The forty-eight-hour window the court had granted us felt less like an opportunity and more like a countdown to a detonation. Victor had secured a sterile, anonymous office space downtown, turning it into a digital war room. The air was thick with the hum of servers and the smell of stale coffee. A team of Victor’s best data forensics analysts, a quiet pack of digital wolves, tore through the mirrored copy of the Davenport, Finch & Gable servers.
I stood before a wall of monitors, my reflection a pale ghost superimposed over cascading lines of code. We were looking for a single, miscategorized, and likely encrypted file in a digital haystack the size of a mountain. A ghost file. The real Moretti ledger.
“Anything?” Victor’s voice was a low rumble behind me. He hadn’t left the room for mo
