The 24-hour gaming café on the Southend seafront smelled of stale energy drinks, hot plastic, and desperation. It was a world of perpetual twilight, the only light coming from the flickering neon of two dozen monitors. This was DC Harris's new battlefield. He sat at a terminal in the darkest corner, a cheap, cash-bought burner laptop wired into the café's high-speed network. To anyone watching, he was just another gamer grinding through the night. In reality, he was building a spider's web.
DI Miles Corbin and Dr. Evelyn Reed sat two rows behind him, trying to look inconspicuous. Corbin, his arm in a sling beneath his jacket, nursed a lukewarm coffee, his eyes constantly scanning the room. Dr. Reed was reading a paperback, though Corbin knew her attention was fixed entirely on the young detective in front of them. The pressure on Harris was immense; he was both the bait and the hunter.
His screen was a chaotic mosaic of windows: command-line prompts, scrolling network traffic logs, and a connection to a freshly created, anonymous cloud account. For the past hour, he had been meticulously constructing the bait. It was a single document, a fake internal police report, designed to be irresistible. He named it: DAME_ELEANOR_SWIFT_THREAT_ASSESSMENT_CORBIN_UNOFFICIAL.docx.
"It's ready, Guv," he whispered into the tiny microphone of his headset.
"The hook is in the water," Corbin's voice replied through the earpiece. "You sure about this, Harris?"
"No," Harris whispered back truthfully. "But it's the only play we've got."
He took a deep breath and initiated the final step. He sent a heavily encrypted email from one burner account to another. The email contained a single, tantalising line: "New intel on the 'masterpiece'. File as discussed. Eyes only. Destroy after reading." It was a piece of cheese in a digital mousetrap, designed to be intercepted by any entity monitoring communications related to Miles Corbin.
Now, all they could do was wait.
The minutes stretched into an hour, then two. The café hummed around them, a cacophony of button-mashing and distant, digital explosions. Corbin brought Harris another coffee, his face a grim mask of tension. Harris's eyes burned from staring at the screens, watching the endless, meaningless scroll of data packets from around the world. He felt like a fisherman sitting in a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean, having just thrown a single drop of blood into the water to attract a great white shark.
Then, it happened.
A small alert flashed in the corner of his monitoring window. It was subtle, almost polite. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS ATTEMPT. His heart hammered against his ribs. The shark was circling.
"Guv, we have contact," he breathed into the mic.
The attack was elegant, coming through layers of proxies and bouncing through servers from three different continents at once. It was The Echo. Harris let them in, opening a single, firewalled pathway to the bait file. He had to give them time to feel safe, to download the document, to believe they were winning.
"They're taking the file," Harris whispered, his fingers flying across his keyboard. "Initiating trace."
It was a silent, frantic battle fought at the speed of light. Harris's trace program began peeling back the layers of The Echo's camouflage. An IP address in Brazil resolved, then vanished, rerouting through Germany. He chased it. The German server bounced to a shell in Singapore. He dived deeper, his code fighting against The Echo's encryption. He felt the digital presence of his opponent—it was smart, fast, and starting to realise the bait was a trap.
The download of the dummy file was almost complete. He was running out of time.
"They're pulling out!" he hissed. "Come on, come on…"
He broke through the final proxy layer just as The Echo slammed the door shut, severing the connection. The screen went dead. It was over.
For a moment, Harris just sat there, his whole body trembling with adrenaline.
"Harris? Did you get it?" Corbin's voice was tense in his ear.
Harris stared at the single line of text he had managed to capture in the final nanosecond of the fight. It wasn't a location. It wasn't a name. It was something far more concrete. He turned in his chair to face Corbin, a look of pale, triumphant exhaustion on his face.
"I couldn't get a location, Guv. They're too good, they cut the connection before I could pinpoint the source." He took a shaky breath. "But I got the hardware ID. The network card's unique MAC address."
Dr. Reed, suddenly standing beside him, understood immediately. Corbin looked confused. "What does that mean?"
A grim smile touched Harris's lips.
"It means their machine isn't a ghost. It's a real, physical piece of kit. And that MAC address belongs to a batch of high-end network cards sold two years ago." He leaned forward, delivering the final, victorious blow. "Sold and delivered to a single residential address… in Colchester."