Evaluation E-Book

Patrick Hofstetter

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 153

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

Fast-Paced Industrial Thriller A team enters a diamond factory to steal its secrets. But someone was already inside, someone who knows their codes, their route, their fears. The heist becomes a trap. And a test none of them were meant to survive.

Leseprobe

To Nikita & Kateryna

The night smelled of metal.

Rain slithered down the old industrial block like cold dust, turning every puddle into a broken mirror that swallowed the streetlights whole. I stood in the lee of the abandoned diamond-grinding factory, my back pressed to the wall, fingers steady on my pulse. The building felt alive in a forgotten way—its walls humming with the memory of machines that once carved beauty out of stone.

“You're early, Lena,” Jonas said behind me.

I hadn’t heard him approach. He stood with his hood low, hands in his pockets, still as a shadow the rain refused to touch. Jonas had a way of blending into spaces that didn’t even have corners. Next to him, the world looked untidy.

“Or you’re late,” I answered.

He didn’t smile. He never wasted one unless it mattered. A dull glow pulsed in the factory windows—nothing alive, just the echo of old neon—but Jonas watched it like the building might breathe again.

Marek arrived next. Heavy boots, heavier presence. Asphalt seemed to vibrate when he walked. Broad shoulders, boxer’s scar on his lip still pink from a fight he hadn’t explained. He nodded at Jonas. He didn’t nod at me.

“I hate rain,” he growled. “You can’t tell blood from water.”

“That’s the point,” Sofie said, emerging from behind a stack of shipping containers. Her hood was too big, her zipper stuck halfway up the jacket, one hand clenching her laptop bag like something inside it might bite. “Rain is kind. It makes everything equal.”

“Except debt,” Marek said.

“Except debt,” I echoed. “And plans.”

Viktor, of course, was late.

When someone spends too long with codes, they eventually think time bends for them. He stumbled around the corner coughing, coat too thin, smelling faintly of wet tobacco. He carried his briefcase the way a man carries a confession.

“Traffic,” he said.

No one bothered replying. Even the river swallowed the excuse.

The wash hall behind the factory was our meeting point. By day it smelled of plastic polish and artificial citrus. Tonight: wet cardboard, oil, something bitter leaking out from the cracks of the stone.

I snapped the padlock open and pushed the steel door inward. Cold concrete air rolled out to meet us.

Inside: a shaky folding table, two battered lockers, an old emergency light that hadn’t turned on since the last century.

I chose this place because no one would miss it. A room between things.

“Put it down,” I said.

Sofie set the laptop on the table. A blueprint flickered onto the screen: the layout of Aebi & Sons Grinding Facility.

The “& Sons” was a lie—had been for decades—but the sign still carried the name as if the sons were ghosts too stubborn to leave.

Viktor added a ring of keys, two magnetic cards, and a wrinkled floor plan he’d stolen the night they “released” him from his position. The word still tasted bad in his mouth.

“Camera four is technically dead,” he said. “Since the renovation. The light’s on, but video goes to a server that—” He gestured to nowhere. “Doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Technically dead isn’t dead,” Jonas murmured.

Sofie scrolled. “I’ll run a looping signal. Even if it’s alive, it’ll see nothing but routine silence.”

“And if it listens?” Marek asked, thumb brushing the scar on his lip.

“Then it hears our rain.”

I handed everyone a paper copy of the plan—thin sheets curling from the moisture.

“No names, no numbers,” I reminded them. “No shortcuts.”

Marek jerked his chin at the black sports bag under the table.

“What about those?”

“Cable ties, gloves, earplugs,” I said. “And a welding cutter in case Viktor’s code belongs in a fairy tale.”

“It’s not a fairy tale,” Viktor snapped, too fast. “I wrote the update myself. Two-step authentication: card plus six-digit code. I’ll change it back at dawn—after we’re done.”

“If,” Jonas said quietly.

Sofie checked the time. “Forty-two minutes until the security guard makes his round.”

“That’s the old guard’s schedule,” Viktor added nervously. “The new one is… unreliable.”

“Unreliable,” Marek repeated, amused. “So we’re alone.”

It was the we that echoed. Like we were something solid. Like each of us wasn’t a different kind of blade.

“Count it,” Jonas said softly.

I unzipped the gray pouch we called the “cashbox,” though it was more of a shared alibi. I spilled the bills onto the table—bundles of fifties and hundreds, crisp and wrong in the cold air.

Jonas didn’t need long. “We’re missing two thousand.”

Sofie pushed her glasses up. “Yesterday we had—”

“Two thousand more,” Marek finished.

