The burned Thorne servers provided an unexpected windfall. Before their destruction, Silas and his team salvaged the hard drives. The data was a treasure trove of corporate espionage, blackmail material, and secret financial records of Thorne Global's rivals and "allies."
One name appeared with disturbing frequency, always in the context of payments for "consulting services" and "risk assessment": Kraken Security Solutions.
Silas dug deeper. "Kraken is a private military and intelligence corporation. Nasty reputation. They specialize in corporate takeovers by any means necessary. The Thornes were one of their many clients. According to these files, Kraken was their backup plan. If the wedding plot failed, Kraken was contracted to initiate a hostile takeover through more… conventional corporate warfare."
Mo Chen stared at the data. The Thornes were just the first wave. Kraken was the real threat, a hydra with many heads. They wouldn't stop just because one client had fallen.
" Can we track them?" she asked.
" They're ghosts," Silas said. "But they leave a financial trail. A very expensive one." He pointed to a series of transactions. "They move money through a series of shell corporations that ultimately funnel funds to a private bank in Luxembourg."
A plan, cold and precise, formed in Mo Chen's mind. "Then that's where we start. We don't wait for them to come for us. We follow the money, and we burn the trail."
She had a new target. And she had a new way to fund her war. She would use the system not just to burn her own assets, but to destroy the financial infrastructure of her enemies.