Chapter 5 - Bail and Retaliation
At noon, my phone buzzed with an alert from the victim notification system. Camille had made bail. Eleanor had pledged the family estate in the Hamptons—her prized social trophy—to secure the five-hundred-thousand-dollar bond required to release her golden child from the county jail.
I was sitting in my private office at the logistics firm, running security diagnostics on our cloud servers, when my terminal screen flashed red. An unauthorized user was attempting to access the core financial database using an executive security token from an external IP address.
"Trying to burn the evidence, Camille?" I murmured to myself, watching the firewall logs stream across my monitor.
She had rushed straight from the jail cell to her laptop, desperate to wipe the dummy vendor accounts and delete the transaction history before the auditors could lock down the data. What she didn't realize was that I had spent the last three years building the company's cybersecurity infrastructure from the ground up.
I opened a command line window and typed a simple execution string. I didn't just block her access; I redirected her terminal to a digital honeypot—a cloned, sandbox version of our server that mirrored the real financial records without giving her access to the actual database.
For twenty minutes, I sat back and watched as Camille frantically hit the delete keys, thinking she was permanently destroying the records of her shell companies. Every keystroke she made was being logged, timestamped, and recorded by my background tracking script.
When she attempted to initiate a final, desperate wire transfer to move her remaining hidden cash out of an offshore holding account into a private crypto wallet, I triggered the trap.
I locked her terminal remotely and pushed a custom text message directly to her laptop screen:
May you like
Nice try, Camille. Your deletion logs and attempted flight-of-capital transfers have just been compiled and forwarded to Assistant U.S. Attorney David Chen. See you in court. — Sydney.
Ten seconds later, my cell phone began to ring from a blocked number. I let it ring until it rolled to voicemail, then forwarded the angry, screaming two-minute voice message directly to Harrison Grant to add to our growing pile of bail violation evidence.
