Chapter 9 - Decrypting the Clue
"What do you mean he gave us the answer?" Sophia asked, leaning over my desk and staring at the blank password prompt on the screen.
"Dominic is a narcissist," I explained, my fingers flying across the keyboard to pull up the transcripts of the financial records from his trial. "He has an ego the size of a skyscraper. He couldn't resist calling to taunt me, to tell me I was just a 'glorified calculator.' But he also said, 'The key is in the past, Anna. And you're too weak to look back.'"
Chloe pulled up a chair. "You think he was talking in code?"
"I think Julian visited him to make sure he wouldn't turn state's evidence," I said. "But Dominic resents Julian. Julian is free, rich, and living a luxury life while Dominic eats prison food. Dominic wants Julian to fall, but he’s too much of a coward to do it directly. So, he taunted me with the clue."
"The past," Elena whispered from the doorway. "What does that mean?"
"When Dominic and I first built his company's accounting software, we set up a master reset protocol for our local servers," I muttered, digging deep into the legacy files I had saved on an encrypted hard drive. "We used a specific alphanumeric string based on the date we signed the incorporation papers and the serial number of our first server."
I found the old file. The string was DCL-0814-SRV992.
"Julian has half the key," I reasoned. "If Dominic used his old master protocol as his half of the offshore cipher, it would be a sequence he would never forget, and one Julian would never be able to guess."
I typed the sequence into the Apex Holdings firewall prompt.
The screen blinked red. ACCESS DENIED. REQUIRES 16-DIGIT SEQUENTIAL KEY.
"Damn it," Chloe sighed.
"Wait," I said, my eyes narrowing. "He said I was too weak to look back. He isn't talking about the company's past. He's talking about my past. The thing he thinks broke me."
My hand began to tremble slightly. The scar tissue ached with a phantom heat. I closed my eyes, forcing myself to step back into the memory of that terrible night in the kitchen. The glowing stove. The searing pain.
"The date," I whispered. "The date of the assault. November 12th. And the exact monetary value of the fraud I exposed that night to put him away."
I typed: NOV12-3940000-DC
I hit enter.
May you like
The screen froze for a grueling three seconds. Then, it flashed green.
ACCESS GRANTED. WELCOME TO APEX HOLDINGS MASTER LEDGER.
