Playing Solitaire
Copyright© 2026 by Jody Daniel
Chapter 12
Dragon Peaks Airfield. North Hangar. 18:30 SAST.
The hum of the hangar’s fluorescent lights felt almost peaceful compared to the silent financial war display glowing across Amanda’s primary monitor.
On the screen was a live feed from the Shanghai Stock Exchange. A single ticker symbol—JLSC, Jinlong Strategic Capital Holdings—was highlighted in blue. Next to it was the live share price, holding steady at 48.20 Yuan.
“Okay,” Amanda said, her fingers hovering over a mechanical keyboard. “Before I hit enter, let me break down what this thing actually does, so nobody ends up in a federal prison by accident.”
Megan pulled a plastic chair up next to Amanda’s desk, clutching a steaming mug of tea. I leaned over the back of Amanda’s chair, watching the stream of green code scrolling along her secondary screen.
“Explain it simply,” I said. “Piet’s already washed his hands of us, and I’d like to keep my pension.”
“It’s surprisingly simple,” Amanda said, pointing to the sleek green box sitting on the ESD mat next to her terminal. “The syndicate didn’t design this box to steal money outright. If you just transfer fifty million bucks out of a bank, red flags fly instantly and the transaction gets frozen.”
“So how do they make their money?” Megan asked.
“Market manipulation,” Amanda replied. “This box contains a proprietary, hard-coded trading algorithm—a high-frequency ‘short-selling’ program that talks directly to Jinlong’s private trading servers in Shanghai. In plain English: Jinlong uses this device to secretly bet against targeted companies. The box floods the market with rapid-fire, micro-fractional ‘sell’ orders, artificially driving a targeted company’s stock price down. While the stock plummets, Jinlong’s short positions make millions on the drop.”
“A legalised wrecking ball,” I murmured.
“Exactly,” Amanda grinned, a sharp, dangerous edge breaking through her usual quiet demeanour. “Except Chen Wei-Liang built a master backdoor into the firmware so he could control it remotely. What I’ve done is re-route that backdoor. I’m turning the wrecking ball around and aiming it at Jinlong itself.”
Megan’s eyes widened. “You’re going to use his own device to crash his own company’s stock?”
“Not crash—bleed,” Amanda corrected. “If I crash it instantly, the exchange will halt trading for a technical investigation. But if I execute a controlled, automated leak—say, a steady two percent drop every hour for the next three days—it looks like a quiet, catastrophic institutional sell-off.”
She tapped a key, and a live order-execution terminal popped up.
“Here’s how the ‘Mister X’ illusion works,” Amanda explained, looking back at us. “To the Shanghai stock exchange and Jinlong’s board of directors, these trade signals will originate from inside Jinlong’s own encrypted network, validated by the physical green box. Chen Wei-Liang won’t see an outside hacker. He’ll see his own device executing trades he didn’t authorise.”
“And when Steinhoff tells Chen that I sold the box to a mysterious buyer...” I said, catching the full scope of the trap.
“ ... Chen will think ‘Mister X’ is actively stripping his company assets from the inside,” Amanda finished. “He won’t know if he has a traitor in his boardroom, a rival firm taking over, or a ghost in the machine. He’ll panic. He’ll start calling his lawyers, his fixers, and his network handlers to find out who has the box. And every time he panics, he’ll leave a digital footprint for Piet and Interpol to track.”
Megan took a slow sip of her tea, a small, thoroughly uncharacteristic smirk appearing on her face.
“Serves the crooked lawyer and his boss right,” Megan said softly. “Let them taste their own medicine for a change.”
I looked at the glowing stock ticker, then at Amanda. “For how long can you run it?”
Amanda’s fingers danced across the keyboard.
“Three or four days if we want to make it convincing. Nothing spectacular. Nothing that screams sabotage. Just a steady deterioration that looks like an institutional sell-off.”
Megan frowned. “And then?”
“Then I stop.”
I looked at her. “You stop?”
Amanda finally looked up at me.
