Part 17
The tranquility of the afternoon was shattered the moment Marcus stepped back into his subterranean command center later that evening.
The massive OLED screens, usually glowing with a calming blue interface, were flashing a rhythmic, urgent crimson.
"Aegis, report," Marcus demanded, his demeanor instantly shifting from a loving father to a wartime general.
"We are under a coordinated, massive distributed denial-of-service attack, sir," the AI responded, its voice entirely calm despite the flashing alarms.
"Someone is attempting a brute-force breach of our external financial servers."
Marcus threw his jacket onto a chair and practically vaulted into his command seat.
His hands hovered over the glowing keyboard as he rapidly analyzed the incoming data streams cascading down the monitors.
"It's not just a DDoS," Marcus muttered, his eyes narrowing as he read the raw hexadecimal code. "That's just a smokescreen."
"They are masking a highly sophisticated penetration worm meant to wipe our primary ledgers," Aegis confirmed.
"Thorne," Marcus said coldly. "He must have hired a dark-web syndicate to destroy the evidence before the feds could confiscate his local drives."
It was a desperate, foolish move from a desperate, cornered man.
"Shall I initiate the secondary defense grids and shut down external routing?" Aegis asked.
"No," Marcus said, a predatory smile crossing his face. "Let them in."
"Sir?" the AI questioned, mimicking a tone of mild confusion.
"Drop the outer firewall on sector four," Marcus ordered, his fingers flying across the keys to set his trap. "Give them a clear path to a mirrored, isolated server."
He was going to let the hackers think they had breached his fortress.
He rapidly coded a digital honeypot, an isolated server that looked exactly like his primary data core but was actually a closed-loop cage.
"They are inside the decoy server, Mr. Johnson," Aegis reported seconds later.
"Excellent," Marcus said, leaning back in his chair. "Now, lock the doors behind them."
He executed the command, instantly severing the hackers' connection to the outside world while keeping them trapped within his system.
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"Now, let's see who we're dealing with," Marcus whispered, initiating a relentless back-trace program.
Thorne had picked a fight with a man who had literally written the foundational code for modern cybersecurity.
