Page 110 of The Honeymoon Hack

“She’s going to die if he can’t upload that data!” I called from the left turn that would take me to the Atlantic section. “This gives her a chance!”

Chapter 41

Brie

The Tor browserhad loaded perfectly, and Lark had stalked away to stare at the server.

Pain radiated from where he’d hit me, and my head was light. But I pushed through, selecting the research directories and initiating the transfer to secure-drop-h4x9k2m.onion, port 8080.

The progress bar appeared, crawled to one percent, then stalled.

Error message: Connection timeout.

I tried again, with the same result. “Shit.”

Lark’s footsteps echoed as he marched back from the Orchid server. “What’s wrong?”

“The connection keeps dropping.” I opened a terminal window to check network diagnostics, flexing my fingers while I waited. “Let me trace the routing.”

“Enzo told me you’re the best.” He leaned over my shoulder, studying the screen. “Don’t let me down now.”

“Network troubleshooting isn’t an exact science.” I refreshed the connection and restarted the upload. Same result—one percent, then failure. Dammit, what was wrong? There was noway I was going to die because of a fucking network connection issue. “Could be minutes, could be longer.”

My hands trembled as I ran ping tests to external servers. All successful. Internal routing was normal. But something was blocking the upload.

“Is Claire with Fenix, too?” I asked, opening network configuration files.

“Don’t worry about Claire. Worry about fixing the shit in front of you.”

I scanned the routing tables and found upload restrictions on external connections. Specific ports blocked, certain domains blacklisted. “The upload restrictions aren’t standard security. Someone specifically configured this server to prevent uploads while still allowing access to the research.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know what it means.” I tried different connection methods and alternate ports. Nothing worked.

“It’s still showing one percent,” Lark said.

“Calculation wonkiness. The system thinks it’s uploading, but the data isn’t actually moving.”

Lark walked away, to the open door of rack fifteen. He knelt and pulled something from his tactical vest.

“If I can’t get the formula,” he said, barely loud enough for me to hear him over the hum of the server room, “no one gets it.”

He placed several items on the ground. Wire cutters. Wrapped rectangular packages. Wires.

Explosives.

A shiver ran through my entire body. Every server here was backed up—blowing the rack wouldn’t actually destroy the research—but I kept that thought to myself. If he thought grabbing the backup was a better option, he’d force me to the storage area. And when he discovered I didn’t know how to retrieve anything from the backups, I was dead.

At least here, I had a chance. “What’s your escape plan?”

Lark chuckled. “Don’t need one.”

That was even worse. If he was here on a suicide mission, he really wouldn’t care what happened to me. “The phoenix will rise?”

“Rebirth, regeneration—it’s all cycles. The universe is predictable in its patterns.” He withdrew another package from his vest and placed it with the others. “Although when Claire recalled our team from Warsaw—where I’d managed to exfil one of our hackers before they were caught—and sent us the video of three Reynolds Recoveries employees? Enzo hadn’t predicted that.”

From everything I knew of him, Enzo was actually an impulsive psychopath.