The air in the pantry was stale, recycled through a HEPA filter that hummed with the monotonous persistence of a dying insect. It was 2:00 AM on Saturday morning. The “No Secrets” pact was six hours old, and the adrenaline that had fueled their confessions had curdled into a grim, vibrating exhaustion.
Chloe Vance sat at her workstation, surrounded by the soft, acoustic pink foam that had once insulated her lies. Now, it was insulating a war room.
She wasn’t the Chloe of the morning school run. The beige loungewear was gone, replaced by an oversized graphic tee and reading glasses that slid down her nose. Her fingers flew across a mechanical keyboard, the clack-clack-clack sounding like gunfire in the small space.
Maya sat on a crate of organic sparkling water, watching her neighbor with a mixture of awe and disbelief.
“I thought you bought the bots,” Maya said, breaking the silence. “I didn’t know you programmed them.”
“I couldn’t afford the managed service,” Chloe muttered, her eyes darting across three monitors. “Buying followers is easy. Hiding the traffic so Instagram doesn’t ban you? That takes finesse. You have to route the IP addresses through residential proxies so they look like real people. I spent three years learning how to spoof location data so I could look like I was in Paris when I was actually eating Easy Mac in this pantry.”
She hit the enter key with a flourish. A command prompt window scrolled a waterfall of text.
“The Podcaster is good,” Chloe admitted, leaning back and cracking her knuckles. “He’s using a VPN. Virtual Private Network. It bounces his signal around the globe. London to Singapore to Brazil. If we tried to trace the source of the upload directly, we’d end up chasing ghosts in Rio.”
“So we can’t find him?” Maya asked, feeling the familiar weight of a dead end.
“I didn’t say that,” Chloe said, a shark-like grin surfacing on her face. “VPNs are secure, but they aren’t magic. They have a latency. A lag. Every time the signal jumps a border, it hesitates for a millisecond.”
She pointed to the center screen, where a waveform of the latest podcast episode was displayed. Not the audio—the data packet structure.
“Look at the upload timestamp,” Chloe said. “Tuesday at 2:00 PM. Every episode drops exactly at 2:00 PM. He schedules them.”
“Or he uploads them live,” Maya suggested.
“No,” Chloe shook her head. “The file size is massive. High-definition audio, stereo mixing. It takes time to push that much data. If he was uploading from a standard residential connection—like the cable internet we all have in The Gables—there would be a specific throttle pattern. The ISPs here choke the upload speed.”
She zoomed in on a jagged line in the data graph.
“But look at this. This is the packet transfer rate. It’s flat. Consistent. Fast. Faster than anything Rick pays for, and we have the Gigablast package.”
“Fiber?” Maya asked.
“Enterprise-grade fiber,” Chloe corrected. “Symmetrical upload and download speeds. And look at the jitter.”
“The what?”
“Jitter. It’s the variation in latency. See these tiny spikes?” Chloe tapped the screen with a manicured nail that was chipped to the quick. “They happen every thirty seconds, like a heartbeat. That’s not a VPN error. That’s a handshake protocol. The connection is refreshing its lease with the local router.”
“In English, Chloe.”
“He’s not uploading from home,” Chloe said, turning to face Maya. “He’s uploading from a public network. A network that forces a ’re-authentication’ ping every thirty seconds to keep freeloaders from camping on the bandwidth.”
Maya leaned forward. “Which network?”
“I ran a traceroute on the packet header,” Chloe said. “I stripped the VPN mask by isolating the handshake ping. The VPN encrypts the data, but it doesn’t encrypt the router’s hardware signature.”
She typed a final command. A map of The Gables popped up on the main screen. A digital overlay of the neighborhood, usually used for finding open houses.
A single blue dot pulsed in the center of the civic district.
“IP Address: 192.168.1.1 via Gateway GABLES_LIB_GUEST,” Chloe read aloud.
“The library,” Maya breathed.
“The Gables Public Library,” Chloe confirmed. “He goes there. He connects to the guest Wi-Fi. He uploads the file. And then he walks away.”
Maya stared at the map. The library was the heart of the community. A beautiful, glass-and-stone building funded by the exorbitant property taxes of residents like them. It was neutral ground. A place for story time and book clubs.
“It makes sense,” Maya said, her mind racing. “It’s anonymous. No login required, just a generic ‘I Agree’ button. No security cameras in the study nooks because of ‘privacy concerns’—Sarah fought for that rule on the board last year.”
“He hides in plain sight,” Chloe said. “He’s not a hacker in a basement. He’s a guy with a laptop sitting next to the biography section.”
“Tuesday at 2:00 PM,” Maya repeated. “Is that when he uploads, or when it publishes?”
