Chapter 13 - The Unresolved Port
The phone vibration was short, rhythmic, and persistent—three quick pulses followed by a long pause. Leo slipped his hand into the pocket of his blue hoodie, pulling out the cracked screen to check the incoming data packet. It wasn’t a standard text message or a social media alert. It was a raw terminal ping from an internal IP address inside the gymnasium’s sub-basement server rack—a node that Principal Vance and the IT department had officially decommissioned three months ago.
Agent Harris noticed the subtle shift in Leo’s posture and stopped walking toward the exit. “Something wrong with the feed, Mr. Vance?”
Leo stared at the string of hexadecimal characters scrolling across the small screen. “The sub-basement node is active,” Leo said quietly, looking up at the agent. “The one connected to the main gymnasium breaker box. The audit logs we pulled this morning only covered the administrative subnet. They didn’t touch the athletic training facility’s isolated local network.”
Coach Miller, who had been standing silently near the trophy cases, frowned heavily. “The training facility network was supposed to be air-gapped from the rest of the school when they installed the new weight machines last spring. Nothing down there connects to the outside world.”
“Unless someone bridged the physical routers using an auxiliary fiber line,” Leo replied, tapping a quick sequence into his phone to trace the routing path. The screen displayed a live data stream showing forty-two gigabytes of encrypted files being actively mirrored to an external cloud storage provider based overseas.
Agent Harris’s expression tightened instantly. He reached into his briefcase, pulling out a heavy portable diagnostic terminal with a built-in cellular uplink. “Show me the routing table.”
Leo handed his phone to the agent, pointing to the blinking port identifier. “Port 8088. That’s the exact port Marcus used to siphon the equipment grants. But look at the timestamp—the transfer didn't stop when the state police arrived at the parking lot. It accelerated.”
President Sterling stepped closer, his face turning pale. “Are you telling me there’s another terminal active right now?”
“Someone is wiping the remaining server traces from the physical hardware beneath the gym bleachers,” Leo said, reaching for his crutches and planting them firmly on the floor. “And if they finish the dump before we cut the main breaker, every financial record from the past four years vanishes into an untraceable server farm.”
Coach Miller didn’t wait for another word. He turned on his heel and sprinted down the hallway toward the double doors leading back to the gymnasium, his heavy footsteps echoing off the walls.
Agent Harris popped open his briefcase, slamming his hand onto the emergency override switch that controlled the building’s local power grid. “Hold on,” the agent commanded, pressing the master kill switch with a sharp slap against the plastic casing.
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The lights across the entire lobby flickered violently once, twice, and then plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness, save for the flickering red LED light of the active terminal ping still glowing on Leo’s cracked phone screen.
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