Chapter 59 - The Counter-Hack
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My blood turned to ice.
"Jax!" I screamed into my earpiece. "Check the European banking servers! Now!"
"Oh my god," Jax’s panicked voice crackled through the static. "He's right, Boss! A dormant worm just activated inside our closed-loop network. It’s chewing through the Council’s financial data. Billions of euros are being systematically wiped from the grid! I can't stop it!"
The Ghost chuckled softly, the wind catching his dark hair. "Without money, your fragile alliance in Europe will crumble by morning. They will turn on you, Emily. Your reign ends tonight."
He stepped off the ledge, zipping rapidly down the steel cable into the darkness of the Macao skyline.
I didn't waste a second. I ran back into the smoke-filled VIP room. Elias had managed to disarm the frantic buyers and was holding his bleeding shoulder.
"We have to isolate the mainframe!" I yelled, rushing to the master terminal.
"I'm trying, Boss, but the virus is polymorphic!" Jax cried over the comms. "It’s rewriting its own code faster than I can quarantine it! The European treasury will be gone in sixty seconds!"
"Then we burn the bridge!" I ordered, grabbing a heavy brass statue from the table.
"What?!" Jax yelled.
"If the virus is traveling from this terminal to the offshore servers, we physically sever the connection!" I yelled.
I raised the heavy brass statue and brought it down with shattering force onto the master terminal. The screen cracked. I hit it again, and again, tearing the internal hard drive and the optical cables completely apart. Sparks showered over my hands, burning my skin, but I didn't stop until the machine was a mangled pile of sparking plastic and metal.
The room plunged into silence.
"Jax..." I breathed heavily, dropping the statue. "Status."
There was a long, agonizing pause on the radio.
"Connection severed," Jax breathed, sounding like he might pass out. "You stopped it at eighty percent, Boss. The European treasury took a hit, but the core foundation is intact. Your empire survives."
May you like
I leaned against the destroyed console, wiping sweat and ash from my forehead.
We had survived the night, but the Yakuza had drawn first blood.
