Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 46098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
He swiveled the center laptop around. “I’ve been reconstructing internal Helix docs from residue—draft saves, thumbprints in temp directories, and dev chat logs that were ‘deleted’ but not really. There’s a lot of redaction. There’s also a lot of sloppiness in how they handled their metadata. Which is where we live.” His fingers flew. Windows stacked, slid, and magnified. “Started as what I thought was a garden-variety internal investigation: resource leakage, missing keys, and unusual traffic from a sandbox cluster. Then we found this.”
A directory tree populated. Folders nested like Russian dolls.
“This”—he tapped the screen—“is The Ledger. That’s not me being dramatic. That’s the file name.”
A heat that wasn’t from the Florida summer crawled up my spine. “Open it.”
“Been doing just that, a sliver at a time.” He hit a quick series of keys, then glanced at Deviant. He dipped his chin once—do it. Jax hit return.
The rows of file names scrolled down, each one decrypting in a flicker of green, and the screen filled with a list of names.
No…not a list. A spreadsheet. A flood of neatly cataloged information.
Names. Thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands.
Politicians, CEOs, high-ranking feds. Every one tied to files thick with dirt so detailed and damning that you could ruin a man’s life from the comfort of your couch. Blackmail material so deep it could bury half the country.
They were organized in rows upon rows, columns inside columns. Each entry had a face thumbnail, a handful of unique IDs, and tags. Senator. Chair. Deputy Director. CTO. CFO. Prosecutor. Special Agent. Publisher. “Friendly.” “Handle available.” “Debt: personal.” “Debt: financial.” “Debt: legal.”
Under each, subfiles: recordings, transcripts, offsite backups, hashes. Some were labeled with dates and places. Some were blurrier—just strings that meant nothing unless you spoke Helix.
Edge let out a low whistle like he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it.
“This isn’t leverage,” he murmured, eyes scanning fast. “It’s a fucking economy.”
It was essentially a hit list in digital form. My gut tightened because I knew power when I saw it, and this wasn’t the kind you shared. This was power you killed for.
He toggled to a different pane. “These are the metadata logs. Shows who accessed it, from what subnet, with what keys. Who touched the encryption, who tried to move it. Who authored each layer of encryption.”
“Who built it?” Kane asked, words flat enough to cut.
“That was the first thing I looked for.” Jax sucked in a breath, clicked twice, and zoomed. “One name keeps showing. Not a lot—he’s careful—but enough.”
A new window opened. The personnel file for E. Leek.
Edge’s mouth quirked. “Like the vegetable?”
“Like the guy who built the fucking locks on this thing,” Jax replied. “Senior Data Security Engineer at Helix Core. Specializes in encryption protocols. And according to these logs, he’s been inside The Ledger more than anyone else.”
Deviant jumped in. “He wrote big pieces of the vault tech this thing sits on. He also wrote a lot of the test harness that’s supposed to keep it from…becoming this. I did not find his keys anywhere they shouldn’t be, but I found his fingerprints on the failsafes. And then fourteen days ago”—Jax switched the screen to another log. A line of access pings marched across the screen, each stamped with a time, a geo, and an internal ref—“someone using internal Helix credentials started pulling a string. Not a download. A check. It threw a probe at The Ledger host every two hours, then at six-minute increments, like someone was watching a clock and daring the guard dog to bark.”
Kane quirked a brow. “That isn’t a thief’s pattern.”
“Nope.” Jax drummed his fingers against the desk. “That’s a test pattern. A guy checking whether he can lift something out of the vault without tripping the sirens.”
“Leek?” I asked.
“Best guess.” Jax’s eyes cut to Ashlynn for the first time since he started. He didn’t soften the question. “Name ring a bell?”
Ashlynn’s brows pulled tight. “Leek…” She sat back slowly. “That was the alias used to hire me through the broker. I didn’t think twice about his name. Most of them use produce names, or birds, or colors. I never would have guessed it was a real one.” Her voice scraped at the end, a rasp of memory. “He said the contact would have a red cap. Was supposed to ask for directions to Redline Speedway. Cash on hand. No phones. No questions.”
“Which is why you didn’t carry ID.” It wasn’t an accusation, just putting it back in play so nobody pretended she’d been careless.
She nodded. “My clients don’t want a digital footprint. I don’t give them one either.”
Smart, angel.
Jax nodded. “That tracks. My read? He built the failsafes for storage. Only somebody decided to weaponize it. My gut says he found out what they were using it for and tried to get the information out before it burned him too. My instincts are screaming whistleblower. He wrote the harness. He would know exactly how it could be abused. So he tries to get it out. Something goes sideways. He hires a courier who won’t set off alarms. Only she does—because somebody else is already listening.”