“Completely. No orders. No activity. Nothing. Let them think they’ve found the problem and fixed it.”
“And if Chen makes another move in South Africa?”
A slow smile appeared on her face. “Then we remind him that his little green box isn’t where he thought it was.”
I looked at the glowing JLSC ticker. 48.20 Yuan. The number hadn’t moved. Yet.
I took a slow breath. “Do it.”
Amanda’s fingers settled over the keyboard. For a moment, nobody spoke. Then she pressed the ENTER key.
The order engine came alive.
Numbers began moving across the secondary monitor in rapid columns. Not dramatically. Not enough to attract immediate attention. Just a steady stream of transactions flowing through the system that Chen Wei-Liang believed belonged exclusively to him.
The JLSC ticker flickered. 48.20. A second later: 48.18. Then: 48.14.
Amanda watched the figures with the expression of someone observing an experiment she’d been waiting a very long time to conduct.
Megan took another sip of tea. “Well,” she murmured, “that’s going to ruin someone’s evening.”
I looked at Amanda. “How long before they notice?”
“Someone in Shanghai will notice within minutes.”
She leaned back slightly. “The interesting question is who they’ll call first.”
I looked at the screen again.
Lujiazui Financial District, Pudong, Shanghai. 00:30 CST.
Somewhere nearly seven thousand miles away, in a glass tower overlooking the Huangpu River, a trading terminal had just begun telling Chen Wei-Liang something he absolutely did not want to hear or see.
His own system was selling.
Chen stared at the figures. “How is that even possible?”
The orders weren’t coming through some unknown external account. They were being generated inside the trading architecture he controlled, carrying authentication signatures that should have been impossible to duplicate.
Another block of shares moved. The price slipped again.
Chen’s expression hardened.
Someone had access to his system.
Someone on the inside was trading Jinlong’s stock in carefully calculated blocks—and whoever it was understood the architecture well enough to make the transactions look legitimate.
His mind raced through the possibilities.
A disgruntled trader?
A rival inside the company?
Someone on the board?
No. This was too precise. Too controlled.
With trembling fingers, Chen Wei-Liang pulled his mobile phone from his jacket pocket and dialled a number...
The phone rang four times before the voice on the other end answered, breathless and sharp.
“Mr. Chen,” Xu Qiang said, his voice stripped of its usual smooth corporate deferment. In the background, behind the low acoustic dampening of Jinlong’s primary data center in Pudong, the frantic clatter of mechanical keyboards and panicked Mandarin shouting echoed through the receiver. “We are already seeing it. We are trying to isolate the node.”
Chen Wei-Liang stood at the floor-to-ceiling glass panel of his fifty-second-story office, staring out at the hazy, neon-lit bends of the Huangpu River. On the curved widescreen monitor behind his desk, the line graph for JLSC looked like a jagged, descending staircase.
“I don’t want you to isolate a node, Xu,” Chen said, his tone deceptive in its quiet, flat calm. “I want to know who is executing high-frequency short allocations from inside my system. What protocol are they using?”
A heavy pause hung over the line. For five agonising seconds, the only sound was the distant hum of cooling fans over the secure connection.
“It ... it is not an external intrusion, sir,” Xu stammered, his technical composure cracking. “The trade commands carry full Tier-1 administrative clearance. The encryption keys are valid.”
“That is impossible,” Chen snapped, his knuckles turning white around his phone. “Tier-1 keys are air-gapped. Unless someone in this room has handed over their RSA token, no one has that level of access.”
“There is one other possibility, Mr. Chen,” Xu said, lowering his voice until it was almost a whisper. “The hardware-level handshake isn’t coming from our Pudong server rack. The authentication signature matches the physical firmware configuration of the alpha prototype. The master key.”
Chen froze. The air in his chest suddenly felt thick, almost unbreathable.
“The device in South Africa,” Chen breathed, the realisation dropping into his stomach like a lead weight.
