Thursday evening arrived with rain.
Barry sat in his car three blocks from Central City University, watching water stream down the windshield. The physics building was visible in the distance, lit windows glowing against the dark sky. His phone showed 6:47 PM. Clifford DeVoe would be in his office right now, wrapping up office hours before heading to Lab 7B for his evening research session.
Barry had seventeen minutes before DeVoe made that move.
The lock-picking set sat in his jacket pocket. A small digital camera with no wireless connectivity was in his other pocket. No phone. No smartwatch. Nothing that could be traced or tracked. He'd left his personal phone at home, powered off and hidden in a drawer.
This infiltration had to be perfect. No mistakes. No evidence left behind.
Barry's enhanced mind ran through the plan one final time. Enter through the east stairwell at 7:04 PM.
Campus security did rounds at 7:00 PM sharp, which meant the east side would be clear for at least forty-five minutes. Take the stairs to the basement. Approach Lab 7B from the service corridor where cameras had blind spots.
Pick the lock. Enter. Photograph everything. Exit within fifteen minutes maximum.
Simple. Clean. Professional.
Except Barry's mind kept circling back to a problem he'd been ignoring. The digital intrusion into DeVoe's email had worked perfectly. Too perfectly. He'd stolen credentials, downloaded files, even sent an email from DeVoe's account without anyone noticing.
But that was amateur hour compared to what real cybersecurity looked like.
Barry had been thinking like a criminal. He needed to think like a security expert.
Because right now, if anyone actually audited DeVoe's account, they'd find traces. Login locations that didn't match DeVoe's normal patterns. Access times that were suspicious. Download activity that was unusual.
The VPN and encryption made tracing difficult. But not impossible. Especially not for someone with resources and motivation.
He needed to clean up his tracks. Really clean them. Not just hide the evidence but eliminate it entirely.
Barry checked the time again. 6:51 PM. He had time before the infiltration. Not much, but enough.
He pulled out the burner laptop from under his seat and powered it on. Connected to a coffee shop's wifi two blocks away using a long-range adapter. Routed through his VPN. Logged into DeVoe's university email through a fresh anonymous session.
First step: check the account activity logs. Every email provider kept records of login locations and times. Barry pulled up DeVoe's activity history and scanned through it.
There. His unauthorized logins stood out like red flags. IP addresses from Iceland due to his VPN routing. Access times at 2 AM when DeVoe was definitely asleep. Download activity that was massive compared to normal usage.
Any halfway competent security audit would spot this immediately.
Barry's fingers moved across the keyboard rapidly. He needed to edit these logs. Delete the suspicious entries. Make it look like nothing unusual had ever happened.
But university email systems didn't let users edit activity logs. Those were stored server-side, protected specifically to prevent tampering.
Which meant Barry needed to get into the university's email server itself.
His enhanced mind processed the challenge. CCU's email was hosted on Google Workspace. Enterprise-level security. Multi-factor authentication on admin accounts. Regular security audits. Not trivial to breach.
But not impossible either.
Barry opened a new tab and started researching Google Workspace vulnerabilities. His enhanced intellect absorbed information at incredible speed. Exploit databases.
Security forums. Leaked documentation from previous breaches.
He found what he needed in eight minutes.
A privilege escalation vulnerability in the admin console that had been patched three weeks ago.
But universities were notoriously slow to update systems. If CCU hadn't applied the patch yet, Barry could exploit it to gain temporary admin access.
He tested it. Navigated to CCU's admin login portal and tried the exploit.
Access granted.
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