Chapter 11: The Big Fish Takes The Bait
4:30 AM, Palo Alto, California
The dark morning sky blanketed the city and the cool air that drifted from the Bay area into the streets of Palo Alto lulled all its residents into deeper sleep.
Well, almost all.
In one of the upscale communities, shielded by a tall private gate was a surprisingly modest modern home.
The home was big enough to fit only three bedrooms at most. Like most modern homes, this one had all its bedrooms on the second floor.
Unlike most houses at this hour in Palo Alto, this one had the lights in one of its rooms on, indicating that whoever lived there was awake.
Said room was one of the bedrooms that had been repurposed into an office and sitting behind the computer on a work desk was Amelia Rhodes.
The Lead Security Architect at Google. A woman known for her no-nonsense approach to cybersecurity, and the one person in the entire division trusted to handle irregular threat reports without panicking or overreacting.
And currently, her eyes were narrowed on a certain anonymous email, contemplating whether it was a scam or another hacking attempt.
She leaned back on her chair, her fingers rapping on her work desk as she re-read the subject of the email,
[Vulnerabilities Detected on Google Internal Systems]