Bitcoin Billionaire: I Regressed to Invest in the First Bitcoin!-Chapter 260: [Wrong!!!!!]

Avoid!!!! This Chapter!! It’s a draft that uploaded the next two Chapters as one! It’s expensive so do not buy! Please! This is a warning! Move on to the next Chapters. I apologize!

"You gotta let me do it my own way this time, boss."

A low masculine chuckle echoed in the room. "Is that what you want?"

"Thinhs like this is what I trained my whole life for. I will not let any illegal digital activity go unchecked. You know... you know what this means to me."

The man hesitated for a moment. "Very well. These are my orders so you must follow them accordingly, but I will grant you the freedom to experiment. You have skills, Lilian. I expect you to use them."

"I will not let you down, sir."

In a room, there were bright overhead fluorescents humming, and below it was a long mahogany table across tiled platinum floors.

On the walls of this room were files stacked like quiet accusations. More files created towers on tables in front of each seat, and there were only two people occupying the room:

Deputy Director Warren Caldridge, and Agent Lilian Greaves.

The tall, coded man wearing black shades stood by the window, arms crossed behind his back, staring out at the overcast skyline of Washington AD — the Capitol dome a faint silhouette in the gray haze.

"On the list is a company that merely started at the last quarter of last year," he continued without turning around. "Steele Investments."

Greaves had heard of that company. It was ran by a know-it-all 21-year-old. In fact, she’d predicted it would collapse that same month when it launched.

But somehow, surprisingly, it was still afloat.

The beautiful but dead angel stood at attention, arms straight, hands clasped behind her back like steel cables. Her tailored black suit bore no wrinkles, and her eyes — cold, calculating, unwavering — were locked onto the file before her.

"Steele Investments," Caldridge continued, "is a rising node in a chaotic grid. A company that’s grown too fast off the back of an unregulated asset class that our administration is one headline away from calling a national threat."

He finally turned.

Caldridge’s eyes were sunken with the weight of a dozen sleepless nights, but Lilian couldn’t see it of course, as he always hid them behind those impassive shades. He had a calm voice, nevertheless, any time he spoke, every word landed like a hammer.

"It’s owned by a young billionaire, Darren Steele. From what I know, he’s not just another Silicon Valley opportunist. He might be young but he’s the real deal. We’ve been watching him, and at a very young age — both him and his company, he’s managed to gain alliances that has given him unchecked power in the city of Los Alverez."

Lilian narrowed her eyes.

"Don’t underestimate him because of his youth. He’s surgical, and makes very few mistakes from what we’ve seen. I’ve had Treasury analysts tracking cold wallets with digital dust trails that all lead back to shell companies that, by sheer coincidence, have ties to the warehouse Steele owns in Navarro. Even more interesting, his Bitcoin portfolio is now speculative. Many suspect that the amount in his private wallet and company wallet is not his total."

Greaves’s jaw tensed. She flipped open the file and scanned the transactions, timestamps, and identity-laundered LLCs. She already saw the patterns forming.

"Speculative laundering," she said.

Caldridge nodded. "Or worse. I want you to go in unannounced. We’ll make sure to send in the notice later to avoid them preparing. Some laws in Calivernia gives you full inspection rights as our agent. But when you get there, Lilian, I don’t want hand shaking. I want you to pull threads until the seams give way." freewebnoveℓ.com

She closed the folder.

"I’ll break them open," she said, voice crisp.

"I don’t want broken," Caldridge said, stepping forward now. "I want exposed. We make an example of Steele, the rest of the market gets the message. They either comply, or they burn."

Greaves nodded. "You said I can do this my way."

Caldridge was silent. "Of course. As long as my orders are followed."

She nodded, taking a look at Darren Steele’s image on the file. "What do you make of him anyway?"

Caldridge sunk his hands into his pockets and turned away. "You won’t like him. He’s calm. Polished. Disarming. Thinks he’s smarter than everyone and has the success to fuel that ego."

"I don’t like anyone," Lilian replied.

A brief pause. Then the faintest shadow of a smile appeared on Caldridge’s lips — gone just as fast.

"Good."

--------

The heavy server farm doors hissed open, revealing a cavernous space bathed in the eerie blue glow of rack-mounted LEDs and the low, constant roar of a thousand fans fighting the heat thrown off by Darren Steele’s mining empire.

The Operations Room.

Cold air, smelling faintly of ozone and hot silicon, washed over them. Lilian Greaves stepped inside, her posture rigid, eyes already scanning the labyrinth of humming racks like a hawk surveying prey.

