Chapter 3 : The Desperate Gambit
Chapter 3 : The Desperate Gambit
Two weeks passed. The Vanguard transition was seamless, and the Sterling name had become nothing more than a cautionary tale whispered in the corridors of Wall Street. Isabella was thriving, spending her days managing her ethical tech investments and her evenings reading to the children at the Havenwood sanctuary.
However, cornered animals are the most dangerous.
Marcus, fueled by a toxic cocktail of wounded pride and sheer desperation, had managed to track down Victor Vance, a notoriously corrupt hedge fund manager who had narrowly escaped federal indictment a decade prior. Victor despised Isabella, having lost a massive bidding war to Vanguard Holdings earlier that year.
Meeting in a shadowy, underground parking garage in Brooklyn, Marcus handed Victor a battered USB drive. "This contains the backdoor access codes to Vanguard’s secondary server," Marcus lied, his hands trembling. He had paid a desperate hacker the last of his pawned watch money to fabricate the codes. "It will give you access to her client list. You can poach her investors and trigger a bank run."
Victor sneered, adjusting his cashmere coat. "You look pathetic, Sterling. But if this works, I’ll give you a ten percent cut of the poached assets and a one-way ticket to Geneva. If it’s a fake, I’ll let my associates throw you into the East River."
Marcus swallowed hard, nodding rapidly. "It’s real. Destroy her, Victor. Take everything she has."
Little did Marcus know, Vanguard’s cybersecurity was lightyears ahead of his desperate, amateurish plot.
High above the city, in Isabella’s executive suite, the alarm triggered a silent, blinking red notification on Clara’s tablet. Clara calmly walked into Isabella’s office, placing the tablet on the desk. "Ma'am. Victor Vance is attempting to breach our secondary servers using a dummy code purchased by Marcus Sterling. The intrusion was quarantined in milliseconds."
Isabella didn't look up from the legal documents she was signing. A cold, analytical light flickered in her eyes. "Marcus just can't let go, can he? He is determined to dig his grave until he hits the earth's core."
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"Shall I have the cyber team neutralize Victor’s servers as retaliation?" Clara asked, her fingers hovering over the command prompt.
"No," Isabella smiled—a sharp, brilliant expression. "Let Victor in. Guide him to the honeypot server. Let him download the encrypted files, but ensure the files are laced with a tracking algorithm that exposes his own offshore tax evasion accounts directly to the IRS. If Victor wants to dance with a ghost, let him catch a phantom."
