Phoenix

16. The deniable Mandate

​Los Angeles, USA

9:00 A.M.

​Douglas Bullock had spent the night entombed in his office. He hadn't returned home, nor had he permitted a single member of his staff to leave.

The atmosphere in the bureau was thick with the scent of stale coffee and the palpable, ionizing heat of Bullock's rage.

He was a man possessed, his mind a theater of simmering frustration that threatened to incinerate anyone who crossed his threshold.

​Just as Arya had predicted, he was behaving like a wounded predator-cornered, bleeding, and dangerously erratic. He had spent the dark hours of the morning pacing the length of his office, nearly clawing at his own scalp in a fit of impotence.

​Initially, the failure of the CIA database was dismissed as a digital hiccup, a transient glitch in the mainframe. It wasn't until an hour later that Agent Newton, the bureau's lead IT specialist, unearthed the viral payload.

By then, the sabotage was absolute. The damage had rippled outward like a digital plague; when the CIA's systems proved unresponsive, they had attempted to bridge into the FBI's servers.
The virus, lying in wait like a trapdoor spider, surged through the connection and compromised the FBI's network as well.

​It was a masterpiece of digital obstruction. The virus didn't destroy the softwares or erase files; it was far more surgical. It sat dormant until a specific string of text was entered into a search bar: Dr. Stanley Donnen.

The moment those characters were registered, the entire national network-thousands of terminals across the country-would freez. The system would hang in a catatonic state, requiring a total manual hard-reboot to restore even basic functionality.

​The chaos reached its peak when the CIA Director called Bulldog directly from Langley.

Over an unencrypted, open telephone line, the Director had dismantled Douglas Bullock's character with a surgical, vitriolic dressing-down. He accused Bullock of gross negligence, of hand-delivering the agency's security protocols to a foreign asset, and of effectively jamming the gears of the nation's intelligence infrastructure.

The mandate was clear: Bullock was forbidden from touching the database until the digital toxin was purged.

​Everyone in the building knew the origin of the disaster. Douglas Bullock had personally authorized the security clearance for Arya Akaishi, and his failure to change the protocols after her escape was an act of incompetence that bordered on treason. There was no shield for his pride, no excuse for his stupidity.

​But Douglas Bullock wasn't mourning his reputation. His obsession was singular: Kim Seokjin.

Once again, the Korean spy had humiliated him. Before Seokjin had appeared in his life, Bullock's career had been a decorated, unblemished climb to the top. Now, it was a sequence of public failures and private insults.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Seokjin's warm, mocking smile. The urge to wrap his hands around the man's throat was no longer a professional goal; it was a biological necessity.

​Unable to vent his fury on his arch-enemy, Douglas Bullock turned his staff into scapegoats. He became a whirlwind of verbal abuse, lashing out at anyone within range. Even the seasoned field agents, men who had stared down terrorists, found reasons to delay their hourly reports, terrified of the man's volcanic temper.

​Agent Newton bore the most brunt of the storm. It had been his recommendation to grant Arya access to the protocols, a fact Bullock reminded him of every fifteen minutes via the intercom. Newton had been tethered to his terminal since the previous day, his eyes burning with exhaustion as he attempted to deconstruct a virus written by a genius.