"Right," Kara said, her voice tight but professional, leading the way. Sandy, Vance, and Daisy followed, while Darren lingered near the entrance, observing. "Core operational logs. You wanted power metrics for Navarro during the flagged window?"

"I did," Lilian confirmed, her gaze locked on the towering racks.

Kara gestured towards a large, wall-mounted monitor displaying complex, real-time graphs.

Rico, already stationed there, waved amicably and quickly went to work.

"This is Navarro Facility, Test Phase Delta," Kara announced, fingers flying over a keyboard connected to the display. A specific graph zoomed in: jagged lines representing power consumption. "See the spikes? Standard for stress testing ASIC clusters. We push them to 110%, hold, cool, repeat. Fluctuates wildly. Exactly as Mr. Steele stated."

Lilian leaned closer, her sharp eyes tracing the peaks and valleys. "Correlate this with your network traffic logs for Navarro during the same period. Specifically, outbound data packets."

That was a smart thing to ask. Kara, tightened her lips, but she didn’t flinch at the unexpected question.

"Rico, overlay Network TX on the same timeline."

Rico tapped commands. A new line, representing data transmission, appeared beneath the power graph. It showed predictable bursts during test phases, low during cooldowns.

"See? Traffic spikes with the power draws. Standard diagnostic data pings, hash rate reports – the noise of testing. No anomalous outbound volume matching the scale of a 41 BTC transfer. That would be a sustained tsunami, not these ripples."

Lilian studied the overlay intently. The correlation was there. But her instinct prickled. "Show me the source IPs for these ’diagnostic pings’. Specifically, any routing through non-standard gateways or proxy layers."

’Jeez. She’s not letting out, is she?’ Kara exchanged a micro-glance with Rico. This was diving closer to their obfuscation layers.

"That level of granular routing data isn’t aggregated on this main ops display, Miss Greaves," Kara explained smoothly.

"It’s Agent Greaves," Lilian snapped.

Kara froze, eyeing Vance and Sandy. "My bad. Agent... Greaves. But what I was saying was that the routing data resides in deeper network diagnostic logs. Here, I’ll show you."

She gestured to Rico. "Rico, pull up Node Diagnostic Set NDS-7 for Navarro, time-synced." Rico navigated complex menus. A new, dense table of IP addresses, ports, and routing paths appeared.

Lilian pointed a perfectly manicured finger at a specific, seemingly random entry. "This gateway. `gateway.zephyr.aux`. Its IP trace doesn’t resolve to any standard Steele Complex subnet. Explain."

Deborah, who also worked in IT, stepped forward slightly, her voice calm and analytical. "Zephyr is an internal codename, Agent Greaves. It refers to a legacy load-balancing protocol we inherited during the Navarro site acquisition. Its subnet was deprecated but still pings during high-load tests as a failover check. Purely internal, non-routed. You can see here," she gestured to another column, "the destination IPs are all internal monitoring servers. No external egress."

Lilian’s eyes narrowed, flicking between the data and Deborah’s grinning face. "You’re Deborah Smith. You worked for Google once."

"Yes."

"Interesting to see you’ve ended here."

Darren didn’t say anything, but took note of that encounter.

Lilian returned to what Deborah had told her. It was plausible. Annoyingly plausible. But she wasn’t going to give up yet. "I want the raw packet capture for `gateway.zephyr.aux` during the largest spike."

"Raw PCAP?" Kara raised an eyebrow. "That’s... intensive. And contains massive amounts of proprietary protocol data unrelated to your investigation."

"Nonetheless," Lilian stated.

Vance intervened, his voice a low rumble. "Agent, our agreement stipulates access to logs, not wholesale network captures containing trade secrets. We can provide filtered packet headers relevant to destination IPs for the period, demonstrating no external transmission from this gateway. Would that suffice?"

Lilian frowned. "But Navarro—"

"Why do you keep bringing up Navarro?" Darren interrupted. "That facility hasn’t even been launched yet. Everything you see here are just location pings. Navarro is a warehouse for shipment containers not a site for Bitcoin wallets."

Lilian’s eyes remained on him for a moment.

"My client is right," Daisy added. "All the transactions you’ve checked concerning Navarro has been legal. And... it’s temporary. Continuous probing is becoming pointless and is heading to forceful investigation without due evidence."

Silence. Lilian had to accept defeat here.

"So would the filtered packet headers suffice?" Daisy finished with the question.

Lilian held her gaze for a long moment, the hum of the servers the only sound. "For now," she conceded, the words clipped. "Proceed."

Rico worked quickly, applying filters. Kara exchanged quick glances with Darren and Sandy, understanding how close that was.

When Rico was done, the display updated, showing only header data for `gateway.zephyr.aux`.

