Chapter 11 - The Dead Man's Switch
My heart plummeted into my stomach. "Wiped? What do you mean wiped?"
"It's a ransomware virus, Mark!" David panicked over the phone. "A dead man's switch program! The moment Sarah's private banking accounts were frozen by the FBI an hour ago, an automated malware script triggered on our office servers! It's deleting every structural drawing and engineering calculation we've made for the past three years!"
"I'm on my way!" I slammed my phone shut and sprinted out of the hospital to my SUV.
The drive downtown was a blur of frantic lane changes and burning rubber. If the structural files for the downtown skyscraper—the flagship project of my career—were erased, my firm would face immediate bankruptcy, breach of contract lawsuits in the tens of millions, and potential criminal negligence charges if the ongoing construction site was compromised without engineering oversight.
Sarah hadn't just built a life around me; she had rigged a bomb inside my career, programmed to explode if she was ever taken down.
I burst into the offices of Vance Architectural Solutions. The lights were flashing red as emergency alarm tones echoed through the open floor plan. My team of twelve junior architects was in absolute chaos, staring helplessly at black monitor screens displaying a flashing red countdown timer:
SYSTEM ENCRYPTION COMPLETE IN: 14 MINS 22 SECS.
DEMAND: 500 BITCOIN TO DECRYPT SYSTEM.
AUTHOR: JENKINS ASSET MANAGEMENT.
"Mark!" David rushed up to me, pulling his hair out. "Our IT lead tried to pull the main power grid, but the virus is hosted on a cloud server that Sarah set up six years ago when she funded our start-up! It's erasing our local backups remotely!"
I stared at the screen. Sarah's father's firm, Jenkins Asset Management. The malware was an old corporate sabotage tool her father used to bankrupt rival firms twenty years ago.
"Think, Mark, think!" I screamed to myself, pacing the floor. "How does the Jenkins protocol work?"
I pulled out my phone and dialed Arthur Pendelton immediately. "Pendelton! Richard Jenkins' corporate sabotage tools—did he use a physical master key or a digital override when he wiped companies?"
"Mark?" Pendelton answered, startled. "Richard always maintained an off-site physical backup server in a secure location! He never trusted cloud servers! He kept physical optical discs of every system he compromised in case he needed to blackmail his targets later!"
"Where would Sarah keep those physical backups?" I demanded.
"In a safe deposit box or a private secure facility," Pendelton replied. "Check her primary residence! The lockbox your mother found!"
"No," I realized suddenly, lightbulbs exploding in my brain. "The kitchen! The day I caught her kicking my mother... there were papers scattered everywhere... but there was an old ceramic ash tray on the kitchen table filled with burnt paper and... USB drives!"
I hung up without another word, turned on my heel, and sprinted back out to my car.
I tore through the city streets, running two red lights, until I pulled into my driveway at dangerous speeds. I threw the front door open, sprinted into the kitchen, and dropped to my knees beside the overturned trash can near the counter.
I sifted frantically through the debris. Torn legal papers, cold coffee grounds, shattered glass... and there, buried under a pile of discarded mail, was a heavy metallic silver flash drive with an official company stamp: JENKINS RECOVERY KEY - MASTER 01.
Sarah had tried to throw it out in the chaos after I caught her, planning to destroy it before leaving the country.
I grabbed the drive, pulled out my laptop from my briefcase, and plugged it directly into the side port.
A dark command prompt window popped up on my screen:
ENTER MASTER AUTHORIZATION CODE:
I stared at the cursor blinking steadily. What was the code? Sarah's birthday? My birthday? Our wedding anniversary?
No. Sarah was an egomaniac. She didn't use sentimentality. She used numbers that represented her victory over my family.
I typed in the exact patent registration date of my father's stolen structural engineering designs: 08-14-2004.
ACCESS GRANTED.
OVERRIDING SYSTEM WIPES...
DECRYPTING ALL VANCE ARCHITECTURAL SERVERS...
A massive green checkmark appeared on my laptop screen. Simultaneously, my phone rang. It was David, crying with relief.
"Mark! It stopped! The countdown vanished! All our files, drawings, and server backups are restoring right now! How the hell did you do that?"
May you like
I collapsed back against the kitchen cabinets, clutching the silver flash drive in my trembling hand.
"I took back what belonged to my father," I whispered, tears of relief washing over my face. "It's over, David. It's finally over."
