The Mediterranean sun offered no comfort. Karvin stood on the quay of the small, dusty island port, wearing a cheap, ill-fitting canvas shirt he'd acquired with the last of the crew's food tokens. He was the picture of a lost tourist, but beneath the surface, his mind raced, charting vectors of danger. The small apartment Scylla had secured for him had been a necessity, but the longer he stayed, the easier he was to localize.
The key to Lisbon was hidden deep within his USB stick: a single, one-way flight booked under the name "Elias Vance," an identity Karvin had constructed years ago but never used—a placeholder persona meant to fail immediately, making it the perfect, disposable disguise for this desperate journey. The ticket was for a flight leaving in six hours from a smaller, chaotic regional airport three hours away by bus.
His first betrayal came not from the Iron Hand, but from his own reliance on digital systems. He approached a local internet café, paying cash for an hour of time. He needed to transfer the ticket details to a physical printout. As the slow, publicly shared computer booted up, Karvin noticed something deeply wrong: a nearly imperceptible lag in the computer's screen refresh rate. The machine wasn't slow; it was being watched.
The Billionaire had planted silent, zero-footprint surveillance code across key infrastructure points that high-profile fugitives might use: internet cafes, low-cost travel agencies, and currency exchange kiosks near non-extradition ports. The code wasn't looking for Karvin's face; it was looking for his intent—searching for specific terms like flight manifests, passport scans, or common destinations.
Karvin immediately killed the connection by tripping the cafe's main breaker, plunging the small room into darkness. The café owner cursed loudly, but Karvin was already gone. He hadn't printed the ticket, but he had confirmed a terrifying new reality: The Billionaire's global surveillance had moved beyond hunting Karvin; it was now baiting him.
He needed the ticket details, but he couldn't risk another machine. He found his solution in an abandoned, sun-baked magazine stand. He purchased a local city guide and used the micro-encryptor—powered by the last remaining battery pack—to project the ticket details, one line at a time, onto the inside cover of the guidebook using a silent, low-intensity laser pointer. He manually copied the details onto the paper using a stolen pen, using a complex code based on his original HFT algorithms.
With the ticket data physically secured, Karvin began the bus journey to the regional airport. The three hours were a masterclass in paranoia. Every glance from a fellow passenger, every idling car, felt like a pre-cursor to the Iron Hand.
It was during this cramped, rattling ride that Karvin ran his mental simulation of the Lisbon mission. The zero-day exploit was designed to initiate a specific ping to the outdated billing server. The server needed to believe the ping was coming from a local, trusted terminal—a direct line usually reserved for internal maintenance crews.
If he couldn't get physical access to the server room, he had to get close enough for a directional antenna, but even a weak radio signal would be instantly triangulated by the Billionaire's newly deployed anti-hack defenses.
Karvin realized the ultimate treachery: the Billionaire hadn't stopped the sanctions because he was winning; he stopped them because he was waiting. The Billionaire knew Karvin would be forced to use the financial weapon he'd created, and had prepared a digital counter-trap at the power grid's billing server.
As the bus pulled into the chaotic, sprawling regional airport, Karvin made a necessary, heartbreaking decision. He walked directly to the airport lost-and-found desk. He retrieved a cheap, generic luggage bag that he had arranged for Scylla to plant days ago, using the Elias Vance identity. Inside the bag was a single, innocuous item: a solar-powered, long-range Wi-Fi repeater disguised as a portable air quality monitor.
He now had the key component: a directional antenna he could leave behind to transmit the exploit while he made his own escape. The problem was activation. He needed a trust-signal to trigger the zero-day exploit once the repeater was in place. He had no digital contact, and he was completely alone.
He boarded the flight to Lisbon, clutching his printed ticket and the luggage tag. Just before the gate closed, his burner phone—the one he thought was smashed—received a single, encrypted text message:
The message was from Dara. She was alive. She had seen his broadcasts and, using the HFT algorithms Karvin taught her, she was telling him that the Billionaire was planning a major, final market manipulation in Lisbon to coincide with his attack.
The message was a lifeline, but also a massive vulnerability. Dara was not safe, and now Karvin had to worry about her rescue while executing the most dangerous attack of his life. He was no longer a ghost; he was a liability carrying a digital bomb, and the clock was ticking down to Lisbon.