Chapter 4 - The Midnight AuditBefore Evelyn could formulate a retort, a sharp knock sounded at the double doors of the penthouse.
One of Kenji’s lieutenants—a scarred, heavy-set man named Sato—stepped inside, holding a waterproof leather briefcase and a heavily encrypted laptop. He bowed stiffly to Kenji, then cast a wary, suspicious glance at Evelyn.
"Kuroda-sama," Sato said in rapid Japanese. "The secondary servers at the port warehouse have been wiped. Miles was telling the truth about one thing: the digital ledger is gone. Without the master keys, we cannot trace the missing containers before the federal audit tomorrow morning."
Kenji’s jaw tightened. A muscle jumped in his cheek. The missing containers didn't just represent thirty million in electronics; they represented the operational stability of his entire American syndicate. If the shipments weren't accounted for by dawn, local authorities and Interpol would simultaneously descend on every dry dock from Chicago to Seattle.
Evelyn set her tea cup down on the marble table. The porcelain clinked loudly in the quiet room.
"Your digital logs are gone," Evelyn said.
Sato sneered, switching to broken English. "Stay out of this, waitress. This is Yakuza business."
"Shut up, Sato," Kenji commanded softly, never taking his eyes off Evelyn. "Go on," he told her.
"Miles isn't a master hacker," Evelyn said, walking over to the coffee table and looking down at the encrypted laptop Sato had brought. "He’s lazy. He spent every Tuesday night shift at The Glass Monarch complaining about his cloud subscription fees and his offshore backup redundancy."
She reached out, tapped the trackpad of the laptop, and pointed at the flashing diagnostic code in the corner of the boot screen.
"He didn't wipe the servers," Evelyn continued, her voice gaining absolute confidence. "He mirrored them to an off-site physical drive using an old-school FTP protocol. My father used the exact same system for the Yokohama docks in 2008. He thinks like a bureaucrat, not a criminal."
Sato blinked, staring at the screen, then at Evelyn. "How do you know that port routing protocol?"
"Because my father wrote the manual for it," Evelyn said coldly. She tapped three keys on the keyboard—a sequence of archaic command-line entries that made Sato gasp.
Suddenly, a secondary folder popped up on the screen, bypassing the encrypted firewall entirely.
File name: Glass_Monarch_Manifest_Final_v2.enc
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Kenji stared at the screen, then looked up at Evelyn with an expression that was half-shock, half-revelation.
"You didn't just save my life tonight," Kenji said, his voice dropping to a low, intense hum. "You just saved my entire empire."