“Maybe you miscounted,” Viktor offered, too innocent to be believable.

“I don’t miscount,” I said.

Silence tightened around us.

“We note it,” Jonas said, his voice gentle like a blade.

“Two missing.”

“And if four go missing later?” Marek challenged.

“Then one of us is missing,” Sofie whispered.

I made a mark in my notebook:

Two thousand. Date. Time.

One thin line like a cut.

We reviewed the plan again. The hallway. The airlock. The timed lock. The glass harder than common sense.

It was clean.

Too clean.

Later, as the others checked routes and blind spots outside, Sofie and I stayed behind. She held the laptop bag on her lap, fingers trembling.

“You’re shaking,” I said.

“I’m cold.”

“You’re lying.”

She looked through the blur of her glasses, almost as if she were already stepping back into herself. “I should’ve backed out,” she murmured. “But no one backs out when it’s serious. That’s the rule, right?”

“The rule is that every rule has an exception.”

She gave a crooked smile. “You’re good at exceptions.”

“I’m good at doors,” I said. “In or out. That’s all.”

“And what if the door is inside you?”

I had no answer.

Footsteps approached. Viktor—too early and too nervous for his own habits—held a wet envelope.

“For you,” he said. “It was by the door.”

My name wasn’t on it. No stamp. Just weight.

Inside: a single note. Torn from a pad. My handwriting. My signature—a simple “L.”

An instruction:

Change route. Shaft 3 blocked. Use West Gate. Code: 809241.

It took a moment to understand the problem.

I never sign with “L.”

I never write code changes.

I speak them.

Someone had traced my handwriting.

Someone who had studied it.

“What is it?” Sofie asked.

“Nothing,” I lied. “A joke.”

A bad one.

I sealed the note back into the envelope as if the words might crawl out.

“We stick to the original route. West Gate is dirty.”

Viktor licked his lips. “But the code… it’s plausible. It fits the security pattern.”

“Plausible is a trap.”

A moment later, Jonas and Marek returned. The fence had a tear. The rain started again—thicker this time, coins from a sky that demanded payment.

And in my pocket, the false note felt warm, like breath.

Someone was already inside the story.

Someone who wanted to write the next chapter for us.

At 2:07 a.m., we would meet at the north fence.

If none of us went missing before that.

By the time we gathered inside the wash hall again, the rain had turned from a whisper to a steady hiss, like static pressed against the windows. The building felt smaller than before. Or maybe our nerves had grown larger.

Sofie set her laptop on the folding table.

“This is the final run,” she said, though her voice betrayed that she didn’t believe in final runs.

The blueprint lit up the room in cold blue.

Hall A, Hall B, the polishing sector, the inspection corridor, the airlock.

Our path was a straight line.

Supposedly.

“Walk me through it,” I said.

Sofie zoomed in on the lower levels. “We enter through the north fence, bypass the outer sensors. Visual feed will be looped—simple static maintenance pattern.” She hesitated before adding: “Eight minutes before the system starts to question it.”

“Eight minutes is enough,” Marek said, cracking his neck like he was warming up for a fight instead of a break-in.

“It is,” Sofie agreed. “But don’t improvise. The loop is automated. If the system sees something unscheduled, it won’t just flag it. It’ll lock the building.”

Jonas folded his arms. “Meaning we become part of it.”

“Meaning you suffocate before security arrives,” Sofie corrected flatly.

Viktor cleared his throat, pushing a new set of diagrams forward. “The internal doors still accept dual authentication: card plus code. Here.” He tapped on the printed floor plan. “Airlock, vault corridor, then the core room.”

“And the code?” Marek asked, eyes narrowing.

“Six digits.” Viktor swallowed. “I’ll enter it myself.”

“Why not share it?” Marek pressed.

“Because someone agreed earlier,” Jonas said quietly, “that fewer people holding sensitive information makes betrayal harder.”

His tone didn’t accuse. That made it worse.

Sofie continued, trying to ignore the tension slicing across the room.

“Motion sensors inside Hall A are old. They respond more to heat than movement. Stay cold, stay small.”

“Stay alive,” Marek muttered.

I watched the blueprint rotate under Sofie’s fingertips. Something about the path bothered me.

A hairline discrepancy, so thin most people would never notice it.

A corridor marked as renovated last year… but Viktor had sworn the renovation stopped at Sector 3.

“Where did you get this version?” I asked.

Sofie hesitated—too long.

“It’s… from the internal network.”

“From when?”

“Two nights ago.” Another hesitation. “Maybe three.”

I looked at Viktor. “This match your files?”

