Page 55 of Forced By the Bratva King
Sierra broke the silence. “Like I said, someone is putting in a lot of effort to turn you against each other.”
“But why, though?” Jacob asked.
“That’s why we need to find them, fast,” Sierra replied.
Donovan frowned. “How do we do that?”
“Found this on Finch,” Yuri said, dropping a phone on the table. “It’s encrypted, so I couldn’t get in.”
“If we can access that device—”
“Then we can find out who hired him,” Donovan finished Jacob’s statement.
“Hold on a second,” Sierra said, turning to face Yuri. “You’ve had that this entire time, and you’re just bringing it out now?” Her brows rose, and she seemed a little upset.
“Uhh….”
This was the first time that I’d seen Yuri speechless—the very first fucking time. It was almost like he didn’t know how to respond to her. Sierra was seriously impressing me today.
“If I knew about this phone earlier, we wouldn’t be having this conversation; we would have found him by now,” she said, looking at our faces. “But that’s not a problem. I can still help.”
We were all quiet, wondering what she could do, and I, for one, was blown away by her confidence. I was anticipating how she’d help in this situation.
“Okay, I’m gonna say it,” Donovan said, clearing his throat. “I’m confused. How are you gonna do that?”
“Dad, do you know what I do for a living?” she asked, but she didn’t let him embarrass himself because, clearly he didn’t know. She continued, “I’m a cybersecurity expert. Doing stuff like this is a regular Tuesday to me. I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager.”
Again, her confidence was truly remarkable, and I was filled with pride. I could tell from the straightening of his shoulders and the soft grin on his lips that Donovan was, too.
It looked like we had one thing in common.
**********
We stood around her at the dining table as she sat in a chair, eyes glued to the laptop screen with her fingers rattling across the keyboard. The phone was plugged into the computer, and as she worked, a series of dialogue boxes spread across the screen with codes—numbers lining up in columns.
“The encryption on this phone is military-grade,” Sierra said, cocking her head to the side as she continued to type. “They’ve used a three-layered cipher with a dynamically shifting key sequence. Clever, but not unbreakable.”
I didn’t understand a thing she just said, and I was positive none of the others did, either. I glanced at Yuri, and he simply shrugged his shoulders.
“I have no idea what that means, but okay,” Donovan said quietly.
“It means that I’ll have to reverse-engineer the key generator and then brute-force the hash tables,” she attempted an explanation, her eyes scanning the cryptographic algorithms displayed on the screen.
“You do realize you’re not speaking English, right?” I asked her, folding my arms across my chest as her proud husband.
She sighed softly without slowing down for a moment. “Basically, what I’m saying is that I’ll have to trick the system into thinking that I’m an authorized user. Get it now?”
“Makes sense,” Yuri agreed.
In a few more seconds, Sierra initiated a series of commands, and from what I could tell, it seemed like she was bypassing the phone’s biometric system; fingerprint and facial recognition. Soon, a progress bar appeared, filling up slowly.
“Almost there,” said, watching the bar, and the moment it was full, the phone’s screen unlocked, mirroring its home screen on the laptop. “Got it. We’re in.”
I leaned closer for a better view, watching her navigate to the messages section, scrolling through the latest ones.
“It appears that there’s a lot of activity going on here,” she said, her eyes darting across the screen.
“What’s that?” I brought her attention to something that had caught my eye on the screen.