Alia calmly looked at the hackers eating up every information she fed them with a smile on her face.
Sentinel really was convenient. Usually, to pull this off and make it believable, it’d take a whole team of programrs if not more.
But with sentinel, it had all happened in a matter of minutes.
Alia picked up her phone and dialed. It barely rang twice before a groggy voice answered, "You can’t keep calling at this hour, Alia."
"I’m your superior, Alex," she stated in a matter-of-fact tone. "That ans I can."
There was a groan and a lot of muttering on the other end before Alex gave up and asked, "Alright, what is it this ti?"
"The hackers have made a move," she simply said and he imdiately understood what she ant.
Apart from her, he was the only other person who knew about this...well, also excluding their CEO since Alia had to report everything to him.
But her decision to keep this limited to as few people as possible was due to the fact that the hackers would have needed an inside man inorder to enter this cleanly without anyone realizing.
Alia couldn’t risk said inside man finding out that they had been discovered, even if they were located all the way in China.
"What are they after?" He asked in a serious tone.
"Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, alongside those of high-value corporate executives," Alia responded, "they seem to be picking out specific targets from those groups."
"Maybe they’re comissioned to search for information on those targets?"
"That’s what I also think," she confird, "but the thing is, they’re also searching for source codes to our software."
There was silence on the other end for a short while before Alex asked, "so, what’s our next move?"
"Sentinel’s handling everything for now," she answered, "but it’s only a matter of ti before they discover that both the information and code is a dud, so I want us to track them before that happens."
"I see," Alex nodded in understanding, before waiting for her to continue.
"And unfortunately, although Sentinel can track their IP and patterns, it doesn’t directly allow us to track specific people," she continued, "not yet anyway."
"And that’s where you co in," Alia said, "Sentinel has done most of the work, narrowing the signal of their IP to Beijing, China, all I need you to do is use this IP to find the exact location of their PC and everything else you can, about them."
"Got it," Alex said, "I’ll get to it imdiately."
"I send you the details soon," she said before dropping the call, and then transferring the IP and approximate location of the Elderwood team to him.
After sending the details, she leaned back on her chair. She knew Sentinel was capable of tracking the hackers right to their door step but OmniTech Corp had locked them out of this feature.
There could be one of two reasons for this, either OmniTech Corp only allowed access to this under a certain type of contract.
Or they didn’t want it being used to perform cyber attacks or even track other people.
Both sounded pretty plausible but she wouldn’t co to a conclusion until she was spoke with OmniTech himself.
For now, she need to handle this quickly, before the hackers noticed that Google was unto them and they disappear.
"Let’s keep them convinced that they’re in for now," she said, "at least, until we know their identities."
-----------------
anwhile, just as Alia had thought, the Elderwoods were really eating every information being fed to them.
"And you wanted us to back out of such an easy pay," i said as she looked at Aleks, "I knew you were just overreacting, we’ve been in their systems since late 2009, there’s no way they’ll discover us now, even with Sentinel or whatever fancy software they co up with."
Aleks sighed, he guessed he was wrong this ti around. He now saw that there was nothing to worry about, they had gotten the data requested and more really fast, without the least bit of resistance.
They didn’t even need to cloak their activity that much since, their previous malware handled all that.
"I guess I was wrong," he said with a sigh as he continued encrypting the data they had copied.
Lin let out a yawn, as he stood back up and asked, "are you guys done yet?"
"Almost," Zhou answered, "we’ll just make sure that any changes in their servers doesn’t affect Project Aurora. This Sentinel thing seems like a pretty genius idea, but I guess it was only filled with empty promises."
"Like I said," Lin cut in, "Arican propaganda, they think they’re leading in innovation and every single product of theirs is hyped as the best, until the results speak for themselves."
"I an, how else will a cyber security software not even recognize a threat in their systems?" Lin continued.
