Chapter 7: The Attack That Wasn't His

Evan was out of the bed before the door had finished closing.

He pulled on the sweatpants, took the stairs to his own room in a run, and opened the laptop on the desk.

The quiet room he had built behind the firewall was on fire.

Red lines poured down the screen.

The intruder who had walked quietly for nine weeks had stopped walking.

A wiper was crossing Ross Group's network, a program built to eat everything it touched.

It was moving through the file servers very fast.

The alarm Ethan had heard was the company's own system, shrieking and not stopping anything.

Evan had maybe ten minutes.

He did not think about Ethan, or the bed, or the way his body still felt.

He put on the other voice in his head, the cold, patient one, and he began to type.

He sent the wiper somewhere it could be useful.

Through the seam he had left open he built a false copy of the main file server, with nothing real inside it.

Then he aimed the wiper at that.

The wiper found the copy, believed it, and began to eat.

Evan watched the real servers go still.

Four minutes later the red lines turned amber.

At minute nine they turned green.

He sat back and rubbed his eyes with ink-stained hands.

He had saved a company he was married into, and he could not tell anyone how.

He pulled on a shirt and went out into the kitchen.

Ethan stood at the island fully dressed in charcoal, with the phone to his ear.

"It stopped," he was saying. "It just stopped. I don't understand it. Maya, can your team confirm?"

He put the phone down and looked at Evan, and for a moment his face was hard to read.

"Stay home today," he said. "You're not well."

"I feel fine."

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