Chapter 6 - The Digital Trap
To catch Julian’s operatives, we needed to feed them believable intelligence. I logged into my mother's old cloud accounts—the ones Arthur used to monitor obsessively—and left a deliberate digital breadcrumb. I created a calendar invite for a medical follow-up appointment at a private clinic downtown for the following Tuesday, complete with a confirmation email from a dummy server Marcus’s cyber team had spun up.
Within six hours, the bait was taken. Our monitoring software showed an anonymous IP address scraping Clara’s synchronized calendar from a server bouncing through three VPNs before terminating at a commercial IP registered to Julian’s consultancy firm.
"They bit," I said, pointing at the glowing screen in the command center Marcus had set up in the safe house basement. "They think Mom is going to be in the open at the downtown medical plaza at 10:00 AM on Tuesday."
Clara brought two mugs of black coffee down the stairs, setting them quietly on the desk. She looked at the tracking maps and surveillance grids without the trembling fear that had defined her for two years. Her spine was straighter; her voice was steadier.
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"What happens on Tuesday?" she asked, looking me dead in the eye.
"On Tuesday," I said, taking a sip of the hot coffee, "you stay right here by the fireplace with a book. Marcus and his tactical unit go to the medical plaza. And Arthur's expensive fixers get a crash course in federal obstruction of justice."
