Chapter 44 - The Burn Notice
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The flight from Scotland to our secondary safehouse in the French countryside was tense and suffocatingly silent. The Sterling Global Foundation—the empire I had fought so hard to rebuild and sanitize—was bleeding out in the digital ether.
When we finally landed at a private airstrip outside of Lyon, my laptop was already open, running secure diagnostic traces on the damage.
"Natalie was right," I said, staring at the cascading red lines of code on my screen as Ben drove our rented, untraceable sedan toward the chateau. "The Spheres didn't steal a single cent. They used a zero-day exploit to completely wipe the ledgers of our primary charitable trusts. They burned three billion dollars just to send a message."
"It's psychological warfare," Ben replied, his eyes constantly checking the rearview mirror. "They want you panicked. They want you making mistakes before Clara's birthday."
"They want a war? They're going to get one," I muttered, my fingers flying across the keyboard.
Suddenly, a hidden, encrypted sub-routine popped up on my screen. It was a ping from Natalie. She hadn't just gone dark; she had managed to trap a fragment of the attacking code before she pulled the plug on the Phoenix servers.
"Ben, look at this," I turned the screen toward him. "Natalie isolated the origin of the cyber-attack. The Spheres routed it through a dozen proxy servers, but the initial launch command came from a localized intranet node."
"Where?" Ben asked, gripping the steering wheel.
"Paris," I read the coordinates. "An abandoned subway station beneath the 11th arrondissement. The Spheres didn't just invite us to Paris for the birthday. They are already establishing their forward operating base there."
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"Then we don't wait for the clock to strike midnight on her birthday," Ben said, a dangerous, cold edge entering his voice. "We go to Paris early. We take the fight directly to their doorstep."
I looked at Clara sleeping in the backseat. The Council of the Seven Spheres thought I was just a wealthy heiress playing with Vanguard's money. It was time to remind them exactly how I survived the first war.
