I leaned against the wall, suddenly feeling the weight of the last twenty-four hours in my joints.

“For now,” I said. “But they are tracking us digitally. How did they find my email?”

“Marcus has resources,” Alexander said. “But he is not a hacker. He hired someone. Someone with deep access.”

I pulled my laptop from my bag.

It was air-gapped, completely disconnected from any network.

I had copied the forensic files from the drive onto its local storage before we left the safehouse.

“I need to look at the digital footprint of the hack,” I said, sitting at a small wooden desk in the adjacent office.

I opened the system log files I had pulled from my email account before I shut down the burner.

The IP address of the login was masked, but the routing protocol was unique.

I squinted at the lines of green code on the screen.

“This isn’t an external breach,” I said.

Alexander walked over, standing behind my chair. “What do you mean?”

“The login bypass used a master administrative key,” I said. “A backdoor built into the Vale Global network years ago.”