Story code: ST-001832
Part 3: The Trace
The blinding LED light of the camera rig seared my retinas. The reporter thrust a microphone toward my face, her teeth gleaming in a practiced, predatory smile. “Marcus, we’re live in three…”
Sterling hovered his thumb over his phone screen. He had given me an impossible choice: confess to terminal brain cancer on live television, or watch him press a button that would instantly destroy my life. But Sterling was a venture capitalist, which meant he was obsessed with optics. He wanted a tragic hero thanking him for his philanthropy. He couldn’t press that button if his tragic hero was currently dying on his shoes.
I had two seconds. I let my eyes roll back into my skull, went completely limp, and let gravity do the rest.
I hit the hardwood floor with a bone-rattling thud. David shrieked. The microphone fed back with an ear-piercing squeal. “Give him air!” David yelled, his heavy footsteps rushing toward me. Through slitted eyes, I saw Sterling freeze, his face contorting in frustration as the cameraman aggressively zoomed in on my lifeless body. Sterling couldn’t hit send now. It would look like he was attacking a comatose cancer patient.
David hauled me up by my armpits, dragging my dead weight through the swinging doors into the back breakroom. He shoved me onto the faux-leather couch. “Stay here, don’t move, I’m calling an ambulance!” he panicked, sprinting back out to handle the chaotic crowd.
The second the door clicked shut, I bolted upright. The live broadcast was avoided, but Sterling’s automated delay on the email was still ticking. I had roughly nine minutes before it hit the corporate outbox. But lying on that floor, a realization had hit me: Sterling was a finance guy. He didn’t know how to rip metadata from an image or script an automated encrypted email blast. He had paid someone to do it.
I yanked my phone from my apron and opened Termux, accessing the backdoor script my friend Jax had built for me to bypass the coffee shop’s aggressive bandwidth throttles. It wasn’t meant for cyber warfare, but it could trace basic network paths. I copied the raw header data from the original extortion email and pasted it into Jax’s script, forcing it to run a reverse trace on the sender’s origin.
Lines of green text cascaded down my screen, hopping through proxy relays and stripping away the cheap VPN masking. The sender IP didn’t trace back to a burner phone or Sterling’s private estate. It pinged a static, registered IP address located exactly two blocks away: the regional headquarters of Sterling Luxury Developments.
More importantly, the ping resolved to a specific local machine ID: `WS-CDAVIS-DATA`.
Chloe Davis.
The name hit me like a physical blow. Chloe was a regular. She came in every Tuesday and Thursday, always ordered a flat white, and always sat quietly in the corner working on her laptop. She was a data analyst for the very firm bulldozing my mother’s neighborhood. Last week, she had even asked how my chemo was going. Sterling hadn’t found me. She had.
I slipped out the back delivery door into the alley. The cold afternoon air hit my sweaty face as I broke into a full sprint down the cobblestones. I tore off my green apron, tossing it into a dumpster. Two blocks down, the gleaming glass facade of Sterling Developments stood like a sterile, mocking monument among the historic brick walk-ups they were actively trying to demolish.
I shoved through the heavy revolving doors, entirely ignoring the security guard shouting at me from the front desk, and marched straight toward the open-plan bullpen I’d seen from the street a hundred times.
I spotted her instantly. Chloe was sitting in a glass-walled cubicle, wearing a bulky knit sweater, staring intently at three vertical monitors. I grabbed the handle of her glass door and yanked it open. It slammed against the rubber stopper with a violent, echoing crack.
She jumped, spinning around in her ergonomic chair. Her eyes went wide. “Marcus? What are you… you’re supposed to be at the shop…”
“Cancel the script, Chloe,” I said, my voice dropping the raspy, pathetic affectation I used for the public. I stood at my full height, breathing hard, my chest heaving with unfeigned stamina. I locked eyes with her, letting her see the sheer, uncompromised strength of a man who had absolutely nothing left to lose.
She blinked, clutching a red pen to her chest. “Script? Marcus, are you okay? You look…”
“I look healthy. I know,” I snapped, stepping into the small office and closing the glass door behind me. “I also know about `WS-CDAVIS-DATA`. I know you sent the extortion email, not Sterling. He’s just the empty suit taking credit for your work.”
Her face drained of all color. The pen slipped from her trembling fingers, clattering loudly onto her desk.
“I ran a trace on the email header,” I continued, leaning over her desk, invading her space. “Jax’s backdoor script chewed right through your masking. It pointed straight to this exact workstation on Sterling’s internal subnet.”
“You don’t understand,” she whispered, her eyes darting nervously toward the bullpen outside. “Silas asked me to run a background check on the neighborhood’s vocal opponents. I scraped public data. That’s it.”
“Bullshit,” I spat. “You didn’t just scrape public data. I know exactly what you did. You used illegal corporate spyware to track me down. You utilized network packet sniffers to cross-reference my private hospital Wi-Fi logins with my mother’s leasing documents, and then you ripped the metadata from a private upload. That’s a felony, Chloe. It’s corporate espionage tools used to blackmail a civilian. What do you think the feds will do when they find out a luxury development firm is using military-grade surveillance to terrorize rent-controlled tenants?”
Her jaw trembled. The quiet, polite customer I knew was gone, replaced by a terrified corporate drone realizing she had stepped off a very steep ledge.
“Cancel the scheduled email to my HR department,” I demanded, glancing at the clock glowing in the corner of her monitor. Four minutes left. “Cancel it right now, or I walk out of here, call the local news van currently parked outside my cafe, and tell them exactly how Sterling Developments illegally stalks its opposition.”
She stared at me, the reflection of her monitors glowing in her panicked, watering eyes. Her hands hovered over the keyboard, but she didn’t type. She had no clean answer. The lie was entirely exposed, the clock was ticking, and the execution switch was sitting right beneath her fingertips.