um, try not to get into any more 'accidents'." She gestures vaguely at my still-bruised face.
I give her a noncommittal nod and finish packing. As I walk out, I feel her eyes on my back. A flicker of annoyance, quickly dismissed. Nicole is harmless. My thoughts are back to Dante.
Back in my shitty house, the dull ache in my jaw is a comforting reminder of what I had to do. I power up my laptop and dive back into the Volkov network. The Malakov's systems, so impenetrable to mere mortals, begin to yield their secrets to me. I map their vulnerabilities, find their hidden channels, and, most importantly, find the evidence of their latest dealings with the Volkov traitor.
I can get full access to the rat's previous infiltration points. The access they used to bleed the Volkovs dry of information for the Malakovs—their original goal was to weaken the Volkovs, but I could amplify that. Turn a slow bleed into a hemorrhage.
I find a backdoor into their central logistics hub—the one controlling their shipments in and out of the East Coast. Instead of just "lost documentation," I engineer small, seemingly random diversions of high-value cargo. A percentage of their illicit goods, just enough to be a significant loss, will be redirected to ghost ports or untraceable dead drops. The Malakovs wouldn't even know it was happening; the goods would justdisappearfrom Volkov tracking.
This'll all look like the Malakovs are simplyescalatingtheir existing infiltration, getting bolder, gettingsmarter. Dante will assume it is their work, amplified by his rat,ifthe rat's still alive. He won't suspect a third party. Not at first.
But I'll leave my signature. A series of nested data anomalies embedded within the corrupted packets. Nothing obvious. Nothing that would scream "hacker". But something that, if analyzed by a mind as obsessive as Dante's (or as skilled as Sal's, under extreme duress), would eventually point tomypreviouswork. A specific sequence of unused bytes. A peculiar timestamp pattern. A digital ghost print. My way of saying:It's me, mister. And only I can stop it.
And then, he would come to me.
TEN
DANTE
I got rid of him.I extirpated him from myself. The printers no longer spit out poems, and that damn music finally vanished from the security room speakers, from my car, from my head. I won. I purged the aberration back to his pathetic civilian life, and he, like the plague he is, fled back to the sewer he crawled out of.
But it doesn't feel like a victory.
My best whiskey tastes bitter. The cigar no longer has any anxiolytic effect, nothing to comfort me with its familiarity, and my office, where I once found peace, is just an office now. I don't understand. I don't understand how he can ruin mundane things he didn't even touch. What the fuck does that fucking Nyx have to do with my cigar, my office, my drinks? Why, after him, does everything wither? Like a fucking cancer.
Dmitry had been in the conference room, reviewing charts for hours. He scrolled through his tablet while Svetlana thumbed through a stack of reports, shaking her head. "They have nothing," she said. "We have guards watching every IT member, every network engineer, every programmer. Day and night. And not a single suspicious movement..."
And that's it.
As if Nyx wasn't enough of a problem, the Malakovs' moves were getting worse. The data breach opened by that rat wasn't as small as we initially thought. Our shipments were now being completely rerouted, disappearing from our logistics systems without a trace. Not just delays, but outright theft. High-value cargo vanished, and the discrepancies in betting transfers were now too large to ignore. We're talking millions in losses, not just a few thousands here and there.
"Is there a chance this isn't internal?" Dmitry asked, trying to find a clearer solution for the plummeting graphs on the screen.
"Ithasto be internal," Svetlana interrupted, her voice hoarse. "The nature of the attacks—the precision, the knowledge of our specific vulnerabilities, the way they manipulate existing systems instead of breaking new ones—it's too sophisticated for an external brute-force attack. It's someone who knows our networks."
"Well, my men confirmed the empty function in the backup script was exploited," Dmitry said, rubbing his temples. "And that it points to a wider, preexisting backdoor. It was just dormant. Now it's wide open, and someone is walking through it like they own the damn place. But if it's internal and our guards haven't seen anything suspicious from our personnel, then who the hell is doing this?"
