Chapter 20 - The Bait is Cast
Viktor Sterling sat in his penthouse office, swirling a glass of vintage scotch, eagerly awaiting the automated alert confirming that the SEC had frozen the Carver Foundation's assets. Instead, his secure terminal chimed with a different notification: a massive, unauthorized transfer of five million dollars had just slipped out of a Carver Global secondary account into an unmonitored offshore vault—complete with digital signatures pointing straight to internal embezzlement. Believing he had successfully framed them, Viktor grinned triumphantly and immediately contacted a complicit financial journalist to break the scandalous headline before the morning markets opened. What Viktor failed to realize was that the entire transaction was a brilliant honey-pot trap engineered by Julian Thorne. The "stolen" funds were tied to a smart contract that instantly tracked every byte of Viktor’s outgoing transmission, mapping his personal IP address, encrypted communication channels, and the exact location of his primary server bank in Zurich.
