Juliet hadn't even changed out of her nightclothes when she arrived, there was no time. Not after that alert.
She found Michael already in the GreyHelix security vault, his face grim in the harsh emergency lighting. The acrid scent of ozone and something burnt still hung heavy in the air, a physical aftermath of the fire alarm's recent shriek. The alarms themselves had long since fallen silent, but a high-pitched ringing echoed in Juliet's ears, mirroring the frantic pulse in her temples. She stared at the fried terminal, its motherboard still smoking faintly. The audacity of the breach.
"Who would risk triggering a full evacuation just to plant this?"
Michaels, GreyHelix's Head of Physical Security, held up a scorched, half-melted USB drive, his brow furrowed with a bewilderment Juliet rarely saw in her disciplined team.
Juliet snatched it, her fingers closing around the still-warm plastic.
"Someone who wanted chaos, Michaels. And a very loud message."
Her gaze flickered to the damage around them melted circuits, sparking wires. A deliberate act of disruption, not just infiltration.
She inserted the charred USB into an air-gapped tablet—a standalone device, physically disconnected from GreyHelix's network, kept for emergencies just like this. Her heart thudded an uneven rhythm against her ribs. Even on this isolated machine, a single folder materialised: ECHOJULES_LAST_WILL.
A cold dread seeped into Juliet's veins. EchoJules. The alias. The name she had thought was buried so deep it would never surface again.
Inside the folder, a single grainy photo blinked to life: her younger self, barely twenty, in a lab coat. Beside her stood five smiling colleagues, faces clear, vibrant. But one face, the sixth, was precisely pixelated, a digital void where a person should have been. It was the same photo she'd deleted on the jet, only this version felt… personal. Intimate.
Then, a voice recording. Static, followed by a man's ragged whisper: "They'll take the child anyway..." The words were garbled, barely audible, but the despair in them was unmistakable.
Michaels sucked in a sharp breath beside her. "That's your old team. But who's—"
"Irrelevant." Juliet cut him off, her thumb hovering over the delete icon, trembling almost imperceptibly. Her mind raced, sifting through the years, the memories she had suffocated. The child. The whisper tore at the carefully constructed walls around her heart. It was impossible. This couldn't be real.
The screen flickered. New text appeared, stark white against the black:
DELETING WON'T HELP. I HAVE COPIES.
AND I KNOW YOUR SECRETS, JULES.
Michaels' hand clamped down on her wrist, surprisingly firm. His gaze was grim.
"Ms. Grey, this isn't a hacker. This is a ghost. We need a ghost hunter. And i know of one - Theo Cross"
Juliet's head snapped up, her eyes narrowing. The name was unfamiliar, yet it resonating with a disturbing weight. Michaels rarely showed such conviction outside of protocol. Michaels released her wrist. "He's not… conventional. But he's the best.
Lucas will have his file. We need to move."
INT. SECURITY OFFICE – 7:20 AM
The journey to the security office, just two floors above the vault, felt like a blur. Juliet's mind raced, grappling with the audacity of the physical breach and the unsettling mention of this "Theo Cross." She found Lucas Chen, her CTO, already there, pacing like a caged animal, looking like he hadn't slept in days. Michaels was already pulling up data on a nearby console.
"Lucas," Michaels began, without preamble, "pull up the dossier on Theo Cross. Now."
Lucas, his brow furrowed, nodded, tapping quickly at a console. The massive wall screen flickered to life, displaying a cold, hard summary of the man Juliet now considered a necessary evil, a desperate measure.
THEO CROSS – CYBERSECURITY SPECIALIST
Ex-NSA black ops (Prague Incident)
Freelanced for three GreyHelix competitors
Known for "ghost hacking", infiltrating systems without leaving traces
"He's the only one who's cracked Echo-level encryptions before."
Lucas said, his voice strained, the technical details a familiar comfort in the overwhelming chaos. He zoomed in on a subsection of the dossier.
"He's rumored to be less a hacker, more a... digital phantom. Some say he doesn't just bypass systems; he understands their very consciousness."
Juliet's nails bit into her palms, the pain a welcome distraction from the rising tide of fear that overshadowed her reality. "You're suggesting we hire a mercenary? Someone who's worked for our rivals?"
The irony was bitter, the thought of trusting an ex-ghost to catch another ghost was even more terrifying.
Michaels unshakily tapped the dossier, specifically pointing to the pixelated face on the old team photo. "That pixelated face on your USB drive? Cross specialises in recovering altered images. There's a reason they call him the best at unravelling invisible threads."
Juliet knew, with a cold certainty, that with a physical breach so deep and a ghost this audacious, she had no choice but to yield before any further harm.
A new alert screamed across Lucas's screen, a brutal, insidious wound on GreyHelix's infrastructure, proving the enemy wasn't after money. They were after total annihilation.
[BACKUP SERVERS OFFLINE: 92% DATA CORRUPTION][DATA INTEGRITY COMPROMISED: CRITICAL CORE SYSTEMS AT RISK]
The message solidified her decision, cold steel hardening her voice. Her empire wasn't just crumbling; it was being meticulously dismantled, piece by painful piece. And the motivation wasn't profit.
It was personal.
"Get Him."