Chapter 6 - The Midnight Showdown
I bolted down the stairs, leaving Megan weeping on the second-floor landing. Every ounce of fear had burned away, replaced by an incandescent, lethal clarity. When a mother realizes someone is trying to steal her child, the civilized veneer of polite family dynamics evaporates into ash.
I reached the foyer. Jason was sitting on the bench by the coat rack, Emma sleeping soundly wrapped in a fleece blanket in his lap. His head snapped up as I came down the steps. One look at my face told him everything he needed to know.
"What do we need to do?" he asked, his voice steady, low, and completely ready for war.
"Paul’s office," I said. "Server closet. Evelyn installed hidden cameras in our guest room. She’s trying to build a bogus custody file for Arthur Vance to present to probate court tomorrow. The files sync to Vance’s cloud at midnight."
Jason didn't ask a single redundant question. He was a lead systems infrastructure architect for a major cloud security firm. Threat assessment and digital containment were his life's work.
"Take Emma," he said, handing our sleeping daughter to me with absolute gentleness. He stood up, unbuttoning his suit cuffs and rolling up his sleeves. "Where’s Paul?"
"Dining room."
Jason didn't run. He walked with heavy, deliberate strides toward the back hallway. I followed closely behind, Emma cradled securely against my chest, her warm breath puffing against my neck.
When we pushed open the door to Paul’s study, we found Evelyn standing at his mahogany desk, frantically plugging a flash drive into the side of a dual-monitor workstation. Paul was slumped on the leather sofa, holding an ice pack to his forehead, looking completely broken.
"Step away from the terminal, Evelyn," Jason said.
Evelyn whipped around, her eyes manic, her hand clamping over the USB drive. "Get out of here! This is private property! Paul, call the police! Tell them Jason is trespassing and threatening us!"
Paul didn't move. He kept the ice pack over his eyes and groaned. "Leave it alone, Evelyn. It's over."
"It is not over!" she shrieked. "We have twenty-four hours! If Vance doesn't get these files, the bank files a lien on this house by Friday! We will be out on the street!"
Jason didn't touch her. Instead, he pulled his personal smartphone from his pocket, tapped four commands into a remote command-line interface, and slid the phone onto the desk between Evelyn and the monitor.
"You're using an unencrypted Netgear Nighthawk router linked to a consumer-grade Western Digital NAS," Jason said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "The Wi-Fi network here is broadcasting an open WPS pin. I gained administrative access to your local subnet thirty seconds after we connected our phones yesterday to check Emma’s baby monitor."
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Evelyn blinked, confusion replacing some of her venom. "What?"
"I didn't just access your network," Jason continued, stepping closer until his shadow completely eclipsed her desk. "I saw the outgoing packet stream to Vance’s law firm IP address at eight o'clock tonight. And because your firewall has zero packet inspection, I mirrored every single folder on your local drive forty minutes ago."
