The air in the office had changed. It no longer felt stale; it felt charged, brittle with anticipation. Evelyn was hunched over her desk, the glow of the dual monitors reflecting in her wide, unblinking eyes. The text file was still open on one screen: THE PRICE FOR THE CURE WAS SILENCE. On the other, the compressed file, LEGACY_LEDGER_01, taunted her.
She had tried everything: standard decryption software, brute-force algorithms, even a few ancient, forgotten journalistic tricks she'd learned from a retired cyber-crimes reporter. The file was locked tight, secured with military-grade encryption that laughed at her laptop's meager processing power.
I need a lock picker, not a lock scratcher, she thought, running a frustrated hand through her hair. She looked at the anonymous message again. Whoever sent this didn't just want to tip her off; they wanted her to work for it. They had provided the match, but Evelyn had to find the tinder.
The coffee had gone cold, settling into a thick, bitter sludge. She pushed it away and reached for her phone—not the burner, but her primary one.
The name she pulled up belonged to a man she hadn't spoken to in three years: Marcus Volkov.
Marcus was, officially, a freelance forensic accountant. Unofficially, he was a mercenary wizard of digital finance, capable of finding the needle of illicit transfer in the haystack of a trillion-dollar corporate shell game. He wasn't cheap, and he was even less predictable. Their professional relationship had ended abruptly when Marcus had discovered his last corporate target was paying off his landlady's exorbitant rent—a classic Thorne-esque tactic, Evelyn now realized. Marcus had walked away, disgusted by his own accidental complicity.
Evelyn hesitated, her thumb hovering over the 'Call' button. Asking Marcus for help meant acknowledging the high stakes, and more importantly, introducing her meager savings to his astronomical consulting fees. She needed the best, though. Julian Thorne was playing a game of chess; Evelyn needed a nuclear warhead.
She pressed call. It rang six times before a low, gravelly voice answered.
"The clock is running, Reed. Your money or your life. Which one are I listening to?"
"Marcus. It's Evelyn. I need a decryption key, a ghost in the machine, and someone who understands how the obscenely wealthy use zeroes to silence the truth."
Silence stretched across the line, heavy with suspicion. "I retired from truth, Evelyn. I'm currently consulting for a vineyard in Tuscany. Their books are deliciously straightforward: grapes in, profit out. No soul-selling required."
"This isn't just about money, Marcus. It's about Aethel. Julian Thorne."
She heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end. That name, she knew, still tasted like ash to him.
"Thorne? I thought you knew better than to stick your finger in that socket. The man doesn't just buy companies, Evelyn. He buys outcomes. He bought the quiet life for five biotech founders in the last year. He can buy us a life of endless legal paperwork and crippling debt."
"He bought their silence, Marcus. But what if one of them is starting to feel the transaction was a bad trade? I have a ledger, Marcus. Encrypted. Too big for me. And I have a message: 'The price for the cure was silence.'"
She could hear the faint clink of glass on his end—perhaps a Tuscan wine, but probably something much stronger.
"A cure, you say? That would mean he didn't just suppress intellectual property; he suppressed relief." Marcus's voice hardened, the cynicism peeling away to reveal a deep, professional outrage. "He's using market forces to police human well-being. That's new, even for him."
"Can you break the file?"
A dramatic sigh. "I can break anything if the price is right. And my price, Evelyn, is higher now. I take no money from you, but you need to fund a few pieces of equipment, and more importantly, you need to swear on your journalistic integrity that you will see this through. If you flinch, if you take his cheque, I walk, and I erase every trace of my involvement. Thorne's money speaks, Evelyn. We have to make sure our truth screams."
"I won't flinch. What do you need?"
"I'll email you a list of hardware and a secure drop location. It's time to get a good, long look at how Julian Thorne budgets for silence."
Evelyn hung up, a sudden surge of adrenaline replacing the fatigue. Marcus was in. She had committed to the most expensive, most dangerous investigation of her career. The cold ledger file didn't look quite so impenetrable anymore.
She gathered her notebooks and her burner phone, carefully tucking them into a non-descript backpack. The Chronicle office, the symbol of free press, suddenly felt too porous, too exposed.
She knew what her first real move had to be: find one of the silenced. She needed to look into the eyes of a man who had chosen five hundred million dollars over his life's work, and ask him if he regretted the deal. She needed to understand the taste of that price.
She pulled up the name of the founder of BioGenesis Solutions again: Dr. Aris Thorne. The official records listed a private residence in a gated community in Malibu. The ultimate golden cage.
Evelyn grabbed her jacket. The night was cold, but the chill in her bones had nothing to do with the weather. It was the icy fear that she might fail, and the deeper fear that Julian Thorne might have already won, his money having successfully silenced every witness, and soon, perhaps, even her.