I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t have time to argue.

The progress bar hit ninety percent.

The cooling fan inside the terminal began to whine louder, high-pitched and strained.

My hands were cold, my fingers stiff from the water we had just waded through.

I needed to find the source code of the script.

I opened a secondary terminal window, my fingers flying across the keys.

The keystrokes sounded like firecrackers in the small, metal room.

I navigated to the temporary directory of the blue drive.

There it was: *xfer_init.sh*.

I opened the script in a text editor.

The code was clean, written by someone who knew our network architecture inside and out.

It was designed to package the telemetry files into an encrypted zip archive.

Then it would upload them to an anonymous cloud server in Zurich.

The progress bar reached ninety-two percent.

“Sarah,” Hayes said, his voice dropping its aggressive edge.

“We have about forty seconds before that bar hits the end.”

“I know,” I said.

My eyes scanned the lines of code.

I couldn’t stop the transmission without corrupting the files on our own drive.