Chapter 16 - Decryption
The penthouse was silent except for the rhythmic, rapid clicking of Elise’s keyboard.
It was 3:00 AM. Graham sat beside her at the glass dining table, watching the reflection of scrolling code illuminate her pale, focused face.
“He used a poly-alphabetic cipher layered over a standard AES-256,” Elise murmured, her eyes tracking a river of hexadecimal data. “It’s clever, but it’s sloppy. He reused the salt.”
With a final, decisive strike of the Enter key, the screen flashed green. The encrypted files unspooled into neat, readable directories.
Elise opened the primary ledger and gasped softly.
“Graham. Look at this.”
Graham leaned in, his shoulder pressing against hers.
The screen displayed a list of buyers for Thorne’s backdoor keys. It wasn’t just corporate rivals. It was defense contractors. Energy grids.
“He’s selling out national infrastructure,” Graham said, the quiet fury in his voice making the room feel ten degrees colder. “This isn’t just a hostile takeover anymore, Elise. This is a demolition.”
“I have his personal routing numbers,” Elise said, her fingers dancing across the keys as she traced the funds. “He’s funneling the syndicate money through an art dealership in Geneva. I can freeze his entire liquid fortune with three lines of code.”
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Graham looked at the woman beside him, entirely captivated by her brilliant, beautiful mind.
“Do it,” he said.