“Yes, sir,” Xu replied nervously. “Whoever has connected that unit is not brute-forcing our firewall. They aren’t hacking us. They are simply using the hardware backdoors we designed into the unit’s firmware. To the exchange’s clearinghouse, it looks like you are selling your own shares.”
Chen closed his eyes, his mind spinning into a furious tactical calculation.
It couldn’t be the police. If South African law enforcement or Interpol had seized the box, they would have bagged it, tagged it, and locked it in an evidence locker for forensic analysis. Cops didn’t run sophisticated algorithmic short-sells on foreign exchanges to bleed the company’s market value.
And it wasn’t Karl Steinhoff. Steinhoff was a greedy, arrogant lawyer, but he lacked the technical competence to re-route a hardware protocol—and he certainly wouldn’t destroy the very company paying his exorbitant retainers.
“Can you override the unit?” Chen demanded, opening his eyes and glaring at the flickering red numbers on his monitor. “Sever the connection from the server end!”
“If we terminate the Tier-1 master key at the exchange level, we freeze all automated trading across our entire portfolio,” Xu warned, his voice trembling. “It will trigger an automatic regulatory audit by the China Securities Regulatory Commission within the hour. They will ask why our master hardware signature was compromised.”
Chen bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper. A regulatory audit was a death sentence. The CSRC would scrape their servers, discover the covert short-selling algorithms, and tear Jinlong apart from the top down.
They were trapped. The person holding that device had his hands around Jinlong’s throat, squeezing just enough to cut off the air, but not enough to trigger the automatic alarm system.
“Do not cut the connection,” Chen ordered, his voice dropping into a cold, lethal register. “Let the trades proceed. Keep the volume within normal variance thresholds so the exchange monitors don’t trip an automatic halt.”
“Mr. Chen ... we are losing millions of Yuan every ten minutes!”
“I don’t care about the Yuan, Xu! I care about finding the hand pulling the string!” Chen slammed his fist onto the polished mahogany desk. “Trace the incoming packet routing. I know the device is doing the final authorisation, but where is the incoming data link originating? Is it still in South Africa?”
“We are running a trace route now,” Xu said hurriedly. “But the connection is jumping through chained proxies in Eastern Europe before it hits the hardware. It will take time.”
“You have thirty minutes,” Chen said softly. “Find me an IP, a cell tower, or a relay station. Give me something.”
He ended the call without waiting for an answer.
Chen stood in the quiet luxury of his office, watching the city lights flicker along the Huangpu River. He slowly reached into his drawer, pulled out a second, burner mobile phone, and dialled a number with a South African country code.
It was time to see if Karl Steinhoff knew just how deep the water had gotten.
Dragon Peaks Airfield. North Hangar. 19:05 SAST.
I watched the numbers flicker across Amanda’s monitor, each one appearing and disappearing with almost hypnotic regularity. The JLSC ticker continued its slow, almost imperceptible decline, nothing dramatic enough to trigger an immediate exchange halt, but enough to make somebody in Shanghai start asking uncomfortable questions.
Amanda sat hunched slightly forward over her keyboard, glasses perched low on her nose, her fingers moving with a speed that made the keys sound like a tiny machine gun.
Megan was beside her, tea forgotten in both hands as she watched the screens.
For several seconds I simply stood there and watched. Then a thought struck me. A rather unpleasant one.
“Mandy...” I said.
She didn’t look up. “Hmm?”
“Can they backtrace this operation to our location?”
That got her attention. Her fingers paused for half a second before continuing their dance across the keyboard.
“Short answer?” she said. “Yes.”
“Yes.” I frowned.
Amanda finally glanced over her shoulder at me, one eyebrow raised. “Long answer? It will take them a very long time,” she said, turning back to the screen, “and even when they think they’ve found us, they’ll end up in the wrong place.”
Megan leaned forward in her chair. “How so?”
Amanda’s mouth curled into a small, satisfied grin. “I’m routing the initial payload through the Tor network, backed up by a multi-hop VPN.”
She said it so casually that I suspected she could have been telling us she’d ordered another cup of coffee.
“And the VPN’s exit IP?” I asked.
