Ghostwire (Excerpt)

by Cory Tsai (11)

Chapter 1: Hemlock Street 

In his secret office location, the man known as the Engineer studied his masterpiece with a quiet, prideful satisfaction. Four months of sleepless nights and clandestine labor had produced the device: a network-attached storage device with an unassuming shell, designed specifically to extract billions from the public’s bank accounts. 

Soon, the Engineer and his team would deliver hundreds of finished units to their private client in exchange for a handsome payout. The Engineer had a bulletproof exit plan in place: unmarked bills, new identities, and a one-way flight to an unnamed island in the South Pacific. His client would then commit the crime and shoulder all the risk, while he and his team would vanish without a trace. 

Clean. Risk-free. Untouchable. At least that was the plan. 

Revered in black hat cybersecurity circles, the Engineer had slipped past firewalls guarding Fortune 500 giants, stock exchanges, and even government networks. But none of that had prepared him to deal with the brutality and ruthlessness of the criminal underworld. He was walking straight into a death trap, all because he had broken rule #1 in the unwritten handbook Doing Business with Crime Syndicates: never trust your client. 

The Engineer got up from his desk, his overweight physique wobbling unceremoniously as he stood. Must use those millions for a personal trainer. He gauchely wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, then snapped open his burner phone to call Giovanni, his trusted lieutenant. Avoiding exposure at all costs, the Engineer had dispatched Giovanni to meet one of the client’s agents over dinner and finalize the transaction. 

“Giovanni, are you at the spot?” 

“Yes, boss. Just left my car with the valet. Walking into the hotel now.” 

The meeting location was the restaurant of a secluded five-star resort called The Paradise. The client’s agent greeted Giovanni politely before motioning to the staff, who soon

began setting the table with an extravagant spread—caviar glistening on ice, oysters arranged like jewels, lobster pasta with truffle cream, and a flawless beef Wellington. 

“Bon appetit,” said the agent. “ Business always goes down more smoothly on a full stomach.” 

Seated across from the agent, Giovanni nodded sheepishly. He lifted the first spoonful delicately, tasting the caviar with the hesitation of a man uncertain whether he belonged at such a table. As the caviar’s umami swept across his palate, he saw the agent cutting into the beef Wellington, savoring each bite as if to set the pace. Encouraged, Giovanni took a large forkful of lobster pasta and started eagerly tearing into the culinary spectacle before him. 

But as the feast went on, something shifted. Sweat poured down Giovanni’s face, soaking through his tailored suit despite the cool weather outside. Every passing minute left his body weaker and vision blurrier. He winced and straightened in his chair, as a sharp twinge radiated from his gut. 

He had no idea that each bite carried more than luxury and exquisite flavor. It also carried a quiet venom that now coursed through his veins. 

“Regarding the de-...device,” Giovanni stammered. “The units are completed and ready to go. Production costs ran higher than expected due to su-...supply chain backlogs. The Engineer requests an additional 7.5 mi-...million Euros added to the final payment.” 

A threatening glance from the agent unnerved Giovanni. “Very well, Mr. Giovanni,” the agent said, wiping his lips with a napkin. “ We’ll see to that matter soon. But first, I have a problem right in front of me to take care of — you. ” 

“Wh…what do you…” Giovanni uttered, trying in vain to push himself upright. But the pain was now tearing through his chest. He collapsed to the floor, rasping, gasping for air. 

“For most, compound N-14 is merely a harmless food dye. But not for you. You’ve been taking your daily retroviral for HIV, yes?” the agent asked rhetorically. “It just so happens that when mixed with your retroviral, N-14 ignites a cytokine storm. Fatal.” 

Giovanni squirmed and kicked, but as the toxin overwhelmed his immune system, his struggles came to a halt. “Disposal team,” the agent said, smiling with sinister satisfaction. 

