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He exhaled slowly, then turned to her.
“Anything left of the system that tried to kill us?” he asked, quiet but dry.
Grace didn’t look up. “Just me,” she said, the edge of her mouth twitching.
Grace hadn’t said anything when they entered, just moved to the terminal, slid into her chair like she belonged there. Her bag settled softly beside her.
She was already diving into the backend, her laptop linked to the terminal with a single direct cable. Her fingers moved fast, precise. She wasn’t talking to the computer, she wasspeaking through it, like she’d folded herself into the machine’s logic and become part of its breath. Grace Harlan radiated competence so fierce it made your pulse slow just watching her move.
He chuckled under his breath and stepped in closer, finally claiming the chair beside her. “What are we looking at?” he asked, voice low.
“OrdoTech’s hidden infrastructure,” she said, already scrolling through three overlapping screens. “I found the dummy company, well, a piece of it. There’s a layered vendor record buried inside a project subcategory they’ve labeled Phoenix.” She paused, her eyes scanning, her jaw tightening.
Nash leaned closer, elbow resting on the table beside hers. “Phoenix? That’s poetic.”
“It’s bullshit,” she said, tapping twice to expand a file. “It’s not even real. It’s a shell with a shell nested inside it. Circular payments. Nothing clean. They used a defunct shipping logistics firm as cover. Something that had a clean public record, then suddenly reactivated, but only for internal government payments.”
She paused, brow creasing. “No employees. No addresses. Just a payout account.”
Nash shifted, that SEAL instinct unfurling like a muscle he hadn’t stretched in months. “So someone’s siphoning contract money through an old corpse of a company?”
“Not someone,” she said. “A system. This pattern’s automated. I’m watching it ghost its own trail in real time. Whatever this is, it’s running independently. No human signs in. It self-authenticates using synthetic vendor credentials.”
Nash’s blood went cold. “You saying the system’s doing the laundering?”
She hesitated. “I’m saying it’s possible. I’m saying something that thinks like a system, and protects like a human, is guiding this money.”
They were both quiet for a moment.
He watched her inhale slowly, her lashes lowering over eyes that hadn’t stopped moving since they got here. She leaned back in her chair just slightly, all calculation.
“I need to map the transactions,” she murmured. “Backtrace them from the payment vector and see what they fed into.”
“Like following river tributaries back to the mountain,” Nash said.
“Exactly.”
She opened a new window, began feeding in scripts, custom code, not government-issued. Nash caught it by the lines of syntax, the way she curved her logic through functions like she was writing music instead of commands.
He glanced at the terminal clock. Twenty-three minutes of silence passed.
Then she froze. “Nash,” she said, voice barely a whisper.
He leaned in.
Her finger hovered above a six-letter acronym that didn’t exist in any public registry. Just a flat signature beneath a bank routing number buried inside a subcontract.
“WTRXN Solutions,” she said aloud.
“Wattraxen?” he echoed.
“WTRXN,” she corrected. “No vowels. Which means it’s either encrypted, foreign… or someone didn’t want it Googled.”
She typed quickly. Every trace led to dead air. Scrubbed files. Redirected metadata. Grace leaned in closer, her brow furrowed.
“They buried this thing deep,” she murmured. “Too deep for corporate fraud. This is protection-grade obfuscation. National security level.”
Nash’s pulse kicked. “So what the hell is it?”