Chapter 13 — They Took the Bait

I picked up my phone, and unlocked it, and tapped a notification that had been sitting quietly in the top bar the entire time: Cloud Synchronization Complete: 100%.

Julian understood money.

He understood nothing about modern network security.

The laptop he had just reduced to scrap was a dummy terminal, a decoy, an inexpensive display running a remote mirror of a desktop that lived somewhere else entirely.

The actual solid-state drive, the one holding the complete eight-hundred-page forensic ledger, was seated in a hidden server rack beneath my floorboards, linked to an encrypted off-site cloud vault, backed up in triplicate, entirely beyond the reach of any crowbar.