Page 72 of Undercover Shadow

“From Idris.” Nightingale was already at the keyboard, with her hands hovering over the keys. “The encrypted files my brother left me. I memorized everything but didn’t understand what they were until now.”

The pieces fell into place—Idris’s death, the investigation he’d been running, the information he’d tried to protect. “The AIWS kill codes?”

“Yes.”Her fingers hit the keys.

“McLaren must have given them to him. Her last words meant something. Damascus codes. Finish it.”

I moved beside her. “It’s all we have.”

Forty seconds remained.

Ambrose’s face had gone white. “You can’t. Those codes don’t work. We tested them. We made sure?—”

But his panic said otherwise.

Nightingale started typing, entering the first string—a long alphanumeric sequence that seemed to go on forever. The system immediately responded—Authentication Required.

She kept going with the second string, even longer than the first.Secondary Authentication Requiredappeared on the screen.

She entered the third code, the longest one yet—numbers, letters, symbols in a sequence that made no sense to me but clearly did to her. Forty characters. Forty-five. Forty-six.

My heart hammered against my ribs as thirty seconds remained, but Nightingale hesitated.

“Leila?”

“Forty-seven characters.” Her voice wavered. “I remember forty-six. What’s the last one?”

Behind us, Ambrose sneered despite Con’s knee on his back. “You can’t do it. You’ll fail. Everyone dies because you can’t remember one character.”

“Close your eyes.” I leaned closer, my hand on her shoulder. “You memorized it. Idris trusted you with it. The answer is in there.”

She did, and her face went still. Then her lips moved, running through the sequence again.

Time slowed as each second became an eternity. Twenty seconds remained.

Her eyes snapped open. “Seven. The last character is seven.”

When she entered it, the wordProcessingappeared. More authentication challenges appeared—security protocols that McLaren must have built in, layers upon layers designed to prevent exactly what Nightingale was attempting. But she kept going, entering code after code. Her fingers didn’t hesitate again. They moved, driven by the confidence of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

The countdown reached fifteen seconds.

“That’s it.” Her voice shook. “Final sequence.”

The shortest code contained ten characters. If she was wrong, if she’d misremembered anything or gotten a single digit out of order, civilization would end in seconds.

She hit ENTER.

The air felt too thin to breathe as ten seconds appeared.

Processing remained on the display while everyone held their breath.

Ambrose sneered beneath Con’s weight. “Too late. You’re too late.”

My hand found Nightingale’s shoulder as five seconds appeared.

Four seconds.

Three seconds.