As the agent left the restaurant, a valet attendant — a man dressed like one, anyway — slipped a folded note into his hand. The address of the Engineer’s office was scrawled across it, lifted straight from the navigation history in Giovanni’s car. 

The agent unfolded the note and took out a walkie-talkie from his jacket. “Operation is a go. The address is 4932 Ulitsa Boligolova — Hemlock Street. Fitting.”

A burst of static, then a deep, commanding voice answered, “Excellent work.” It was the leader of the syndicate — a man known simply as the General. “Initiate phase two. ” 

The plan was to raid the Engineer’s office and take the devices by force. In five days, the General’s men will be transporting and setting up hundreds of hard drives to extract money from banks worldwide. The General continued, “Secure the devices. Take the Engineer and his men alive — they’ll make excellent tech support if the systems hiccup. Anyone who resists should be eliminated.” 

Another voice clicked over the radio. “Affirmative, General. Team en route to the Engineer’s premises. I’ll initiate the raid once we’re on site. Over.” 

The Engineer’s facility stood alone in an otherwise deserted industrial park. The General’s convoy surrounded the building and launched the raid. A breaching charge reduced the fortified door to splinters within seconds. The General’s forces stormed the building, overwhelming the Engineer’s men almost immediately. Electromagnetic pulse cannons mounted on the General’s trucks silenced the Engineer’s satellite communications network. The Engineer’s hastily assembled guard unit crumbled under the assault. 

Most of the Engineer’s men surrendered without even firing a shot. They were hopelessly outnumbered — ten to one — and severely outmatched in both training and equipment. With no viable escape route, they had no choice but to yield. The raid was swift, brutal, methodical. 

Within minutes, the entire operation was over. Hundreds of crates containing the rigged storage devices were loaded onto trucks and driven away. The prisoners were told little — only that they would be handed over to the General, who accused the Engineer of “breaking the agreement and acting out of excessive greed.” As punishment, he warned they would face serious consequences if they failed to cooperate. 

Amid the chaos, one detail stood out: there was no sign of the Engineer himself. His office was empty, his workstation still warm, an empty box of painkillers lying on his desk. According to his men, he was having a migraine attack and had gone home for the night. True to his paranoid nature, none of them knew where he lived. 

The General observed the mission from a hidden security feed, watching with quiet approval. These soldiers were his elite — handpicked and trained in a secret facility under conditions modeled after Soviet Armed Forces programs. Yet, his satisfaction was tempered by a single thought: by sheer luck, the Engineer had slipped away — and before long, he would realize that the crown jewel of his life’s work had been taken from him.

Chapter 2: Phantom Trail 

The trucks moved steadily across major freeways and intercontinental transport routes, each bound for a precise, pre-assigned location. Inside their sealed containers were the Engineer’s creations: malicious storage devices disguised as ordinary hardware. Once deployed in a bank’s internal network, the devices would burrow through digital security defenses, alter transaction records, and siphon invisible wealth into predetermined offshore accounts. 

Every route and contingency had been planned meticulously down to the last mile. Drivers received directions to the next waypoint on burner devices that erased themselves after each command. Believing they were simply transporting cargo, the drivers were in fact setting in motion the General’s highly sophisticated operation to consolidate an immeasurable fortune. 

Far below a decommissioned power plant, the General watched a wall-sized screen in his underground command center. Each blinking dot marked a truck in motion. Operators moved around him like parts of a well-oiled machine, voices clipped, movements rehearsed. The plan was on schedule. 

An on-screen overlay listed the first targets. 0200 GMT — Caisse Populaire de Provence, Marseille. 0245 GMT — Pražská Spořitelna, Prague. 0320 GMT — Bank Metro Jaya, Jakarta. Each site had been chosen for a specific reason — lax perimeter defenses, unmonitored access points, aging hardware firewalls. 

“Status?” asked the General, a smirk creasing his lips. 