She tapped a key. A small window appeared on her secondary monitor. “Currently registered to a server in Gordon’s Bay, Cape Town.”
I stared at her. For perhaps two seconds, my brain simply processed the information. Then it clicked.
“You’re using one of their own proxies to hide behind?”
“Yip!” Amanda giggled. There was something almost disturbingly cheerful about the way she said it. She turned her chair slightly so she could look at both of us.
“If they manage to break the encrypted chain and trace the connection far enough, the trail doesn’t lead here. It points straight to Gordon’s Bay.”
She tapped the screen with one finger. “Which means they’ll spend their time looking in the wrong place while we sit here drinking tea and watching their share price bleed.”
Megan shook her head slowly, a smile beginning to appear. “And you’re sure they can’t just follow the trail backwards?”
“That’s the fun part.” Amanda’s eyes gleamed behind her glasses.
“The traffic is bouncing through multiple layers before it reaches the exit node. Every hop gives them another problem to solve. Even if they manage to peel one layer of the onion away, they don’t suddenly get a nice little sign saying ‘Dragon Peaks Airfield, North Hangar.’”
I couldn’t help smiling.
“And the Tor nodes?” Amanda shrugged. “Don’t keep conventional traffic logs.”
She paused and looked at me. “Which makes their job even more entertaining.”
Megan gave a soft chuckle and shook her head.
I looked at Amanda for a moment. There were times when I genuinely wondered whether the woman sitting in front of me had been recruited by SAPS or whether somebody had simply forgotten to tell the rest of us that she’d escaped from a particularly well-funded computer laboratory.
Megan seemed to be thinking exactly the same thing. “Are you sure you’re not Doctor Amanda Finkelstein?”
Amanda gave a mischievous little shrug. “Not yet...” She turned back to her keyboard, her fingers beginning to move again. Then she glanced sideways at us, and that wicked little grin returned.
“Only...” she said. A tiny pause. “ ... devious, evil, despicable ME!”
She giggled.
Megan laughed outright.
I just shook my head.
I had spent most of my career dealing with criminals who carried guns, planted bombs or threatened people with knives.
Now I was standing in a cold hangar in the Drakensberg, watching an exceptionally cheerful computer scientist hide a financial counterstrike behind the digital equivalent of somebody else’s front door.
And somehow, I had the distinct feeling that Mandy was enjoying this far too much.
I glanced at my watch and was genuinely surprised by what I saw. 19:32.
Somehow the evening had slipped past me while I was watching Amanda work.
The North Hangar had changed character over the past hour. Earlier it had been alive with voices, movement and the constant background noise of an investigation winding down. Now most of the team had disappeared, leaving behind scattered equipment, half-empty coffee mugs and the soft electronic hum of machines that nobody had yet bothered to switch off.
Outside the open hangar doors, darkness had settled over the Drakensberg.
The last traces of daylight had disappeared behind the mountains, leaving the peaks as darker silhouettes against a deepening blue sky. The floodlights around the airfield had come on, throwing pale pools of light across the apron and catching the occasional swirl of dust and dry grass in the breeze.
I looked at Mandy.
“Mandy, will you excuse me, please? I still need to do some paperwork if we’re going to release the wreckage to the insurers by the day after tomorrow.”
She looked up from her screens.
Megan, who had been standing beside the workbench with her mug of tea, turned toward me.
“Are you going to release the wreck?”
There was something in the way she asked it that made me realise the question wasn’t really about paperwork.
“Yes. We’re done with the physical examination,” I replied. “We’ve got the photographic record, the component analysis and the complete three-dimensional model. Unless something new turns up, there’s not much more we can learn from the wreck itself.”
She nodded slowly. “That means by Friday, or early Saturday, we could all be going home?”
“That’s the plan.” I paused. “But you can stay until Sunday if you want. The accommodation is paid for until ten o’clock Sunday morning.”
Her eyebrows lifted slightly. “You’re flying Misty back?”
“Yes. I’m not going to walk.” I couldn’t resist the grin.