Each time he made contact with someone promising, Bug used MindReader Q1 to send a Trojan horse back to whomever emailed or messaged him a quote. Most of the very top hackers believed that they were immune to those kinds of intrusions, and they had software to review every line of code in the metadata of that email. Except MindReader’s quantum speed was too fast to be caught. As soon as a connection was made by receiving the email or message, it attacked without using a reply message at all. This was something Bug developed years ago for Mr. Church. The super-intrusion software swept into the sender’s system via their own email and positioned itself to make the target unable to read any of the Trojan horse code. It wouldn’t even see that it was there, no matter which kind of cybersecurity tools were used.

Long ago, Bug and Church had discussed sharing this software. The pro side of the argument was that it would greatly protect the military, universities, hospitals, and the computers running the power grids. Though while that was true, sharing it was greatly outweighed by the cons of it simply being too dangerous. If the tech got out, then there would be no protection for anyone.

The compromise was that Bug went into the systems running nuclear power, electrical grids, and a few key places and planted a different set of Trojan horses. A set of analytical and reactive programs designed to prevent the most sophisticated and dangerous kinds of black hat hacking. They called it Operation Counterpunch, and only the two of them were aware that it existed.

Bug was not in a mood to send benign protective viruses out there, however. He was hunting for links in the Kuga chain of black market experts. And although he had not yet found the main Kuga online presence, he had a serious in. A bit less than two years ago, one of Lilith’s Arklight teams had captured, interrogated, and executed the man who had been, to that point, the most successful and powerful black marketeer of all time, the Turk named Ohan. Before he died—and he died very badly—Lilith’s team extracted a great deal of information from him. They were on the hunt for key players in the sex-trafficking world, and they found many. Found and removed in very ugly ways. However, the by-products of all that were what Lilith considered “scraps.” Names, email addresses, passwords, and darknet sites for nearly forty of Ohan’s top people who had been recruited by Kuga.