Elder wood turned to him before turning back to the monitors, Lin was right, even he had expected a bit of resistance from this so called tech world shaker but was disappointed when there was none.
Not even the slightest bit of alarm was raised and that caused him imnse disappointnt.
"What if this was just a bait?" Aleks couldn’t help but comnt.
"C’mon, you’re still on this?" i asked in disappointnt.
Zhou chuckled as his fingers flew over the keyboard. "Bait? If this is bait, it’s the weakest one I’ve ever seen. No packet tracing, no intrusion detection triggers, nothing. Just wide open doors."
"That’s the problem," Aleks muttered. He tapped the ash off his cigarette into a half-empty tea cup. "Doors left open are never truly open. Soone is watching."
i rolled her eyes and leaned forward, snatching a skewer from the tray on the desk. "And what? We’ve already pulled half the Gmail data and the corporate accounts are practically gift-wrapped. Our client’s going to be very happy."
"I heard you haven’t slept in a while," Lin cut in, "maybe that’s what making you paranoid, why don’t you take a rest while we handle the rest?"
He was right, Aleks hadn’t been having the greatest of sleep in the past few weeks, the reason was unknown to anyone except himself as he refused to tell the team.
But they all agreed that, the cause of his paranoia was his lack of sleep.
"I’m fine," Aleks muttered, "I just have this nagging feeling that sothing is wrong."
"Relax," i tapped his shoulders, "everything will go as planned and after we receive our pay, maybe we should take a vacation out of the country? Maybe to your ho country?"
"That’s not a good idea," Aleks said, "I agree with the vacation but not to anywhere near Russia."
"Alright then," i said with a chuckle, "we won’t go close to Russia, no matter how much I was hoping to ride a bear."
"You know that’s not true right?" Aleks chuckled before calming down and ignoring the nagging feeling.
Everything had gone okay, so there was no need to worry at the very end. For the first ti, he was glad that his guts were wrong.
--------------
While all this went on, Alex found himself pretty early in Google’s building. So early that the security almost didn’t let him in.
But they did after he showed his badge and signed in.
The reason he was her and not at his ho at this hour was because of the task given by Alia.
He could do it on his laptop at ho but that would take longer than he liked so he ca to the office to quickly work on it since their servers were faster.
Reaching the cyber security room, he opened the door and walked in, as he was greeted by complete silence.
The room was dimly lit, the hum of servers filling the silence like a low, steady heartbeat.
Rows of monitors lined the walls, most of them blank or running passive network diagnostics.
Alex slid into his chair, the leather creaking under his weight, as he dropped his backpack on the floor.
He cracked his knuckles, muttering under his breath, "Alright, let’s see where you’re hiding."
Booting up his terminal, he connected through the secure node that Sentinel had tagged.
Alia’s packet data and IP trace were waiting for him, neatly bundled, the kind of thing only a software like Sentinel could automate in minutes. Normally, this would’ve taken a team hours to piece together.
"Thanks for the head start," he murmured.
The trace showed Beijing, but that wasn’t enough. Alia had asked for nas, hardware signatures, the kind of fingerprints you couldn’t erase with a simple VPN hop.
Alex pulled up his toolkit, a custom blend of traceroute variants, deep packet inspection scripts, and a couple of programs that, if anyone else ran them, would have triggered red flags in Google’s own system.
His eyes narrowed as the first string of tadata ca in. "Interesting..." he whispered.
The attackers were careful—too careful. Most ops would leave sloppy trails: clock drift in tistamps, mismatched encoding, maybe a lazy process running in the background.
But these guys? They were seasoned. Whoever was in Beijing knew their way around infiltration.
Still, Sentinel had done the hard part. There were gaps—tiny, imperceptible to most—but enough for him to pry open.
He leaned back for a second, letting the code run, his coffee-deprived brain starting to wake up. Alia trusted him with this because he could go further than Sentinel would allow Google staff to go.
This wasn’t just a track-and-trace, it was a hunt.
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