Page 24 of Rogue Hope
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Three hours later,Zara looked up from her array of monitors to realize the Knight Tactical cyber lab smelled of coffee, electronics, and tension. The overhead lights had been dimmed to reduce screen glare, casting blue-white illumination over Finn’s hunched form at the neighboring workstation—close enough to communicate, far enough apart to maintain emotional distance.
Even with the buffer, the tension radiating between the two of them could have powered the entire building. Maybe the whole Hope Landing airport.
He leaned toward her and stared at her screen. “You’re doing it wrong.”
The comment was so unexpected her fingers stilled above the keyboard. Four monitors displayed cascading lines of code, network pathways, and running analytics—the complex digital pathway they’d been pursuing in their hunt for a way to find a tracer to embed in the intel they would deliver to Cipher.
“Uh. No. I’m not. I’ve been breaking encryptions since before most hackers knew what a firewall was.” She resumed typing without looking at him. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Not saying you don’t.” His voice remained frustratingly calm. “Just suggesting that maybe Cipher’s patterns have evolved in the past seven years.”
“And I’m suggesting that your hovering is distracting.”
“Not hovering. Observing.”
She gestured toward his abandoned monitor without breaking focus on her code sequence. “How about you handle your end of things? If you don’t figure out how Vanguard’s tracking us, this whole plan of yours fails.”
Among the million other ways this sketchy op could detonate in their faces. There were too many ifs … and too little time to cover them all. Despite Finn’s optimism, she had to design a Trojan horse good enough for Cipher to miss, and then hack into the most heavily defended network she’d ever come across.
And she had seven hours left to do it.
Finn returned to his station without argument, though she could feel his eyes periodically checking her progress. The weight of his attention made her hyperaware of every keystroke, every decision pathway—like taking a qualification test with the instructor breathing down her neck.
She was contemplating getting up to stretch and grab another mug of coffee when Finn grunted, pushing back from his station. “Whelp, we’ve got a good news bad news situation going.”
She waved a hand in an impatient signal to continue.
“Good news is they’re not inside your system.” He winced. “Bad news? They’re using external surveillance. Directional mics, thermal imaging, possibly even lip-reading technology.”
He pointed to his monitor bank. “See here? That signal’s repeating on an unusual frequency. Not standard commercial tech. That’s Vanguard’s signature. Similar to what I encountered in Belgrade last year.”
“What kind of range are we talking about?”
“Depending on equipment quality, up to two kilometers with clear line of sight.”
She assessed the building’s surroundings mentally. Two kilometers encompassed most of downtown Hope Landing, including several tall buildings with excellent vantage points. The team had already deployed countermeasures around the Knight Tactical building itself, but because of the constant air traffic swirling around them, their surveillance perimeter only extended about half a kilometer.
“If I can isolate the frequency pattern,” she said, fingers flying across the keyboard, “we might be able to triangulate the transmission source. Then the team can head out and shut it down.”
“Careful. That frequency modulation looks like?—”
“I know what I’m doing.” She cut him off.
A subtle shift in the data pattern caught her attention first—almost imperceptible, but to her trained eye, alarming. The trace wasn’t just analyzing the signal anymore; it was being analyzed in return.
Her fingers slammed across the keyboard, initiating emergency shutdown procedures. “Kill your connection. Now.”
To his credit, Finn didn’t question or hesitate. His station went dark instantly as he executed a hard shutdown.
“They’re backtracking our trace,” she explained, working furiously to sever the digital connection before Vanguard could pinpoint their precise network architecture.
“How far have they penetrated?” Finn was beside her, all pretense of maintaining distance abandoned in the face of immediate threat.
“Too far.” Red warning indicators flashed across her primary screen as the counter-intrusion measures struggled to contain the breach. “They’re mapping our system architecture. Identifying vulnerabilities.”
The taste of adrenaline—metallic and sharp—flooded her mouth as her fingers raced across the keys, executing command sequences designed to fragment their digital footprint. The room felt too warm, the air too thin, as the implications crystallized. This wasn’t just surveillance; it was active penetration testing.