He leaned over the screen, squinting hard. “Yes. No. I mean—this part shouldn’t exist.” He pointed at a narrow hallway branching off the main route. “Sector 3 never had a secondary corridor.”

“Maybe it’s new,” Sofie offered.

“Or maybe,” Jonas said, “someone added it so we’d believe it exists.”

The rain hammered the windows harder.

We all felt it: something was off-balance.

“Check the source,” I said.

Sofie’s fingers tapped the keys. The blueprint flickered— once, twice.

Then a warning flashed across the screen:

MISSING DATA BLOCK

FILE INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED

Sofie froze. “That… shouldn’t happen.”

“What does it mean?” Viktor asked.

“It means someone accessed the blueprint before me.” Her voice shrank. “And deleted the log.”

Jonas exhaled softly. “Whoever it was knew exactly what they were looking for.”

Marek slammed his fist onto the table, rattling the metal legs.

“Enough games. Who touched the system?”

No one answered.

But the silence wasn’t equal.

It tilted toward Sofie.

Toward Viktor.

Toward me.

I opened my notebook, scanning the handwritten annotations I had made two days earlier.

The ventilation route.

The bypass junction.

The emergency side door.

Each matched the blueprint—except for one.

The emergency fuse panel on the west side.

In my notes, it was marked as inactive.

In Sofie’s blueprint, it was active.

Someone had changed that detail.

“Small inconsistencies,” Jonas murmured, reading my expression. “Those are the ones that kill.”

I closed the notebook.

“There’s a leak,” I said. “Inside our team or inside our sources. We treat everything as uncertain.”

Viktor paled. “But the codes—”

“Even the codes can be wrong,” I cut in. “If the system was altered, your access may already be outdated.”

The tension thickened until it felt like a sixth person in the room.

Sofie tried to smile, but it faltered. “We can still do this. We just need to adjust—”

“No adjustments,” I said. “We stick to the original route. No detours. No shortcuts. No new corridors.”

“And if the new corridor exists?” Marek asked.

“Then whoever added it wants us inside it.” Jonas answered for me.

The rain outside slowed, a pause in the sky.

It felt like the city was listening.

We would enter the factory in less than an hour.

And someone—inside or outside our team—had already started writing lies into our map.

The kind you only discover when they close behind you.

The rain clung to the metal door in thin, trembling lines when I stepped outside to clear my head. The air smelled like wet rust and something older—like secrets soaked too long in water.

I didn’t hear Viktor until he was close enough to touch me.

“Lena,” he said, breathless, “someone left this.”

He held out an envelope, damp around the edges, the paper swollen from the rain. No name. No stamp. No mark.

Just weight.

“For me?” I asked.

“It was lying by the door.” He sounded nervous, like he’d touched something he shouldn’t have.

I took it.

The paper was cold, but the weight inside felt warm, as if it had been held recently. Carefully. Intentionally.

Inside was a single sheet, torn from a notepad.

My handwriting.

My signature—just L.

I never signed with a single letter.

The message was short:

Route change. Shaft 3 blocked.

Use West Gate.

Code: 809241.

—L

The kind of instruction I would give verbally.

Not on paper.

Not like this.

Sofie appeared in the doorway behind Viktor, pushing her glasses up with the back of her hand. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” I said too quickly. “A prank.”

But it wasn’t.

My pulse knew it.

Jonas, appearing like a shadow along the wall, knew it too.

He watched the envelope in my hand, eyes narrowed in that quiet way of his.

“The rain didn’t warp the ink,” he said. “Meaning it wasn’t outside long.”

“Or someone protected it,” Marek added from behind him, arms crossed like he was waiting to swing at the next thing that moved.

Sofie stepped closer. “Lena… what does it say?”

“A detour,” I answered. “And a code.” I folded the note back into the envelope, sealing the imitation of my handwriting away.

“Is the code valid?” Viktor asked, voice hitching.

“Because—because it looks plausible. It follows the factory’s standard algorithm.”

He said it like he wanted it to be true.

Or like he already knew it was true.

Jonas tilted his head. “Strange how confidently you say that.”

Viktor’s cheeks flushed. “I updated the system myself. I know the logic. The combination is… possible.”

Possible.

The word sat in the room like a trap.

Sofie hugged her laptop closer. “Lena, someone mimicked you. Exactly. That’s not a message. That’s a rehearsal.”

She was right.

It wasn’t just a fake instruction.

It was proof that someone inside our circle—or close enough to study us—was preparing for something more.

I tore the envelope in half, then in half again, the paper ripping under my fingers like brittle skin.

