The laptop arrived not more than an hour later. Leo had personally delivered it, placing the slim, unopened box on the table alongside a weighty pile of academic books on cryptography that might have served to prop the door open. He moved with a kind of unnerving, silent efficiency as if he had sucked all the air out of the room. "Everything you wanted," he said, his dark gaze lingering on her one beat too long. "Mr. Moretti is generous with those who prove interesting. I advise you not to become boring. Or reckless." With that parting shot of veiled advice, he was gone, and the lock clicked behind him, sealing her in with her new and dangerous toys. Serena unboxed the machine with slightly trembling hands. It was a work of art, a work of power, the latest version made absurdly overpowered for academic research. It was a symbol of Damiano's wealth and a statement of his utmost confidence, giving her the very best and yet leave her powerless. He was very wrong; she would show him.
For the first few hours, she did not even get the machine connected to the network. She worked offline instead, diving deep into the operating system, fingers flying over the keyboard, searching for Leo's digital eyes. It took her four hours to locate the surveillance software, and it was more sophisticated than she had feared. Proprietary, elegant, and sandwiched deeply into the core of the system-it must have been Damiano's own design. It logged all keystrokes, took occasional screenshots, and flagged any suspicious strings for immediate review. A digital panopticon. Now that she knew of its signature, its shape in the dark, she could begin to work against it. The first step was to create a smokescreen. She dialed into the firewalled external server and began to perform for her unseen audience. She downloaded digital texts, opened multitudes of windows, and began the painstaking development of a new, complex encryption algorithm-a project ambitious and academic enough to be believable. She kept leaving her notes, her failures, and much of her progress wide open, thereby fashioning the perfect illusion of a brilliant yet harmless hobbyist lost in her work.
Underneath the digital curtain, in a partitioned, encrypted corner of the hard drive that she had cloaked from the monitoring software, she commenced with her real work. She was forging a weapon. Drawing bits and pieces of code from the textbooks and utilizing her vast knowledge, she started writing a script. It was a fine and delicate balance. Each line of code would have to be perfect, crafted for the single-minded execution of surgical targeting: to isolate and capture one of the traitor's fleeting data packets. The script had to be a ghost, masquerading as a common network error upon execution, and never setting off Leo's alarms. One wrong command; one misplaced syntax error, and the whole fragile edifice would come tumbling down and expose her. She worked all night long, sustained only by black coffee delivered by the silent guard and her fervor-worse than agony-to be gripping this one chance. Outside her window, life had twinkled into day, and even a break in the dull grey dawn, yet she worked on, locked into the lines of coding on her computer screen.
Now it was finally ready. Her heart pounded a frantic, heavy rhythm within her ribcage as she prepared to cast her digital net. The decoy project was being run in a visible window-a perfectly reasonable excuse for the frenetic activity. She watched the clock on the screen, pulse hammering, every fiber of being locked into the top of the next minute. The instant the second hand ticked toward the next count, she activated the script, a black command window popped onto her screen, impossibly fast-scrolling text raining its chaos down. A storm of data, the utter racket of the network. She held her breath, eyes scanned for the one signal among the noise. Thirty agonizing seconds passed by in absolute silence. A cold knot of fear constricted her stomach. Had she missed it? Or worse, had the traitor changed their timing? Had she been discovered? Then, just as she was about to abort the program, two words appeared at the bottom of the screen, stark and beautiful in their simplicity: Packet Captured. A wave of dizzying triumph swept over her. She had it: one tiny, encrypted thread of the conspiracy that was poisoning Damiano's empire. Tucked safely in her machine was a secret that could change everything. But before she could fathom beginning the monumental task of decrypting it, an ominous electronic buzz split through the stillness. The intercom on the wall crackled alive. It was Leo's voice, as frigid and calm as a winter lake. "Serena. Mr. Moretti has been admiring your diligence from his study. He would like you to explain what you've been working on."