“All clean,” said the lead technician. “Just a couple of routine traffic stops. Installation teams already in position. Marseille deployment will begin in about 30 minutes. We’re right on schedule.” 

“Good. Initiate the phantom trail.” 

The phantom was a fabricated personality: fake social media footprints, forged employment records at spy agencies, face scans lifted from archival footage, and a thinly veiled web of shell companies registered to his name. The identity was manufactured to resemble a lone but formidable hacker: messy enough to draw suspicion, tidy enough to steer intelligence eyes where the General wanted it. 

The trail led to a bank account tied to a leased office building in Veselov, an abandoned city in Romania hollowed out years ago by failed privatizations. The General’s drones and hidden cameras surveilled the building’s perimeter. 

“They’ll take the bait,” he murmured.

In a quiet wing of the CIA’s Cybercrime Response Division, Giancarlo Grendel, MIT-trained engineer and a rising star in the Digital Forensics Unit, was about to call it a day when an alert flashed across his screen: 

[CODE 713] WARNING – Suspicious Transnational Bank Transfers Detected 

Within minutes the alert threaded its way up the chain: phones buzzed, on-call technical analysts were woken, and senior intelligence officers poured over the live feed. 

In the division’s war room, a couple dozen technical analysts hastily convened on a video call, their faces illuminated by fast-scrolling streams of transaction data. They followed the financial crimes forensics playbook, first cross-referencing the CIA's database of bank accounts with known ties to crime syndicates. Nothing. Then the FinCEN Global Financial Crimes Registry. Still nothing. Even INTERPOL and affiliated agency feeds came up empty. 

Amid the growing confusion, Grendel’s eyes lit up. “I got a hit on AURORA,” he said, referring to the new AI digital signature tracing system he had helped design. “Fifty-four percent of the transfer chains pass accounts tied to Eastern European shell companies, all registered under one name.” 

The war room came alive again. Technical analysts on the video call, reenergized by Grendel’s findings, went to work validating AURORA’s trace paths, correlating transaction timestamps and verifying digital signatures. Intelligence officers began to build a dossier on the mysterious accountholder who, to their surprise, had never been on the CIA’s radar. 

Meanwhile, the division’s Director — under immense political pressure to curb cyber-financial crimes after a sharp global surge in the last two years — was on the phone with everyone from CIA’s top brass to CEOs of major financial institutions and foreign government officials. 

As new information emerged about the ghost identity by the minute, Grendel could not shake his suspicion that something felt off. On the surface, it was apparent the perpetrator took deliberate pains to cover his tracks. Yet, an unmistakable trail of breadcrumbs was left behind, each leading conveniently to the next. Could this be…by design? 

“We found an address,” a technical analyst announced on the video call, breaking Grendel’s train of thought. “Office building in Veselov, Romania.” 

On the far end of the war room, members of the Field Operations Unit stood next to a whiteboard crowded with satellite images, social media photos, and intelligence printouts. The newly discovered Romanian office address was written across the whiteboard, circled in red. Next to it was a list of agents’ names, enumerating the roster for the unit’s imminent mission.

Field Commander – Ash 

Deputy Commander – Garcia 

Field Intelligence – Tess 

Communications – Choi 

Tactical Weapons – Holmes 

Demolitions – Noah 

One slot remained blank. 

Ash, the most seasoned and decorated operative in his unit, crossed the room to where Grendel was seated. “Brilliant work tonight, Grendel,” Ash said. “We’re headed to Romania to hunt this guy down. We could really use someone like you with us as our Field Technical Specialist. You in?” 

Grendel nodded eagerly. After all, he had turned down lucrative big tech job offers to join the CIA specifically to chase the adrenaline-filled satisfaction of taking down the world’s most evasive white-collar criminals. “Bet.” 

Ash chuckled. “That’s the spirit, Agent Gen Z,” he said, extending his hand to shake Grendel’s. “Pack light, and get some rest. Wheels up at 0800, Everton Airfield.”