Entrance, Ellingson Mineral Company. After Klaus's text hit his phone, Cole slipped from the car and walked straight to the doors.
The security guard clocked the face and blinked. "Consultant—haven't you gone home?"
Cole—wearing The Plague's features—didn't miss a beat. "System security issues. I need to address them. Open up."
No suspicion. The guard buzzed him through.
Inside, Cole kept a quiet read on the patrol patterns. Even at night, Ellingson ran hot—roving teams and cameras everywhere. The tracker's ping led him to the seventh floor.
"Open up. I'm taking the kid—work to do," he said to the post at Dade's door.
Keys turned. The guard hauled Dade Murphy out. "Move," Cole said, steering him toward the lifts.
They rode to the top floor. At the security hub, Cole leaned in to the facial scanner. The door chirped: "Verification successful. Please enter."
The room beyond was Ellingson's nerve centre. A middle-aged tech already working a console turned at the hiss of the door. "Belford? Why are you—did you bring that kid with—"
Cole's smile didn't touch his eyes. "I need to do something. Take a nap."
He hooked the tech's neck, twisted, and dropped him to the tiles. "You're up," he told Dade, dragging the body aside.
Dade slid into the chair, projected a keyboard onto the desk surface, and his fingers blurred. "I'm using a Zero Cool payload. It'll swallow Ellingson's regional centres. Ten down; six to go. Then we copy and transfer."
Five minutes later, he narrated for Cole without looking up. On the main board, sectors flipped from green to red, one after another.
"Now loading a rabbit copy virus to overload via infinite duplication; it'll metastasize across the network," Dade said, gesturing at the left screen. "This pane is the data we're copying; that pane is the transfer volume."
Cole followed the colours and numbers. He didn't need to understand the code; the effect told the story.
Ten minutes later the copy pass finished.
"Files complete. Beginning transfer and wash."
The figures began to race. Money started its dance across the global banking mesh and bled, layer by layer, toward a Bahamas account—air-gapped and quiet—under Cole's control. The kind of place arms dealers and criminal outfits used, protected by shell atop shell.
"Six hundred eighty million dollars," Dade said, surprised despite himself. "That's what they've gnawed so far at the accelerated rate."
Cole felt the weight of it. And that was just the recent double-speed skim. Before that, The Plague's worm had been chewing the world grain by grain.
"Can you trace where their destination account sits?" Cole asked. In Hackers the partner org stayed offscreen; here, if he was going to steal from the thieves, he needed to know whose toes he'd stepped on.
"I'll try." Dade danced over keys. "Bahamas endpoint, layered obfuscation. Final beneficiary resolves to Owen Davian. Berlin ties."
Cole's mind flashed to Mission: Impossible III—Berlin, Vatican City, Owen Davian, the rabbit's-foot broker. Not his brother. A very different Owen. Not a simple man to cross. Fine. He'd prep for the blowback.
Two minutes later, the last sector drained. "All transferred," Dade said.
"Push the criminal package to Langley. The CIA will be very interested," Cole said.
"On it." Dade shipped the lot—worm ledgers, laundering paths, Belford's ops—to the CIA, then pocketed the Da Vinci floppy. He'd need it to burn the last of his own file.
Cole took a stick of explosive chewing gum, palmed it, and pressed it to the server chassis. He thumbed the trigger.
Boom—steel rang and the blast rolled through Ellingson's floors. Boots pounded in the hall.
"What happened?" a guard yelled, bursting in.
"Wenden turned traitor—dumped our data to the CIA," Cole snapped, already moving Dade. "I killed him, but he planted a bomb. I have to move this kid before Langley tags him first, or we are all in deep trouble."
No one doubted Belford. Everyone knew his reputation. The post waved them through, frantic to contain the fire.
Cole and Dade walked out of Ellingson clean.
—
CIA Headquarters, USA.
A folder tagged PRIORITY landed on IMF Director Theodore Brasseur's desktop. He opened it. Streams of transaction logs, system maps, malware trees, names. He didn't need a briefing to grasp it.
"John," Brasseur said into the phone, voice turning to steel, "pick up Eugene Belford, security consultant at Ellingson Mineral. Seize the entire company. Now."
He hung up and stared at the screen. Who sent him the package—and what did they want?