Justice of the Supreme War God

CHAPTER 39 PART 2

Catherine was still in the villa's kitchen when Diana came back through.

Or she had been. By the time Diana stood in the entrance hall with her coat still on and the conversation from the precinct lobby still in her chest — the moment she had watched Marcus walk out with two officers at his back with the self-possessed composure of a man choosing his direction — Catherine had migrated to the sitting room and was in the process of making the space her own in the way she always did, which Diana found comprehensively irritating at the best of times.

"You need to let the process work," Catherine said, before Diana had fully closed the door. "That's what institutions are for. You report a crime, the police investigate, the courts determine the outcome." She had her tea. She had apparently found the tea. "You don't need to do anything else."

"I wasn't planning to do anything," Diana said.

"Good."

"I was thinking about what he said."

"Diana." Catherine set her cup down. "He is a thief who has been caught twice and is now in police custody. What he said was the natural output of a man trying to avoid consequences."

"He said my phone was hacked," Diana said.

"Men who steal from their wives' companies say all manner of creative things."

"He also said someone put his name on the transfers deliberately," Diana said. "And he told me to check the IP trace on the authorizations." She looked at her mother. "Those are specific, verifiable claims. That's not the behavior of someone who knows they're guilty."

"It's exactly the behavior of someone who knows they're guilty and is sufficiently intelligent to misdirect." Catherine picked up her tea again. "Don't hire a lawyer for him. Don't post bail. Don't involve yourself beyond what you've already done. If he's innocent —" she said the word with the gentle skepticism of someone who considers the word's application theoretical in this context — "the system will handle it."

Diana stood in the sitting room doorway and looked at her mother.

She thought about Liam.

She thought about Liam, who had given her mother this information with explicit instructions not to reveal the source, who had hired thugs to ambush Marcus in the morning and brought his father's resources to bear on her business in the afternoon, who had walked into her conference room and dismantled four months of work with the cheerful impunity of someone who had never experienced a consequence he couldn't purchase his way out of.

She thought about who, in the entire landscape of people who wanted Marcus Hayes gone, had both the motive and the specific, targeted knowledge to make this happen.

She thought about these things and said none of them.

"I'm going back to the office," she said.

Adrian Cho had been the Morrison Accounting Group's head of IT security for three years, and he had the specific, practiced thoroughness of a man who took his job seriously and therefore slightly resented the implication that something had gotten past him.

Diana handed him the phone without preamble.

"Full diagnostic," she said. "Everything. I want to know if there's anything on this device that shouldn't be there. Any software, any background processes, any access logs that don't match my own usage." She looked at him. "How long?"

"Thorough scan — forty minutes, maybe an hour." He turned the phone over in his hands with the professional assessment of someone already beginning. "Is there something specific I should be looking for?"

Diana thought about the line of code on the diagnostic screen. The small, patient software running silently behind every application she used, capturing every keystroke, sending every password and authorization code somewhere it was never supposed to go.

Marcus had found it in under two minutes.

With his thumbs.

Without specialized equipment.

"Keystroke logging software," she said. "A trojan. Embedded in a background process."

Cho looked up at her. "You know it's there?"

"I want you to tell me whether it's there," Diana said.

She went to her office and sat at her desk and looked at the quarterly report open on her screen without reading it and thought about a man who had stood in a diagnostic screen she hadn't known existed and found something that her enterprise-grade security had not flagged.

Forty minutes later, Cho knocked.

He came through the door with her phone and a tablet and the expression of a man who has found something he did not want to find and is working out how to present it accurately without communicating that he is personally embarrassed.

"You were right," he said. He set the tablet on her desk — a screenshot of the diagnostic log, annotated with his own analysis. "It's a sophisticated piece of kit. Professional grade, the kind of thing I'd associate with a contracted cybersecurity firm rather than an amateur operation." He pointed to the relevant section. "Keystroke logger, as you said. It's been in the system for approximately eighteen days. Everything you've typed on that device in that period — passwords, authorization codes, login credentials — went to an external server."

He looked at her with the professional, carefully neutral expression of a man delivering a result he knows has implications beyond the technical.

"It's very well hidden," he said. "I won't lie to you — I would not have caught this in a routine scan. Whoever built this knew what they were doing." A pause. "How did you know it was there?"

Diana looked at the annotated screenshot.

She thought about Marcus's hands on her phone. The direct, navigational path through three layers of system settings to a diagnostic she hadn't known existed. The absence of hesitation. The two minutes it had taken him to find something her own IT department had missed for eighteen days.

"Someone mentioned it," she said.

She looked at the screenshot for a long time.

How did he know.

The question sat in her chest with the specific, uncomfortable weight of something that does not have a comfortable answer — the weight of a certainty being dismantled from the inside, one verified data point at a time.

She picked up her phone.

She thought about calling the precinct.

She thought about Catherine's voice.

She set the phone down.

She thought about Marcus's eyes when he had looked at her before he walked out of the kitchen — that single, level, asking-for-nothing look.

She picked the phone back up.