[CONTENT TEMPLATE HERE]
Chapter 839:
Cole shoved the man away and climbed into the back seat. The heavy doors sealed him in the dim, soundproof cabin. Shadows cut across the sharp angles of his face. He reached into his tactical vest and withdrew June’s phone — its screen spider-webbed with cracks from where it had fallen at the pier.
His thumb, trembling slightly, traced the jagged glass. A physical record of the violence she had endured tonight.
In the front passenger seat, the team’s lead hacker opened a heavily encrypted military-grade laptop. His fingers flew across the keys. He was reverse-engineering the communication signals from the burner phones recovered off the mercenaries.
Cole reached for the decanter in the center console, poured three fingers of bourbon, and threw it back in one swallow. The burn barely suppressed the nausea twisting in his stomach. The image of June being dragged into a car made him want to be sick.
“They used a multi-layered Tor network, sir,” the hacker reported, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cold air. “Highly sophisticated dark web protocol — professional grade. The IP bounces across dozens of countries p>
𝘚𝗁𝖺𝗿𝖾 𝘆о𝘶𝗿 𝘁h𝗼𝘂𝘨𝗁t𝘀 𝘰𝗻
Cole hurled the crystal glass at the bulletproof partition. It exploded into fragments.
“I don’t care if you have to burn the dark web to the ground,” Cole said. “Find the buyer p>
The hacker swallowed and bypassed standard protocols, hijacking the processing power of the Compton Group’s mainframe supercomputers to brute-force his way through an encrypted proxy server in Eastern Europe.
Lines of green code cascaded down the screen. Then a single IP address stabilized.
“Got it,” the hacker breathed. “It traces to an offshore cryptocurrency account in the Cayman Islands p>
The assistant picked up a satellite phone and dialed a cyber-warfare specialist in Geneva on the Compton payroll. Using illegal backchannels and a zero-day exploit, they forced their way into the dark web exchange’s backend servers, bypassing the blockchain anonymizer to reach the KYC identity verification records tied to the initial deposit on that wallet.
Five minutes later, the small wireless printer in the SUV hummed to life. The sound of paper sliding out was deafening in the tense silence of the cabin.
The assistant pulled the sheet free, scanned the final line of the decrypted data, and went still. The blood drained from his face.
Cole saw the shift in his posture and snatched the paper from his hand.
His eyes found the name at the bottom of the page.
Alycia Beasley.
The air left Cole’s lungs. Flashbacks detonated behind his eyes — Alycia crying in his office, playing the fragile victim. Then the angry red marks the ether cloth had left on June’s neck.
Crushing guilt and absolute, blinding rage collided in his chest.
Cole began to laugh. It started low and grew into something dark and unmoored — a sound that made the hair on his assistant’s arms stand up. It held nothing of sanity.
His hands tightened. He tore the paper in half. Then again. He shredded it into fragments, and with every tear, something in him fell away with it.
He pressed the comms button on the console, connecting directly to his security chief. His voice was as cold and flat as permafrost.
“Initiate a Code Red assembly. Every off-duty contractor, fully armed, at the rendezvous point in ten minutes p>