Chapter 7 The Singapore Server
Damien
SINGAPORE WAS A city that ran on precision. Every street was clean. Every building was a statement. Every person moved with the efficient
purpose of someone who had somewhere important to be.
Damien had always liked Singapore. It was a city that valued
order—and order was something he’d spent his life trying to maintain. The illusion of control. The architecture of respectability. The careful construction of a reputation that could survive any storm.
It was all a lie, of course. It always had been.
The Blackwood Systems data center was in the CBD, housed in a skyscraper that looked like a shard of glass rising from the waterfront. Twenty floors of servers, networking equipment, and security systems that Zara had already identified as compromised.
They arrived at 7 AM local time. Zara had slept on the last leg of the flight—actually slept, curled against the window with her mouth slightly open, looking young and tired and vulnerable in a way that made something in Damien’s chest twist.
He’d watched her sleep for twenty minutes before catching himself. The man was falling for this woman. He’d known it since Marrakech. He’d known it since the rooftop and the kiss and the way she’d pulled away and said Don’t make me understand you.
The problem was that understanding was all he had left. “I need administrative access to the Singapore backup servers,” Zara said as they entered the building. “Specifically the export logs for the period between January 2014 and June 2015.”
“You have it.”
“Does Marcus know we’re here?”
“He will within the hour. Our travel records are in the same system
he monitors.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Let him know. If he’s guilty, he’ll panic. Panicking people make
mistakes.”
They took the elevator to the twelfth floor. The data center was cold and loud—the hum of cooling systems, the click of hard drives, the particular silence of a room full of machines that never slept.
Zara went to work immediately. She connected her laptop to the terminal, ran her scripts, and began pulling export logs.
Damien stood behind her and watched. She moved through data the way a musician moved through a composition—with intuition, with rhythm, with a kind of fluency that made the complex look effortless.
“Found it,” she said after forty minutes.
She pointed at the screen. A series of export events, timestamped March through June 2015. Each one was a complete copy of Project Meridian—the classified government surveillance platform—sent to an IP address that resolved to a server in Hong Kong.
“Seven copies,” Zara said. “Total data transferred: 1.2 terabytes. The exports were made using an admin account called M.Webb_Strategic.”
Damien felt sick. “He used his own account name.”
“He used an account with his name but registered through a proxy.
If we hadn’t already connected the dots, it would look like someone framing him. But combined with the offshore accounts and the Helios Holdings shell company…”
“It’s him.”
“It’s him.”
She exported the logs to her encrypted drive. Then she stood up and looked at him.
“There’s something else. The IP address in Hong Kong—it’s still active. Whatever Meridian is, someone is still using it.”
“That’s a problem for the government, not for us.”
“It’s a problem for everyone. If the surveillance platform is in the hands of a foreign government…”
“I know.”
The security guard at the front desk called up. “Mr. Blackwood, you have visitors.”
Damien and Zara exchanged a look.
“Who?” Damien asked.
“Two men in suits. They say they’re from the Department of Justice.”
The room went very quiet.
“They’re here for the data,” Zara said.
“Or for us.”
“Same thing, if Marcus has told them what we know.”
Damien looked at her. Her face was calm, focused—the face of someone who’d already calculated the odds and decided on a plan.
“Back door,” she said.
“The data center doesn’t have a back door.”
“It does now. I created one.”
“When?”
“During the flight. I always have an exit strategy.”
She led him through the server room, past rows of blinking machines, to a maintenance hatch in the floor that opened onto a service corridor. They descended into the bowels of the building and emerged in a parking garage three levels below street level.
Zara had a car waiting. She’d arranged it remotely.
“You planned this,” Damien said as they drove.
“I planned for the possibility. There’s a difference.”
“You’re terrifying.”
“Thank you.”
She drove through the Singapore morning, weaving through traffic
with the same precision she brought to everything. Damien sat in the passenger seat and thought about the fact that he was running from the Department of Justice with a woman he’d known for two weeks.
Two weeks. It felt like a lifetime.
“We need to get this data to someone who can use it,” Zara said. “Amina’s journalist contacts are good, but they’re slow. We need someone inside the system.”
“Victoria Chen.”
“She’s on the board. That makes her compromised.”
“She’s the only person on the board who isn’t compromised.” “Then we need to verify that. Before we hand her anything.”
Damien nodded. Zara was right. Trust was the most valuable currency they had, and they couldn’t afford to spend it on the wrong person.
“I’ll contact Victoria through a secure channel,” he said. “Set up a meeting. Neutral ground.”
“Where?”
“New York. My loft. Nobody knows about it—it’s not in any of my public records.”
Zara glanced at him. “You have a secret loft in New York.” “I have a lot of secrets.”
“Clearly.”
There was something in her voice—a warmth that hadn’t been there
before. Damien caught it, turned it over in his mind, decided not to examine it too closely.
They booked a private flight out of Singapore that afternoon. The Department of Justice agents were still waiting at the data center when they left.
As the plane climbed above the South China Sea, Zara pulled up the Hong Kong IP address on her laptop.
“The server is still active,” she said. “Whoever has Meridian is using it in real time.”
“Can you trace who’s operating it?”
“I can try. But if they’re good—and they are, because they’ve been doing this for fifteen years without getting caught—they’ll have layers of protection.”
“Then we go through the layers.”
She looked at him. “You sound like you mean it.”
“I do mean it.”
“This could get us both killed, Damien.”
“I know.”
“And you’re still in.”
“I’m still in.”
She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she nodded and turned back to her screen.
Damien watched her work and thought about his mother, who’d died when he was twelve, and Nadia, who’d died when he was twenty-six, and the pattern of loss that seemed to follow him like a shadow.
He’d spent fifteen years building walls around that pattern. Walls of money and power and strategic distance. And this woman had walked through all of them in two weeks.
He was terrified. He was exhilarated.
He was, for the first time in a very long time, exactly where he was supposed to be.