Page 48 of Make Them Pay

“Evidence deployed,” I report. “Delivery confirmed on all six channels.”

Render: “Copy. Entering stairwell. Descending to the first underground level.”

I watch the indicators on my screen. Nine green dots, each one a person moving through a building in the dark. Knight on the perimeter. BRAVO securing the upper levels. Diaz holding the stairwell. Render going down.

Everything is working. The plan’s holding. The six-minute window is open and the team is moving through it with the kind of precision that comes from either long experience or careful training.

Then the facility’s security network does something I don’t expect.

It doesn't sound the alarm. It doesn't lock the system down. It simply asks an outside server one question: Is this supposed to be here? It wasn’t in any of the systems before.

The query goes out. A response comes back in a little over a second. That response carries an authorization code I’ve never seen before. And the code triggers a secondary security layer across the entire facility at the same time.

Oh shit.

Every lock in the building resets.

Doors that were open close. Doors that were closed lock. The readers on the lower corridors cycle from standby to active, and when they come back online the authorized fingerprints they’ve been programmed to accept have been completely replaced. Updated. Changed to a new set my system doesn’t recognize.

The key I made no longer fits the lock.

“Render,” I say into the radio. My voice stays steady because it has to. “The security network just cycled. All the fingerprint profiles have been refreshed. The system I built is no longer viable.”

Silence on his end for two seconds, and then he says. “I’m on the first underground level. The general holding area is right ahead. The door is locked. I think I can open it manually.”

“Do it. But the second-level corridor, Poe’s corridor—the fingerprint lock has been updated. I can’t open it remotely.”

“How long to rebuild with the new profiles?”

I look at the data on my screen. The new fingerprints are locked behind a type of encryption I’ve never seen before. It’s not standard. It’s not anything I encountered in Goldenbell’s network. It’s custom. Recent. Built specifically to stop the kind of approach I used.

Someone anticipated us. Someone knew what we were going to do and prepared a countermeasure.

The realization lands hard. I trace the verification request back through the network. The outside server it contacted is registered to Nightwood Capital—the same entity I accessed through Margaux Delacroix’s trust account. The same account I went through hours ago while Render was unconscious with a fever.

Serafina didn’t just notice my access to her financial network. She used the pattern of that access to predict how we would attack the facility. She saw the lock specifications in the data I pulled. She saw the timing of my work relative to the guard schedules. And she built a countermeasure that would activate the moment someone tried to use the information I’d gathered.

My choice. My access. My pattern. My fault.

“Enley.” Render’s voice is sharper now. “How long until you can rebuild it?”

“I... I don't know.” I swallow. “The new profiles are locked behind custom encryption. I have to crack that before I can rebuild the system. It could take ten minutes. It could take two hours. I won't know until I can see the whole structure.”

“We don't have two hours. Lockdown's already been triggered. Guards are mobilizing. Knight and BRAVO are engaging the perimeter. I need that door open in five minutes, or I'm going through it the hard way. And if I do that, everyone in this building is going to know exactly where I am.”

Panic surges through me.

I force myself to breathe. Shit. Fuck. I can do this. I have to do this.

Five minutes.

Five minutes to crack encryption I've never seen before, rebuild an access profile from scratch with new biometric data, and push it through a security network that's been reinforced to stop exactly this kind of attack.

“I'm working on it,” I say.

“Work faster.”

The edge in his voice slips past the operational calm and lands somewhere deeper. He's not angry with me. He's angry at the situation. But the situation exists because of me. Because of a decision I made alone in that storage unit while he was unconscious. That decision gave the enemy exactly what they needed to turn our entire plan inside out.