“We stick to the original plan,” I said. “No West Gate.” Marek grunted approval, but his eyes stayed on Viktor.

“What if the note is real?” Viktor asked quietly. “Maybe you wrote it earlier and forgot. Stress does that. People—”

I stepped toward him, closing the distance until he had to lift his chin to meet my eyes.

“I don’t forget,” I said.

The room went still.

Only the rain, tapping against the tin roof, filled the silence.

Jonas broke it first. “If someone can copy her handwriting, they’ve watched her long enough to know how she thinks.”

“And what she changes,” Sofie added.

“And what she doesn’t,” Marek finished. “Which means the rat is somewhere close.”

His gaze slid from Viktor to Sofie to Jonas.

Then to me.

I felt all their eyes.

Felt the tension breathe.

This was the moment every criminal crew fears: not the heist, not the risk— the first irreversible crack in trust.

Someone had studied me.

Learned me.

Written me.

A shadow wearing my voice.

The false envelope wasn’t a warning.

It was a promise.

The kind only a traitor makes before they move their first real piece.

By 2:07 a.m., the rain had thinned to a cold mist, like the sky was holding its breath with us.

I reached the north fence first.

The factory loomed ahead—just a gray mass swallowed by darkness, its windows blind, its angles sharp as old bones. The neon from the distant access road flickered across the wet ground, turning it into shifting metal.

Marek arrived next, peeling himself out of the shadows like something the dark reluctantly released.

“You’re punctual,” I said.

“I’m always punctual,” he replied, rolling his shoulders.

“If I’m late, I’m dead.”

“Maybe you’re punctual and dead,” I said.

He gave a quick, humorless laugh, but I saw the tension in the way his hand tapped the fence wire — testing it, testing himself.

Jonas appeared a heartbeat later.

He didn’t walk up; he simply materialized, stepping out of a stillness so complete it felt unnatural. He passed neither Marek nor me a glance. His eyes tracked the perimeter instead, tracing every weak point, every shadow.

“Two minutes,” he murmured.

“Two minutes until what?” Marek asked.

“Until someone else doesn’t show up,” Jonas said.

And right then, Viktor stumbled toward us from the darkness, hands stuffed in his pockets as if to keep them from shaking. His coat hung open, drenched, and he looked like he’d sprinted, or fled, or both.

“Where’s Sofie?” I asked.

“She’s—behind me,” Viktor panted. “She said she had to… to check one more thing.”

“One more thing?” Marek echoed. “She wants us dead?”

“Or alive,” Jonas said softly, which somehow sounded worse.

I stepped closer to Viktor.

“Look at me. Did she say what she was checking?”

“A loop,” he gasped. “A camera loop. She—she said she needed to be sure the system wouldn’t catch us too early.”

“Or too late,” Jonas murmured.

Viktor flinched at that.

“Listen,” Marek snapped, “if she isn’t here in the next thirty seconds, we go without—”

Footsteps splashed through the mud.

Sofie emerged from the dark, hood low, soaked, breath unsteady. She held the laptop bag to her chest, like a shield.

“It’s running,” she said. “Eight-minute window. Maybe nine if the system lags.”

“‘Maybe’?” Marek growled.

“Everything is unstable tonight,” she answered quietly.

“I’m not the only one in that network.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the rain moved through me.

Jonas’s gaze flicked to Viktor. “Where were you before you met us?”

“I—I was hiding,” Viktor stammered.

“From what?” Jonas asked.

“From the rain,” Viktor said.

Jonas smiled faintly.

It wasn’t kind.

“All right,” I said. “We start. No talking. No mistakes.”

I took the bolt cutter from my bag. The metal bit into the wire with a sharp, bright snap, loud in the tension-thick air. A second cut, and a square of fencing sagged open like a broken grin.

We crawled through one by one.

Inside, the world felt muted.

As if the fence had swallowed the last of the city’s noise and left only our breathing.

The factory rose before us — a sleeping beast, cold and mechanical, built to grind down anything that entered.

Sofie checked her watch. “The loop is live.”

“Meaning?” Marek asked.

“Meaning the cameras are blind to us,” she whispered, “and watching everything else.”

We approached the service door — the outer airlock. Metal slick with rain. Card reader blinking in a steady, indifferent rhythm.

Viktor reached for his card.

“Wait,” Jonas said.

Viktor froze.

“W-what is it?”

Jonas stepped close enough that Viktor shrank away.

“What code are you planning to use?” Jonas asked softly.

“The… the right one,” Viktor stammered.

“And what is the right one?” Jonas pressed.

Viktor’s throat bobbed.

“I—I’ll enter it myself.”