Chapter 13: The Final Gambit

Chapter 13: The Final Gambit

The communication in the honeypot was no longer a cautious exchange of information; it had become the frantic, high-speed dialogue of a command center in the final moments before an assault. The blinking cursor was a shared heartbeat between a ghost in an apartment and a detective in a precinct, two worlds connected by a single, desperate objective.

He's running, Nemesis’s message appeared, stark and without preamble. Tonight.

Isabella Rossi, hunched over the dedicated monitor in her darkened office, felt a jolt of ice in her veins. The charts and diagrams papering her walls suddenly felt like relics of a battle already lost. “What do you mean running?” she typed, her knuckles white. “The Feds are getting the seizure warrants ready. His assets are about to be frozen.”

Too slow, the reply came instantly. He knows. He's liquidating. A single, massive wire transfer scheduled for 0200 hours. He's cleaning out his domestic accounts and moving every last dollar to a private, ghost bank in Macau. One transaction to erase his entire financial footprint in this country. If that money disappears, so does he.

Rossi stared at the words, the scope of the disaster unfolding in her mind. It was the ultimate escape plan. Croft wasn't just weathering the storm; he was pulling his entire empire out from under their feet. The RICO case, the federal task force, all the evidence they had painstakingly assembled—it would all mean nothing if their primary target vanished with all the money. They would be left with a handful of enforcers and a mountain of useless paperwork.

This was it. The endgame. Not a slow, methodical checkmate, but a sudden, violent flipping of the board. They had one chance, a window of a few hours, to stop him for good.

Can you stop it? she typed, the question feeling impossibly heavy.

There was a pause. For a full ten seconds, the screen was just a black void. Rossi could almost feel the phantom on the other end, the whirring of a brilliant mind calculating odds and assessing risks she couldn't even comprehend.

Stopping it isn't enough, Nemesis finally replied. We need to do more. We need to seize it. And we need the server logs from the transaction itself. That's the smoking gun, the irrefutable link. We can't just block the transfer; we have to catch it in our own net.

Rossi leaned forward, her mind racing to keep up. “What are you proposing?”

A high-stakes hijacking, the text bloomed on the screen. A three-stage operation. It’s audacious. It’s borderline insane. And if a single line of code fails, he gets away clean, and his security will trace the intrusion back to me within seconds.

The plan unfolded in a series of concise, chillingly technical messages.

Stage One: Infiltration. The transfer will be initiated through a heavily encrypted, proprietary portal. I've found a zero-day vulnerability in the encryption protocol, a backdoor that only exists for a few seconds during the initial handshake. I have to hit that window perfectly to gain access.

Stage Two: Redirection. Once inside, I can't just kill the transfer; their system would flag it as a communications failure and lock down. I have to reroute it. I’ll perform a man-in-the-middle attack, altering the recipient account number from his ghost bank in Macau to a destination of our choosing. It has to look like a legitimate, successful transaction on his end.

Stage Three: Exfiltration. As the money is being redirected, I'll execute the real payload. I'm going to clone his entire transaction server. Every log, every key, every bit of incriminating data, copied in real-time. It’s the digital equivalent of stealing the bank vault and getting a signed confession from the bank robber on the way out.

Rossi’s mind reeled. It was the most daring cybercrime she had ever heard of, only this time it would be committed in the service of the law. The risks were astronomical. For her, it meant orchestrating a federal seizure of funds based on the word of an anonymous criminal informant, a move that could end her career if it went sideways. For Nemesis, the risk was absolute. If he was caught, he wasn't just facing prison; he was facing a man who made problems permanently disappear.

She glanced at one of her other monitors, which was tracking the BOLO on Marcus Thorne’s sedan. The car was a frantic predator, moving erratically through the city’s industrial district, pinging traffic cameras near the old addresses of two more of his former classmates. Croft's rabid dog was off the leash, his hunt for Nemesis growing more desperate by the hour. The digital threat had a very real, very physical counterpart that was closing in.

“The Feds are my problem,” she typed, making the decision. She was all in. “I can get them to set up a secure, anonymous seizure account. I’ll tell them we have a high-level human source inside his organization. They’ll want details I can’t give them, but the promise of seizing that much capital will be too tempting for them to refuse. I can make it happen. Can you really do your part?”

The code is already written, Nemesis replied, his confidence a cold, steadying force. But there is no room for error. The slightest deviation, the smallest unexpected security patch on his end, and the whole plan collapses.

“The plan is the only chance we have,” Rossi typed. “The account will be ready. I’ll feed you the routing number through this channel exactly five minutes before the transfer is scheduled to begin. Once you have it, you’re on your own until the data hits our servers.”

Understood. I'll need complete radio silence once the operation begins. Any communication could create a detectable data packet.

“You’ll have it.” Rossi hesitated for a moment, an uncharacteristic urge to connect with the person behind the screen rising in her. “Be careful, Nemesis.”

The reply was swift and devoid of sentiment. Luck is a variable I don't account for. Tonight, we make our own. Nemesis out.

The text vanished. The channel was dead.

Rossi pushed back from her desk and stood up, a field general whose only connection to her best soldier was a screen that had just gone dark. She picked up her phone, her thumb hovering over the number for the lead FBI agent on the task force. She had a story to sell, a career to gamble, and a criminal empire to burn to the ground.

Across the city, Eli Vance watched the honeypot window close. His apartment was silent, save for the low hum of his machines. On his main monitor, the architecture of Croft’s private banking network was mapped out like a celestial chart. On another, a dozen different scripts and attack vectors were queued up, ready to be deployed. On a third, a simple digital clock was counting down.

Two hours and forty-seven minutes.

He cracked his knuckles, the sound unnaturally loud in the quiet room. The years of hiding, of being a victim, of seeking a simple, clean revenge—it had all led to this single night. He was no longer just a ghost in the machine. He was the weapon.

The game was set. It was time to burn the board.