James has no idea of where to begin. He could start from where he found out Mark was involved with the research conspiracy, or from when he spotted a dark web hacker on her network.
"Let's begin from the moment you sent me that message" James adjusted in his seat for comfort. "For the record, you were the first person to have ever requested help for copyright fraud. I was surprised at first, and even more, surprised when I saw that it was coming from you.
"I did a little dig and gathered more information from you, you know, to verify that those documents in question were yours", James paused and smiled a little.
"You told me you wanted to become a doctor, but you never told me you majored in neurology. Don't take this another way, but I read one of those documents. I was fascinated, and I still am".
Looking at Sophia again, he said, "You're a special person Sophia. I've never seen a such detailed and well-researched analysis of the human brain.
Sophia couldn't help but blush a little. The sudden compliment caught her by surprise. No one has ever told her she was special for her brain. Most of the time it was all about her beauty and money.
"That was why I decided to help you, and why I couldn't handle the fact that your brilliant discovery would be stolen by a dried-up hag.
"So I decided to intervene. I went to the dark web and initiated a full search. There were four computers and one cloud server already hosting your documents. Taking account of the time you sent me the message to the time I executed the search, I reckon it was spreading quickly.
"Of course, I completely removed them and rendered their computers unbootable. It was a quick and easy task. I still kept a close watch for any computers that might have hosted your document and were offline, but so far, there was none".
He paused intentionally for Sophia to digest the information. Using the time of silence, he sipped the last drop of water before putting the bottle away. He called the attention of the waiter and ordered a plate of spaghetti.
"Do you care for anything?" James asked. "I'm not hungry", Sophia said lost in her thoughts. James glanced at her with concern, before paying for his food.
"I think this information might be troubling for you. Maybe we should schedule this meeting some other time", James said. "No I'm...I'm fine. Please resume from when you warned me to close my laptop", Sophia blinked and said.
"Sure, I'll do that", James said affirmatively. "As soon as I was done cleaning your files from the internet, I dialled your number and wanted to tell you I was done. Remember when I said the purge was easy, it wasn't for my computer. I had to purchase a new CPU because of the one I had fried on my motherboard.
"However, as I was dialling you, I noticed a suspicious connection coming from a VPN. Earlier, I detected you were using a physical firewall to protect your internet activity, right?"
Sophia nodded affirmatively. According to her mom, her father installed it when she was five. With the nature of his job, it was understandable why he would want to protect himself online.
"Well this person bypassed it somehow", James said flatly. "What?" Sophia asked confused. "It's impossible. The firewall was configured to reject all incoming connections, except specific ones, like my school website, Google and Wikipedia.
"I couldn't even use my social media to talk with my friends because of the restriction, and I liked it that way", Sophia shook her head in disbelief.
"And the more reason I warned you to shut down your computer. I don't know how and where Mark found this person, but even I was scared when I saw the strange connection", James' brow furrowed as if to accentuate his statement.
He was very good at computers, but even a physical firewall would be very challenging for him to infiltrate. That was why he couldn't remotely control her MacBook at that time. The mysterious hacker, whom he later knew as Varvara did though. So scary.
Earlier, he planted a tracking link on every of his school and hospital records in every of the school and hospitals to which he'd been admitted to. He already knew she was going to search for him. And she fell straight for it.
Unlike what he had speculated, Varvara was actually from Ukraine. Although that was only the information he had, knowing who she was would make it easier for him to perform a full search of her later.
"MacBooks are tightly secured, right? Unfortunately, some people could break into it very easily. That hacker for example. She had initially—"
"She?" Sophia cut James. "Oh yeah. Her name is Varvara, but I'm not sure if that's her real name. However…"
"She had initially wanted to connect remotely to your computer and steal all the research stored there. She would then maintain that connection and wait for say when you begin writing again, and she would easily swoop in and take it again and hand it over to Mark", James revealed.
Sophia was reeling from the new information. "Oh my god", she exclaimed softly. Why the hell would Mark steal a work she had toiled day and night on?
For a moment, Sophia came to a realization. Mark wasn't the only one using her. Her father was using her to gain power and respect, Daniel was using her to help his father maintain a business relationship with her father, and her ballet teacher was using her to boost her business.
And now, her teacher almost scammed her of her research? People can be so cruel!
While all these thoughts were floating in her mind, she didn't realize that her eyes were leaking tears. James quickly noticed this and panicked. "Sophia, I…I'm sorry. Was there anything I said that upset you?"
Sophia snapped out from her daze and looked at James' terrified expression. "Wha… Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know", she then knew that she was crying. She used her hands and wiped the tears from her eyes.
I knew it! James had suspected that this information would traumatize Sophia. What was he thinking?! "No Sophia, I'm the one to be sorry. I wasn't supposed to be telling you this", James' heart broke. He couldn't bear seeing her cry this way.
Before he knew it, he began feeling the desire to cry also.