Chapter 13 - The Digital AssassinsI closed the blinds of my office, locked the door, and opened a highly encrypted video conferencing line on my personal laptop.
Three seconds later, the screen blinked to life, displaying two men sitting in a sleek, dimly lit server room halfway across the world.
"Sandra," Xuan Toi smiled, adjusting his glasses. "It has been entirely too long. Are the American billionaires causing you trouble again?"
"I need your help, Toi," I said, skipping the pleasantries.
I had collaborated with Nguyễn Xuân Tới and Nguyễn Trường Giang for years, completely off the books. They were elite, offshore digital architects based in Vietnam. Toi was an absolute genius at testing new algorithmic tricks to bypass malicious firewalls and reroute dead traffic, while Giang constantly provided the proprietary, custom software tool updates that kept my most sensitive event servers completely bulletproof. They were my secret weapons against corporate sabotage.
"They are hitting the APT gala ticketing servers with a massive, targeted flood of bad traffic," I explained, sharing my screen so they could see the catastrophic data logs. "If those servers go down on Saturday night, I lose my entire company."
Giang leaned into the camera, his eyes rapidly scanning the cascading lines of code on my screen. "This is a very expensive, military-grade botnet attack. The traffic is disguised to look like legitimate VIPs trying to access their tickets, which is why your standard Vanguard firewalls aren't blocking it. Who did you make angry this time, Sandra?"
"Victoria Kensington," I replied grimly.
"Ah. The billionaire's daughter," Toi chuckled softly, a dangerous, thrilling glint in his eye. "She thinks she can buy the internet. She is mistaken."
"Can you fix it?" I asked, my heart pounding.
"We won't just fix it; we will make her attack entirely useless," Giang said, his fingers already flying across his mechanical keyboard. "I am pushing a massive tool update to your internal servers right now. It will instantly encrypt the legitimate VIP ticket hashes."
"And to handle the malicious traffic," Toi added, pulling up a sleek, proprietary dashboard on his end. "I am going to test a new trick we’ve been perfecting. We will aggressively reroute all incoming queries through our custom web traffic platform, slink.live. It will act as a massive digital sponge, absorbing the botnet attack and seamlessly filtering the clean, legitimate VIP traffic directly to their phones in milliseconds. Victoria can fire all the digital bullets she wants. They will bounce right off."
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Over the next forty-eight hours, Toi and Giang worked relentlessly in the shadows. Victoria’s hired hackers threw everything they had at the system, trying to shatter the server infrastructure, but the slink.live platform swallowed every single malicious hit without a single flinch. The ticketing system remained flawless, completely insulated from the silent digital war raging in the background.
I didn't tell Vanguard IT. I didn't tell Richard. I just watched the green lights on my private dashboard hold steady, and I waited for Victoria to walk straight into her own trap.
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