Page 3 of Filthy Little Fix

"He's got nothing," I say as Anton twitches on the floor. "He doesn't know shit."

Luca pants, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. "He's a piece of shit, but he seems genuinely scared of what he doesn't know."

I nod, my eyes still on Anton's body. I trust Luca's instincts. He's a good reader of people. Not of minds, but of fear. Anton's trembling confirms his fear; a sign he's genuine. He's not lying, or at least not entirely. Which doesn't change the fact that he's still useless.

"Get him out of here," I order. "I don't want to see his face again. Solve the problem."

Luca and another one of my men, Marco, drag Anton out of the room. He's unconscious now, a dead weight. I crush the cigar in the crystal ashtray.

I lean back, knowing that as long as the leak remains, my world remains vulnerable, and I won't rest until I find the root and break it. Frustration is eating at me. How do you catch someone who leaves no trail?

The door opens again, and Sal, my lanky, tired-looking cybersecurity head, comes in. He definitely doesn't look the part, but he's been with this family for long enough.

"Anything, Sal?" I ask, not looking at him. I see him approaching in my peripheral vision.

He stammers when he speaks to me, as if we haven't known each other for years. "M-Maybe. Ruslan found something... atypical."

"Atypical how?"

"We went through Anton's computers, hard drives, the cloud. Nothing directly links to the source of the leak. But Ruslan, he was in the logs of a server Anton used now and then. And there, well hidden, was some ASCII art."

I sigh. I'm not in the mood for this. "And what the fuck is ASCII art?"

"It's a picture made with letters and symbols, an image formed by text. And Ruslan noticed something. It wasn't just any art. It was a code. A hidden pattern."

I lean forward. "A code. What does that have to do with our problem?"

"Ruslan was about to give up, Mr. Dante. But in college, I wrote a program that scans for patterns in what looks like random digital data. It functions like a fine-toothed comb. This ASCII art contained a distinct pattern, nearly like a digitalsignature. Deep within the tangled symbols was a repeating pattern. Like a subliminal message. And when I managed to isolate and decrypt that pattern... it formed the words 'find me.'"

He spoke so quickly and hesitantly that I could barely keep up. Details aren't important now. The message, however, interests me. "Who the hell left this fucking message?"

"He used a 64-character grid, which is kind of unusual... in the source code, he left spaces as 0xA0 instead of normal spaces, and that's not standard... which tells me he wrote this on a specific machine, probably a Unix terminal with a custom locale, w-which would match other service patterns from Nyx..."

The name. Nyx. The ghost that haunts my reports—that's Nyx.

"Fucking Nyx."

"It's his brand, Mr. Volkov. It's very specific, and we can exploit it."

I stand up. Sal takes a cautious step back. "How the hell is some stupid digital art supposed to lead me to a ghost?"

"I-I narrowed the search by cross-referencing it with entry logs on the Onion network mirrors, and I ran a script that looks for this specific encoding pattern, a-and I ran the parser on the last 72 hours of access on the relay nodes he used, and there's a terminal pattern with the same encoding parameters with a specific local DNS showing up three times?—"

I rub my temple. Too much technical detail. "Sal."

He stops talking instantly and drops his gaze, realizing he's crossed a line.

"The summary," I demand. "In terms I understand. We have this Nyx's DNA. And we can use it to hunt the bastard. Is that it or not?"

Sal nods, swallowing hard. "Yes. That's exactly it, Mr. Volkov. We can. It's his fingerprint."

"Good," I say. "Then start hunting. I want this son of a bitch. I want him before he even thinks he can hide behind a screen."

And I always get what I want. No matter how elusive, I'll find him in the end.

THREE

LEO