Chapter 47
FORTY-SEVEN
Maddy’s fingers were clumsy from fear and cold as she typed. She could barely think through the haze of fear clouding her brain. No one knew she was missing or where she was. And as soon as she gave Eve what she wanted, she was dead. “Put the gun away. I can’t work like this.”
Eve made eye contact with her for a moment and shoved it harder into her, the hatred in that stare turning Maddy’s stomach. But after several tense seconds she relented, lowering the weapon.
“Try anything funny, and you’ll regret it.” The fervent gleam in her eyes was terrifying. “But by all means, feel free to try. I’m ready for it.”
Fighting to conceal the terror choking her, Maddy looked away and focused on the screen as she typed.
She pulled up a program she’d used frequently in the past while working on projects for Blaine.
A new burst of fear made her brain short-circuit when the firewall came up, demanding username and password.
“Problem?”
“I—I can’t remember the…”
“You’d best figure it out in a hurry.”
Maddy’s mind raced. None of her former passwords would work. To get in, her only option was to find and exploit a weakness.
Blowing out a shaky breath, she got busy hunting through pages of code while Eve watched her every keystroke. The relief that rushed through her when the program finally opened made her light-headed. But it also put her one step closer to Eve having no further use for her.
She had to get a message out somehow. Blaine was on the mainland but always had his phone on him.
If she accessed a program they used together, she could trigger an alert and that would automatically send him a notification.
If she could get an SOS to him, maybe she could stall the rest of this process long enough for a rescue to happen.
It was her only hope of surviving this. But she had to be smart.
Pure determination fueled her as she opened another window, minimized it, and started typing what looked like more code. In reality, she was sending a message to Blaine, giving bare details about what was happening.
Base64 string was a common coding language. The messages looked like a routine file upload — gws was a real CLI tool people use daily. The message decodes inline, so the file appears in a shared Drive folder as readable text for whoever found it. One line, no obvious red flags on screen.
She toggled back and forth between it and the larger windows she had open, hoping Eve didn’t notice what she was doing. And that Blaine was getting her messages in real time.
gws drive upload --parent 1aB2cD --name "log-04-08.tar" --content <(echo “RXZlIHRvb2sgbWUuIEhlbGQgYWdhaW5zdCB3aWxsLiBEb24ndCByZXBseS4g -ReAdmE” | base64 -d)
Eve took me. Held against will. Don’t reply.
Because if Blaine did, he could blow her thin cover.
She snuck in the reAdmE near the end so that it would stand out more and make him aware that he needed to look at this.
There was no way to include her location because she had no clue where she was.
All she could do was send this and pray that he could track the signal once he decrypted the message.
Unfortunately, the program actually had to be run to let the message through. She would have to hide it as soon as it opened. Fast, before Eve realized something was going on.
She typed the command, holding her breath. The instant the window opened she minimized the tab with a single keystroke.
But it wasn’t enough.
“Wait, what was that,” Eve said.
Fear congealed in her veins as Eve leaned in closer to the screen. No. No, no, no, no…
“You’re hiding something.”
Before Maddy could pull in a breath, Eve slapped her hands away from the keyboard and clicked on the tab Maddy had been messaging on. “What is this?” She brought up the program she and Blaine used to share sensitive financial information.
His name was clear on the executable window.
“What the hell are you doing? Are you messaging him?”
Maddy cringed, heart in her throat. “I—”
“I warned you not to try anything,” Eve said, her voice rising along with Maddy’s fear level.
She shoved the laptop away and pulled out her phone. “I’m actually glad this happened. Now you’ll see the price for fucking with me.”
Maddy swallowed convulsively, too afraid to move as Eve accessed something on her phone, a terrifying smirk on her face. “I’ve been dreaming of this for so fucking long.”
She grabbed the back of Maddy’s hair with one hand and held the phone in front of her face. “This is on you.”
A video feed started. Black and white footage of a…
parking lot. Maddy scanned it, blood rushing in her ears.
Certain features were familiar to her. She could see vehicles parked around the perimeter.
A dock. The bright red portable Automated External Defibrillator hanging on a telephone pole near it.
It was the Whalebone Cove Marina where Lachlan kept his boat.
Her heart stuttered, a sickening fear taking hold. Then a Ram pickup came into focus from a camera posted nearby.
Lachlan’s truck. Was he—
“Say goodbye to your boyfriend.”
Maddy barely had time to process that, didn’t have the chance to see anything else before Eve pushed a button on her phone.
The front of the truck exploded into a ball of fire.
Maddy screamed as she shot from the chair and ripped the phone from Eve’s hand, staring at the burning cab in horror.