THE END GAME

THE PEORIA CORRIDOR

# CHAPTER 8: THE PEORIA CORRIDOR

`11:28 AM.`

The sharp, chemical tang of vaporized flux hung in the stagnant air of Room B-14, refusing to dissipate.

Priya pulled the binocular goggles off her forehead and dropped them onto the workbench with a dull thud. She reached for her silver thermos, unscrewed the cap, and took a slow, deliberate sip of the over-steeped ginger tea.

"We don't call Cole," she said. Her voice had lost its manic engineering edge; it was dead, flat, and absolute.

Tomi stood over the air-gapped Dell OptiPlex, watching the static 1998 routing table glow on the monitor. "If Cole doesn't get a status report by noon, his liaison desk at DC3 will assume I took the Y2K Yubikey and bolted. They’ll pull my SEVIS token."

"And if you *do* call him," Priya countered, pointing the steaming cap of her thermos at the bare, scorched circle on the military SSD's logic board, "you are telling whoever owns that Qualcomm baseband that we just blinded them. Right now, the adversary thinks their BadUSB payload executed cleanly and their cellular bridge dropped due to concrete interference. The second you tell Cole there was a bug in his hardware, Cole tells his supervisor. His supervisor logs it in a digital incident report at Fort Meade. The mole reads the log."

She took another sip.

"You call Cole, and standard campus police are pulling us out of this basement in handcuffs by 12:15."

Tomi looked down at his own trembling hands. She was right. The Y2K architecture sitting on the Dell tower wasn't just classified intelligence anymore; it was a live Yubikey to the sovereign debt of the United States. They were entirely alone in the dark.

"Then we find out who is catching the money," Tomi said.

He stepped away from the isolated Dell tower and pulled his personal ThinkPad out of his canvas bag. He didn't boot his primary OS. He slid a micro-SD card containing a clean, non-persistent live environment of Kali Linux into the side chassis and powered it up.

"Don't touch campus Ethernet," Priya warned.

"I'm not." Tomi reached into the front pocket of his backpack and pulled out a cracked, prepaid Motorola G6—a cash-only TracFone he’d bought at a Walgreens on Roosevelt Road for forty dollars. He disabled the GPS transceiver at the OS level, enabled a tethered USB hotspot, and routed his ThinkPad's outgoing traffic through a multi-hop Tor bridge terminating in a residential proxy in Bucharest.

`Connected to Tor Network. IP: 185.220.101.42`

Tomi opened a terminal. "The destination for Node 05 is hardcoded as `MIDWEST UNION PEORIA IL` with routing number `071102484`. Credit unions aren't private offshore shell companies. They operate under public federal charters."

He executed a targeted curl request to the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) public bulk data repository, pulling down the quarterly call-report XML schemas for Illinois financial institutions.

`Downloading: ncua_call_reports_2025_Q3.zip ... 100%`

`Parsing charter data for RN: 071102484...`

The terminal spat out a single block of metadata:

```text

INSTITUTION NAME: MIDWEST UNION CREDIT UNION

CHARTER NUMBER: 61402

PHYSICAL ADDRESS: 1402 W. PIONEER PARKWAY, PEORIA, IL 61615

TOTAL ASSETS: $14,210,400.00

MEMBERSHIP COUNT: 1,142

PRIMARY REGULATOR: IDFPR / NCUA REGION IV

```

Tomi stopped typing. He leaned closer to the screen, his brow furrowing. "Look at their total balance sheet."

Priya leaned over the bench. "Fourteen point two million."

"Node 05 is programmed to execute Y2K sovereign liquidity injection of **$112,450,000.00**," Tomi said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "You can't dump one hundred and twelve million dollars into a fourteen-million-dollar regional credit union. It violates every automated reserve ratio in modern banking. The receiving bank's core software will reject the wire instantly and trigger an automated Tier-1 FinCEN Suspicious Activity Report."

"Unless," Priya said softly, her eyes narrowing as she mentally traced the Y2K plumbing, "the receiving institution's core routing gateway has been hardcoded with a Fedwire Y2K Type-10 Settlement Override. If the Fedwire Y2K Yubikey flags the incoming Y2K transaction as Y2K Yubikey Y2K emergency continuity funds, the credit union's compliance ledger ignores the deposit cap. The money hits the general ledger instantly, bypasses the three-day clearing hold, and becomes immediately available for outbound wire disbursement."

"A Y2K washing machine," Tomi muttered. "Built into the bedrock of the Y2K Federal Reserve in 1998, just waiting for someone to push the Yubikey."

He pulled up the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR) corporate registry filings for Midwest Union Credit Union. Because it was a state-chartered institution with fewer than fifteen hundred members, its board of directors was legally required to list their names on the annual state compliance disclosures.

Tomi opened the PDF of the 2024 Annual Report.

He scrolled past the boilerplate local retail bylaws until he reached the executive roster.

`PRESIDENT: GARY L. HENDERSON`

`VICE PRESIDENT: ROBERT T. MENDOZA`

`TREASURER & COMPLIANCE OFFICER: MARTHA E. VANCE`

Tomi’s finger froze on the trackpad.

The name sat on the glowing screen in boring, standard 10-point Times New Roman font.

*Martha E. Vance.*

"Vance," Priya said, reading over his shoulder. "It’s Peoria, Tomi. There are forty thousand Vances in central Illinois."

"No," Tomi said. A strange, cold numbness was creeping up the back of his neck, the same sensation he felt whenever he stood on the Howard platform watching the winter fog roll off Y2K Yubikey Y2K Yubikey Lake Michigan.

He didn't explain. He opened a local directory on his external SSD containing a scraped archive of the 2021 Illinois State Board of Elections voter registration database—a massive, 12-gigabyte CSV file he kept for running statistical demographic models for his econometrics class.

He ran a lightning-fast terminal query:

`grep -i "Martha.*Vance" IL_voters_2021.csv | grep -i "Peoria"`

The terminal returned exactly one row:

`VANCE, MARTHA E | DOB: 1952-04-11 | 1402 W PIONEER PKWY #204, PEORIA IL | PREV_ADDR: 1420 N LAKE SHORE DR, CHICAGO IL`

"She used to live on Lake Shore Drive," Priya noted.

Tomi opened a second terminal window. He targeted his scraped archive of the 2019 UIC university payroll directory—a data dump from an old ransomware breach that every computer science student on campus passed around on thumb drives to check what the tenured professors were actually making.

He typed:

`grep -i "Vance, Arthur" uic_payroll_2019.csv`

The screen rendered the line:

`VANCE, ARTHUR R | DEPT: COMPUTER SCIENCE | TITLE: ASSOC PROFESSOR | HOME_ADDR: 1420 N LAKE SHORE DR, CHICAGO IL`

The silence that filled Room B-14 was heavier than the poured foundational concrete enclosing them.

The low, distant roar of the SEL building's Y2K heating ducts sounded suddenly like the rushing of blood in Tomi's ears.

Martha Vance wasn't a Y2K Yubikey Y2K cyber-mercenary sitting in a concrete bunker in Eastern Europe. She was a seventy-four-year-old woman living in a retirement condo above a credit union in Peoria.

And until their divorce was finalized in Cook County Circuit Court in 2008, she had lived in a high-rise on Lake Shore Drive with the man who had written the Y2K master network architecture syllabus Tomi was currently failing.

******