Every destination listed was indeed an internal Steele Complex IP. Lilian scrutinized it, finding no gap, no hint of an Estonian shell or a Croatian aggregator. It was all freaking legitimate.

Her lips tightened. She moved on, the frustration a subtle tightening around her eyes. "The R. Talmor wallet. Show me its association within your internal records. Proof it’s a vendor or partner."

Darren watched, impassive, from the back.

Kara took a breath. "Rico, bring up Vendor Management Portal. Search ’Talmor’."

Rico did just that and a new window opened on a secondary screen, showing a clean, corporate interface. Rico typed. A single entry appeared: "R. Talmor Solutions LLC. Status: Inactive. Services: Legacy hardware procurement consultancy (2010-2011). Primary Contact: Discontinued."

"Discontinued?" Lilian pounced.

"Common when small consultancies fold," Sandy offered smoothly. "We maintain the record for historical financial reconciliation, but the contact path is dead. We haven’t engaged them since Q1 2011. Long before Navarro was even a blueprint."

"And the address linking it to Navarro?" Lilian pressed.

"Was their registered address at the time we used them," Kara explained, pulling up an old contract snippet. "They sublet space in a warehouse complex Navarro now occupies. John Brittle was the former owner but he had connections to Talmor. Purely coincidental geography. The flagged transfers happened after their contract ended."

Lilian stared at the screen. She stood straight and folded her arms. "Feels like plot armor if you asked me."

Everything was watertight. Too watertight.

She turned and headed out. "Cold storage. I want to verify the holdings linked to Steele Complex primary wallets. Specifically, anomaly detection during the aggregation window."

This was the heart. Accessing cold storage logs, even hashed summaries, risked exposing the lattice if their mirroring failed.

Kara led them to a separate, even more secure section behind a retinal scanner. Inside, terminals glowed softly. "Cold storage access is air-gapped and multi-sig," Kara stated.

"We don’t pull live logs. We generate hashed, time-stamped balance attestations." She sat at a terminal, inserted a physical key, then looked at Sandy. "Authorization code, please." Sandy recited a complex string. Kara entered it, then placed her thumb on a scanner.

The screen displayed: `Generating Attestation Report: Steele Complex Primary Vault - Timeframe: [Flagged 72-Hour Window]`.

Seconds ticked by, feeling like hours in the tense silence. Lilian watched the screen unblinkingly. Finally, a report populated. It showed wallet addresses, their public keys, and a complex hash representing the balance at the end of the 72-hour window. No transaction history. Just snapshots.

"See?" Kara pointed. "Steele Primary Vault A. Balance Hash: `a3f8d...`. Steele Primary Vault B. Balance Hash: `c901e...`. No significant, unexplained inflows during the window matching 41 BTC. The aggregate holdings here," she gestured to a total line, "aligns with our reported treasury figures. No anomaly."

Lilian leaned in, her eyes scanning the hashes, the addresses. "Verify the hash against a live checksum now*" she demanded.

Kara didn’t hesitate. "Rico, run live checksum on Primary Vault A and B." Commands were entered on another secure terminal. Moments later, codes appeared: `a3f8d...` and `c901e...`. Matching the attestation hashes exactly.

There was no flaw. No discrepancy. The mirror drive and zero-trace partition had worked. The lattice, the phantom transfers, the dummy accounts – all remained hidden behind the sanitized view. The R. Talmor ghost had vanished into the digital ether.

Lilian Greaves straightened up. The relentless energy that had propelled her through the inspection seemed to drain away, replaced by a cold, hard realization. She had been outmaneuvered. Prepared for.

Every question anticipated, every potential crack sealed before she could probe it. Darren’s team hadn’t just hidden things; they had constructed an immaculate, parallel reality for her to inspect.

She turned slowly, her storm-grey eyes sweeping past Kara, Rico, Sandy, Vance, Daisy, finally landing on Darren. He met her gaze, his expression still unreadable, but a faint aura of satisfaction seemed to radiate from him.

"Thorough," Lilian stated, the single word devoid of any warmth. "Your systems are... meticulously documented."

Darren gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. "We strive for transparency, Agent Greaves. Within the bounds of security and proprietary interest, of course."

Lilian held his gaze for a beat longer, the unspoken battle hanging heavy in the humming air. She had come for blood, for the truth behind the ghost name, for the proof of Darren Steele’s circumvention. She had found only polished surfaces and perfectly rehearsed explanations.

"You don’t think this is over, do you?" she asked.

Darren shrugged. "We’re not at war, Agent Greaves."

The dark angel scoffed. "We’ll see about that."