Welcome to my first non-fiction book, Cybers & Sighs, a high-stakes global suspense thriller about love, loyalty, and deceit. Available now on Amazon.
Prologue
Let the Game Begin
Langley, Virginia
At the CIA headquarters, nestled deep beneath layers of security, the basement computer room hummed with the sound of servers and sophisticated machinery. Here was the silent guardian of national digital intelligence. Bill House, a late shift computer operator of ordinary skills, sat behind a console monitoring routine system traffic. His fingers paused over the keyboard as an anomaly appeared on his screen—a curious cyber intrusion.
Rapid keystrokes resonated in the quiet chamber, punctuating the gravity of the moment. With a series of commands, Bill effectively countered the breach, thwarting the hacker with ease. Still, he thought he should summon Anna Walsh, the agency’s top cybersecurity analyst.
As Walsh analyzed the breach’s digital signature, a puzzled frown creased her brow. The intrusion pattern was almost too straightforward as if it were meant to be discovered. “It’s almost like they wanted us to find it,” she murmured to Bill. The immediate threat had been neutralized, but she couldn’t shake off the feeling that this was merely a distraction, perhaps a ploy to elicit and test the agency’s defenses. The simplicity with which Bill had thwarted the breach wasn’t a testament to his skill but rather to the intruder’s true intentions.
“We are going to have to monitor this more closely, there is more to this than it seems,” she said, and added, “Put a note in your journal that this is likely a precursor to something more virulent. I want us all on a yellow alert status until further notice.”
