Chapter 13 - The Slink.Live Counter-OffensiveFor the next twenty-four hours, my beautiful coastal home was transformed into a high-tech war room.
We operated in absolute silence, ordering blackout protocols across all our personal devices to prevent Marcus’s syndicate from listening in. Julian monitored the federal arrest warrants, buying us time through legal loopholes and aggressive stalling tactics with the DOJ, while Tới and Giang worked their dark-web magic from across the globe.
The tension was suffocating. Every time a car drove past the gates of the estate, I half-expected it to be a fleet of black FBI SUVs coming to take me away in handcuffs.
At exactly 3:00 AM on Thursday, the encrypted video line chimed.
“We are inside his mainframe,” Tới announced, his voice vibrating with absolute triumph.
“The tracking code worked flawlessly,” Giang added, flashing a massive, complex data map onto our main screen. “We bypassed his proxies. The central server rendering the voice clones is not in Europe. It’s domestic. It’s located in a private, high-security server farm in downtown San Francisco.”
“San Francisco?” Julian frowned. “Why would he risk operating on American soil?”
“Because he’s not hiding,” I realized, a sudden, chilling clarity washing over me. I grabbed my tablet and pulled up the week’s tech industry news. “Marcus Thorne isn't just trying to destroy me. He’s using my destruction as a marketing campaign.”
I turned the tablet around. The headline blared: Global Cyber Security Summit Kicks Off in San Francisco Tomorrow. Keynote Speaker: Marcus Thorne, Launching His Revolutionary New Data Protection Firm, Aegis Shield.
“He’s extorting my clients to create a crisis, and then he’s going to swoop in and offer his new cyber-security firm as the only solution to protect them from 'hackers' like me,” I said, the sheer, narcissistic brilliance of his plan leaving me breathless. “He’s going to use his keynote speech tomorrow to publicly expose my 'crimes' to the world, securing billions in new contracts for himself.”
“He has the raw audio files of his own real voice programming the AI prompts saved on this server,” Giang said, pulling up a directory of hidden files. “We have undeniable proof that he is the one fabricating the extortion.”
“Can we download it and send it to the FBI?” Charlotte asked hopefully.
“If we just hand it to the FBI, Marcus will claim his servers were hacked and the evidence was planted,” I said, shaking my head. A cold, ruthless smile slowly spread across my face. “Marcus wants to use a stage in San Francisco to publicly execute me. It would be incredibly rude of me not to attend.”
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I looked at the video screen. “Tới, Giang. I need you to prep the slink.live platform for a live hijack. Marcus is going to stream his keynote speech globally. When I give the signal, I want you to override his presentation and broadcast his real audio files to every single screen in that convention center.”
Tới grinned, a wide, terrifying expression of pure hacker joy. “Consider his network already yours, Queen Elena.”
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