There was no saying no to this one. Even a second of pause would mean admitting guilt. Serena met Damiano's eyes, her mind a maelstrom of calculation and terror. An opportunity wrapped in a death sentence, a chalice filled with the finest wine and the deadliest poison. "'I'll need complete system access", her voice revealing none of her inner turmoil. "And a direct feed from the network core; I can't hunt a ghost if I'm blindfolded'" Damiano's smile was triumphant. He had her. "You know Leo will give you whatever you need." A dismissive wave of his hand, the audience over. "Do not fail me, Serena." Leo, who had been just an impassive statue by the door, made his appearance. "This way," he said, voice flat. He didn't wait for her, just turned and walked out, taking for granted that she'd follow. She did, leaving Damiano's study with the weight of her impossible new role settling on her like a shroud.
Leo led her not back to her suite but to a completely different elevator, one that needed his thumbprint to operate. It descended into the cold, sterile depths of the estate. The doors opened into a room that was the antithesis of the opulent luxury above. The beating heart of the beast. A vast, climate-controlled chamber filled with rows of humming, black server racks, their blinking lights reflecting on the polished concrete floor, a captive galaxy. Sitting in the center of the room was a most advanced workstation with three massive, curved monitors. And this was Damiano's digital throne room, the source of all power and surveillance with which he held a city under his grip. "This is your new workstation," Leo announced as he paused on a gesture toward the chair. "You have been granted level-one administrative access. It is the highest level of clearance besides my own and Mr. Moretti's. Every command you issue is logged, flagged, and reviewed by me in real-time. There are no secrets."
He brought up a whole folder of files on the main screen. For that was the entirety of their investigation into the traitorous party. Terrifyingly sparse. "We call him the Ghost," began Leo, with the voice of a surgeon talking about a disease. "Data exfiltration is minimal but consistent: banks of shipping manifests, encrypted financial transfers, security schedules. Amounts so small that they fly beneath standard audit triggers. Never has there been a direct breach of the outer firewall. Hence, our conclusion is that he operates from within, with high-level clearance." He pointed towards the log file, "This is from the night of the gala. A hundred times our internal team has carried out the analysis. They found nothing. Your first task is to prove them wrong. Find something. Anything." Simple as that: a test. Probably he knew already the answer to the puzzle he was giving, just to see how her mind worked.
Serena sat down, the cool leather of the chair contrasting sharply with the heat of the pressure under which she sat. With Leo's shadow falling over her, she began work. At the moment she couldn't go for the kill. She couldn't admit to him that she knew of the rhythmic pulse; that would be like a magician revealing the trick of his magic. She would have to lead him down to the conclusion, making him believe that he was the one connecting the dots that she was laying out. She started out at the broad level, looking into server performance metrics, cross referencing their processor loads against the network logs Leo provided. For over an hour, she toiled without uttering a sound, with the only noises in the room being the tones of the servers combined with soft clicking from her keyboard. Leo stood behind her, perfectly still, his patience seemingly infinite. And then, she 'found' it. "Here," she said, voice sharp with manufactured excitement. She highlighted a timestamp on one screen and a corresponding graph on another. "The firewall logs are clean. Pristine, actually. Too pristine." She pointed to a tiny, almost imperceptible spike on the server performance graph. "At this exact time, there's a fractional increase in the central processor load for a task that doesn't exist. There's no corresponding activity in the network logs. It's a ghost process. It lasted less than a nanosecond, and then it's gone." She found another, sixty seconds later. And another. "He's not just slipping past the firewall," she whispered, as if realizing it for the first time. "He's erasing his own footprints from the log files as he goes. He's forcing the system to lie."
Then she turned in her chair to direct her eyes at Leo, demanding a flicker of surprise, even a nod of approval. Instead, his face was like a cold stone mask. He surveyed the screen back to her; dark piercing eyes now held an edge of dangerous sharp suspicion. He had tested her and she had passed with colors flying—with perhaps too much brilliance. "I've been tracking those spikes in the processors for the past six weeks," he said, his voice dangerously low. "The internal team couldn't find them. They were looking for a presence, not an absence." He took a step closer, voice falling. "The question I have now, Serena, is how you found them in just over an hour." Not a praise to her. But it was an accusation. She had proved her merit and in doing so had made herself the primary suspect in his inquiry. The poisoned chalice had just been pressed to her lips.