Chapter 4 Saving Isla II

AUDREY

I grab my primary laptop and run toward the building, leaving the rest of my equipment behind. If someone wants to play games with my daughter's life, they're about to learn why I was the FBI's most requested cyber crimes agent.

The school hallways are chaos. Emergency responders try to breach doors with crowbars and small explosives. Parents scream names. Teachers sob into phones. The sound echoes off cinderblock walls, a symphony of desperation.

I move through it all, following my laptop's signal trace. The source is close – computer lab, probably. Hidden in plain sight among dozens of networked machines.

The lab is empty except for one workstation running familiar code. My code. Frank's code. Our code, perverted and weaponized.

On the screen, a message appears in real-time: _Getting closer, Ms. Romano. But not close enough. Your daughter is very brave. She's trying to keep the other children calm while the water rises. Such a good little leader, just like her father._

I want to put my fist through the monitor. Instead, I plug my laptop into the workstation and begin the digital equivalent of performing surgery with a chainsaw.

Nine minutes.

My fingers move faster than thought, dismantling the attack from the inside. I'm not being careful anymore. Not worried about preserving evidence or maintaining system integrity. I'm being surgical and brutal and absolutely ruthless.

The kill switch is buried in seventeen layers of encryption, disguised as routine maintenance protocol. But it's booby-trapped. Disarm it wrong, and Room 15 floods instantly instead of in nine minutes.

Seven minutes.

BUZZ.

Another text: _Isla says hi mommy. she says the water is getting deep but she's helping scared kids stand on desks. she says she loves you._

Someone is in that room. Someone is watching twenty-four children face death and sending me play-by-play updates like it's entertainment.

I make a choice that goes against every protocol I've ever learned. Instead of disarming the kill switch safely, I'm going to overload it. Blow out every system in the school if necessary, but get those doors open.

Five minutes.

I upload a virus of my own creation – something I coded years ago but never used. Too dangerous for anything but absolute emergencies. It's designed to cascade through networked systems, destroying everything it touches but forcing every connected lock to default to open.

It will destroy the school's entire computer network. It will cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. It will probably get me arrested.

I don't care.

Three minutes.

I initiate the upload and watch my virus tear through the school's systems. Smoke begins rising from servers throughout the building as circuits overload and safety systems fail. The smell of burning electronics fills the air.

Then, accompanied by the sound of electronic death rattles, every door in the school clicks open simultaneously.

CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.

Children pour out of classrooms. Parents rush in. Emergency responders flood the building.

But I'm not celebrating. I'm running toward Room 15, laptop still clutched in my hands, following the signal trace that's still active, still broadcasting from somewhere inside the school.

The person who did this is still here. Still watching. Still playing games.

I round the corner toward Room 15 and see something that stops me cold.

A figure in maintenance coveralls walking calmly away from the chaos, disappearing through an emergency exit. Someone who doesn't run or panic or look back.

Someone who moves with the confidence of a person who planned this.

Someone I recognize.

My blood turns to ice.

Because the person walking away from my daughter's near-death experience is supposed to be in federal prison.

---

FRANK

Morena walks into my office without knocking, which means someone's dead or we're about to be.

I'm halfway through my second cup of coffee, reading quarterly projections that look too good to be real, when she appears in my doorway looking like she just watched a car accident happen in slow motion.

"We have a problem."

I set down my mug. The coffee's gone cold anyway. "What kind of problem?"

"Three clients just terminated their contracts. Simultaneously. Seven-thirty this morning."

My brain does that thing where it immediately starts calculating damage control. Three clients could mean anything from a minor revenue hit to complete financial disaster, depending on which three clients we're talking about.

"Which ones?"

"Pentagon, Homeland Security, and the EU Commission."

*Fuck.*

Those aren't just clients. They're the foundation of everything I built. The contracts that legitimized my company, that turned us from a scrappy startup into a global cybersecurity powerhouse. Without them, we're just another tech company in a city full of tech companies.

"What reason did they give?"

"Security concerns. They won't elaborate."

Security concerns. From clients who hired us specifically for our security expertise. It's like being fired from a restaurant for knowing how to cook.

My phone buzzes against the desk. Personal phone, not work phone. I glance at the screen expecting spam, but it's a message from a number I don't recognize.

*Check your personal email. The one you think nobody knows about. -Someone who remembers.*

That cold feeling starts in my stomach and spreads outward. I have seventeen different email addresses, most of them for business or spam or online shopping. But there's one I set up in college, back when I thought email addresses were permanent things you'd keep forever. The one I've never changed because changing it would mean admitting that some parts of your past are supposed to stay buried.

The one Audrey used to email me funny articles at two in the morning when she couldn't sleep.

I open my laptop and navigate to that account. There's one new message, sent twenty minutes ago.

*Subject: Thought you should know*

*From: A.R.*

My hands stop working properly. A.R. Audrey Romano. The woman who walked out of my life eight years ago without explanation, leaving nothing but a note on my kitchen counter that said "I can't do this anymore."

I click open the message.

*Frank,*

*Your company has some interesting vulnerabilities. Thought you should know. Also, Boulder has nice schools.*

*-A.R.*

*P.S. - Call me.*