“That’s the upload stamp,” Chloe said. “I checked the metadata of the first three episodes. Episode One: Tuesday, 2:04 PM. Episode Two: Tuesday, 2:01 PM. Episode Three: Tuesday, 1:58 PM.”
“He has a routine,” Maya said. “He goes there on his lunch break? Or maybe he doesn’t work.”
“Or his work is nearby,” Chloe suggested.
Maya stood up and began to pace the small room, oblivious to the claustrophobia. A routine was a weakness. A routine was a trap waiting to be sprung.
“Next Tuesday,” Maya said. “We know where he’ll be.”
“But we don’t know who he is,” Chloe said. “The library is huge. At 2:00 PM on a Tuesday? It’s packed with nannies, tutors, remote workers. There could be fifty men with laptops.”
“We need to narrow it down,” Maya said. “Can you see which device it is? A Mac? A PC?”
Chloe turned back to the screen. “I can try to fingerprint the MAC address. It’s a unique ID for the network card. If I can isolate it…”
She typed furiously for a minute.
“Got it,” she said. “It’s an older network card. Intel Wireless-AC 7260. Common in laptops manufactured between 2013 and 2015. Think chunky Dell Latitudes or Lenovo ThinkPads.”
“Not a sleek MacBook,” Maya noted. “So we’re looking for a guy with an old, heavy laptop. Probably bulky. Maybe a fan that runs loud.”
“And he’ll be wearing headphones,” Chloe added. “To monitor the audio levels.”
“Old laptop. Headphones. Tuesday at 2:00 PM,” Maya listed the criteria. “We can do this. We can stake it out.”
“Wait,” Chloe said, her hand hovering over the mouse. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
“The file size on Episode Three,” Chloe said, squinting. “It’s slightly larger than the others. There’s an embedded data packet attached to the end. It looks like… text.”
“He attached a text file?”
“Steganography,” Chloe said. “Hiding code inside an image or audio file. I missed it before because I was looking at the signal, not the container.”
She extracted the data. A simple text window opened on the screen.
It contained a single line of coordinates.
41.8781° N, 87.6298° W
“Coordinates,” Maya said. “Put them in Google Maps.”
Chloe copied and pasted. The map zoomed out from The Gables, panning across the county, across the state line…
The red pin dropped in the middle of downtown Chicago. Specifically, on a bridge over the river.
Maya felt the blood drain from her face. She knew that bridge.
“Wabash Avenue,” she whispered.
“That’s…” Chloe looked at Maya, her eyes wide. “That’s where your source jumped.”
“He put the coordinates of David’s suicide in the podcast file,” Maya said, her voice trembling with a sudden, cold rage. “It wasn’t for the audience. The audience wouldn’t know how to find this. It was for me. He knew I’d analyze it. Or he knew someone would.”
“He’s mocking you,” Chloe said softly.
“He’s challenging me,” Maya corrected. She leaned over Chloe’s shoulder, staring at the red pin. The fear that had dogged her for days evaporated, replaced by a sharp, diamond-hard focus. This wasn’t just about Bittersweet Court anymore. This was about redemption.
“He thinks he’s untouchable because he’s behind a screen,” Maya said. “He thinks he’s the director. But he just gave us his location.”
“The library,” Chloe said.
“The library,” Maya agreed. “We aren’t just going to stake it out, Chloe. We’re going to trap him.”
“How?”
“You said you can spoof location data,” Maya said, looking at the influencer. “Can you spoof a Wi-Fi login?”
Chloe’s eyebrows shot up. “You want to hack the library?”
“I want to create a honeypot,” Maya said. “Next Tuesday, when he logs on to upload Episode Five, I want him to think he’s connecting to the library guest network. But I want him connecting to us.”
Chloe sat back, a slow smile spreading across her face. It was the first genuine smile Maya had seen on her in months.
“A man-in-the-middle attack,” Chloe mused. “I’d need a pineapple router. I’d need to be within thirty feet of him.”
“We’ll get you close,” Maya promised. “We’ll cover you.”
“And if he connects?” Chloe asked. “What then?”
“Then we don’t just trace him,” Maya said. “We download his hard drive. We get the raw files. We get the outtakes. We get the evidence he kept from 1994.”
Maya placed her hand on Chloe’s shoulder.
“Can you do it?”
Chloe looked at the map, then at her equipment. She picked up her glasses and pushed them back up her nose.
“Maya,” she said, “I faked a trip to Bali using a green screen and a heat lamp. Catching a middle-aged man on public Wi-Fi? That’s child’s play.”
“Good,” Maya said. “Because on Tuesday, we go hunting.”