When Ryan felt the room had fully turned toward him, he pulled the silver flash drive from his pocket and held it up.
“I don’t think you’re calling the police,” he said, grinning. “Because I have your secrets.”
So he had gone into my office.
Good.
“Are you threatening me?” I asked.
“I’m making an offer,” he said. “Half a million by end of day, and the house deed in my name. Otherwise I leak everything.”
Nicole stepped closer with the phone. “Pay him.”
Daniel stepped forward and slapped the civil filings into Ryan’s chest: restraining orders, identity theft claims, fraud actions, defamation complaints. Ryan laughed them off because fools are only frightened by consequences they can already picture.
“Prove it,” I said.
He blinked. “What?”
“If you have my data, show it. Right now. Plug in the drive.”
Nicole, predictably, urged him on immediately. Ryan unzipped his bag and pulled out his company-issued laptop. That mattered. I had hoped for it. I hadn’t dared count on it. He inserted the drive.
At first, nothing.
Then the screen flickered.
The desktop vanished.
Red code began cascading over black.
Ryan frowned, tapped the trackpad, hit the keys harder. The light on the drive pulsed.
“What the hell is this?” he said.
“Did you really think,” I asked, “that stealing from a forensic investigator would be easy?”
He looked up at me then, and for the first time I saw real fear.
“That drive doesn’t contain my client files,” I said. “It contains bait. And because you just plugged it into a work machine that auto-connects to your employer’s network, you didn’t compromise my firm. You infected your own company.”
The lobby went dead still.
I explained it slowly, not for him, but for the witnesses. The ransomware simulation wouldn’t touch my systems because I never plugged it into anything live. But Ryan had done what Ryan always did: he mistook possession for understanding. He inserted the payload into a corporate device tied to his employer’s internal network.
His phone rang.
The caller ID showed his CEO.
He answered on speaker by accident because his hand was shaking. The voice on the other end came through in a torrent of rage: catastrophic system failure, breach tracing, assigned hardware, termination, legal action. Ryan tried to explain. Tried to redirect blame. Tried to say it was all a misunderstanding.
None of it mattered.