Chapter 5: The Snake Takes the Bait

Chapter 5: The Snake Takes the Bait

The confirmation didn't come through a line of code or a digital feeler. It came the old-fashioned way: over a glass of overpriced whiskey in a dimly lit bar, far from the sterile glow of Silicon Valley. Megan sat opposite Jen, a former colleague who had escaped the corporate grind of OmniCorp for the marginally less soul-crushing world of venture capital.

“You didn’t hear this from me,” Jen said, swirling the amber liquid in her glass. She leaned forward, her voice a low murmur. “But OmniCorp is in a frenzy. Marcus Thorne has basically cleared the decks. All non-essential R&D is on hold. They’re pouring everything into a new skunkworks project.”

Megan kept her expression neutral, a mask of polite curiosity. “Oh? Chasing the next big thing?”

Jen let out a short, cynical laugh. “Chasing a ghost. They’re calling it ‘Project Chimera.’ My contacts in their engineering department are pulling their hair out. They’re trying to reverse-engineer some code they ‘acquired.’ Something about quantum compression. They say it’s the most elegant, revolutionary algorithm they’ve ever seen, but they can’t make it work without some kind of proprietary hardware.”

Megan’s heart was a trip-hammer against her ribs, but she just nodded slowly, taking a small, deliberate sip of her drink. “Sounds ambitious.”

“It gets better,” Jen continued, her eyes alight with the thrill of high-stakes gossip. “You’ll never guess who’s leading the integration team.”

Megan feigned ignorance. “Someone from their top brass, I assume?”

“You’d think so. But no. Thorne is apparently fast-tracking this new hire, some kid they picked up a few weeks ago. A real wunderkind, supposedly. He claims to have an inside track on the original developers. Name’s Santiago Vargas.”

The name landed on the table between them with a soft, heavy thud. Megan held Jen’s gaze, the clinking of glasses and low chatter of the bar fading into a distant hum. Wunderkind. It was so perfect, so utterly, predictably absurd.

“Vargas,” Megan repeated, letting the name roll off her tongue as if she’d never heard it before. “Never heard of him.”

“No one has,” Jen shrugged. “But he’s got Thorne’s ear. He’s the golden boy. Good luck to him, I say. That place eats its own.”

---

Meanwhile, in a glass-walled conference room on the fortieth floor of the OmniCorp tower, the golden boy was holding court. Santiago ‘Santos’ Vargas leaned back in a plush leather chair, a custom-tailored suit having replaced his mud-stained hoodie. He gestured languidly at a massive screen displaying the very lines of code Elara had so carefully crafted.

“The synergy here is self-evident,” Santos said, addressing a table of senior engineers and executives, all of them decades his senior. “The legacy platform Aether-Works was building was fundamentally flawed. Their leadership was… uninspired.” He gave a small, condescending smile. “I was able to salvage their core algorithm before the entire enterprise collapsed under the weight of their mismanagement.”

He was a master of the narrative, recasting his betrayal as a heroic rescue. The truth—that he was a glorified script kiddie who had deployed a pre-packaged espionage tool—was buried beneath layers of corporate jargon and sheer, unblinking arrogance.

“The encryption was trivial,” he lied smoothly, “but the code itself is a work of genius. My genius, of course, was in recognizing its potential.”

An older engineer, a man named Harris with tired eyes and a healthy dose of skepticism, cleared his throat. “Mr. Vargas, our teams have been working around the clock, and we’re still unable to replicate the results without the… hardware component you mentioned. The leaked schematics for this ‘Quantum Resonance Chamber’ are theoretical at best.”

Santos waved a dismissive hand, as if swatting away a fly. “Hardware is a triviality, Harris. A matter of fabrication. The intellectual property is what matters. And I have it on good authority,” he said, his voice dropping as if sharing a sacred secret, “that the founders are desperate. They’ve lost their funding. They’re hemorrhaging cash. They’ll be looking to offload the prototype hardware for pennies on the dollar.”

He didn't know this, of course. He was inventing it on the spot. But it was what they wanted to hear, and in the rarified air of the OmniCorp boardroom, confident lies were more valuable than inconvenient truths. His audience nodded, their greed outweighing their caution. Santos was offering them a shortcut to market dominance, a silver bullet gift-wrapped in a story of his own brilliance. Who were they to question it? They had seen the code. It was real. Therefore, the rest must be true.

His success had inflated his ego to a colossal scale, making him completely blind. He didn’t see the inconsistencies, the convenient timing of the leaks, or the sheer, dumb luck of it all. He saw only a reflection of his own greatness. He was no longer just a spy; in his mind, he was a visionary, the hero of this story.

---

“He’s calling himself the project lead.” Megan’s voice was a tight cord of controlled fury as she relayed the details to Elara and Todd back in the RV. “He told them he ‘salvaged’ the code from us.”

Todd let out a low whistle, a mixture of disgust and grudging admiration for the sheer audacity. “The snake isn’t just in the grass anymore. They’ve invited him into the house and given him the master bedroom.”

“It’s better than we could have hoped for,” Elara said, her voice devoid of emotion. She stood before the whiteboard, her expression as cold and sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel. “They’re not just chasing the bait anymore. They’ve put their star pupil in charge of reeling it in. He’ll suppress any internal dissent, dismiss any technical questions, and bulldoze anyone who gets in his way. His ego is now our primary shield.”

She uncapped a black marker. “They’re expecting us to be desperate. They’re waiting for us to try and sell them the hardware. So that’s what we’ll do.”

“We don’t have any hardware,” Todd reminded her. “The schematics I drew are basically nonsense art.”

“We don’t need the real hardware,” Elara said, turning to face them. Her eyes were dark, burning with a chilling intensity. “We just need a box. A black box. A beautiful, perfectly engineered device that they can plug into their systems.”

She drew a simple square on the whiteboard. “Inside, Todd, you’ll build just enough circuitry to make it look legitimate. But the real core won’t be hardware.” She looked from the box to her laptop. “It will be software. A complete, working version of the compression algorithm. No tricks. No flaws. It will pass every diagnostic they throw at it. It will integrate seamlessly into their new flagship product. It will work flawlessly.”

Megan frowned, a flicker of confusion and doubt in her eyes. “Wait. We’re just going to… give them what they want? After all this?”

“We’re going to give them a gift,” Elara corrected, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. The final, venomous piece of her plan was about to be laid bare. “And buried so deep inside that perfect code, so intricately woven into its very logic that no scan will ever find it, will be a little extra something.”

She drew a small circle inside the square on the whiteboard, like a single, malevolent eye.

“A logic bomb. A digital detonator, tied to a specific date and time. The exact moment Marcus Thorne stands on stage at their Global Launch event and tells the world about his revolutionary new technology.”

The RV fell silent. The scope of it was monstrous. They weren't just planning to trick OmniCorp anymore. They were planning to execute them, live on a global stage.

“The Trojan Horse,” Todd breathed, the name landing with the weight of history.

Elara nodded, her expression grim. “Santos will lead them to our door. He’ll champion the deal. And he will personally hand-deliver the weapon that will burn his new kingdom to the ground.”