Chapter 17 - THE DIGITAL MANHUNTBy 7:00 AM Saturday morning, I was sitting across the conference table from Jonathan Vance in his high-rise downtown office, sliding the printed threatening letter across the wood surface.
Jonathan adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes scanning the text line by line as his expression hardened into a mask of pure professional focus.
“This isn’t Mason’s handwriting, and it’s not Elena’s,” Jonathan muttered, tapping his pen against the table. “The syntax is too clinical, too deliberate. This was written by someone with legal training or high-level corporate security experience.”
“Mason had a fixer,” I said, leaning forward with my hands clasped tightly together. “During his tech startup days, before he met me, he worked with a corporate intelligence firm that specialized in burying scandals, erasing digital footprints, and intimidating whistleblowers. He must have retained a contract with them.”
“If that’s true,” Jonathan said, spinning his laptop toward himself and typing furiously on the keyboard, “then whoever sent this letter didn’t just mail it from a random post office. They routed the transmission through an encrypted proxy server to mask their IP address.”
“Can you trace it?” I asked.
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“It’ll take some heavy digital engineering, but yes,” Jonathan replied, a confident smirk touching the corners of his mouth. “Give me twelve hours. If there’s a third party holding a contingency file, they left a digital fingerprint the moment they hit ‘send’.”
“Do it,” I said. “And while you’re tracking them down, I’m going to pay a little visit to Arthur Whitmore. It’s time to expand our security perimeter.”
