Chapter 5: The Bleed
Chapter 5: The Bleed
Richard’s corporate headquarters was a glass-and-steel monolith downtown, a monument to his fragile ego. At 4:00 AM, the building was silent, operating on a skeleton-crew of bored night guards. I bypassed the exterior biometric scanners using a localized EMP burst that fried the circuits, and slipped into the sub-zero server room like a shadow passing over glass.
Lily had mentioned ledgers. If Richard was moving cartel money, he was too arrogant to do it on paper alone; he had a digital paper trail. I plugged a custom-built, military-grade decryption drive into the central mainframe. Lines of green code cascaded across my black screen. It took twelve nerve-wracking minutes to break through Richard’s expensive, but ultimately commercial, firewalls.
The data was a goldmine of damnation. Shell companies in Panama, phantom properties in Miami, dummy corporations in shell states, and billions of dollars washed squeaky clean for the Los Soles cartel. I downloaded every single byte of it onto my drive, permanently wiped his local and cloud backups, and left a single, digital text file sitting dead center on his desktop. The file was named: TICK_TOCK.
