Chapter 17 - Into the Lion's Den
The abandoned subway maintenance tunnel smelled of rust and decay. It was the perfect place to hide.
Daniel sat at a makeshift table constructed from an old wooden spool, loading magazines into a matte-black tactical pistol.
Victoria sat across from him, typing furiously on a rugged, military-grade laptop she had retrieved from one of her secure dead-drops.
It had been forty-eight hours since the bombing. Daniel’s face was plastered across every television screen and digital billboard in the city. The FBI had frozen all of his assets.
"Arthur is moving fast," Victoria said, her eyes locked on the screen. "He called an emergency meeting of the board of directors for tonight at his private estate in the hills. He is going to use the 'terrorist attack' as an excuse to completely privatize the company and sell the Aegis assets directly to the cartel through shell corporations."
"El Espectro will be there," Daniel stated, chambering a round into his pistol. "He will want to be present to receive the final source code in person."
"Arthur’s estate is a fortress, Daniel," Victoria warned. "It sits on a cliffside. He employs a private army of ex-military contractors. The perimeter is lined with motion sensors, thermal cameras, and biometric locks."
"Every fortress has a flaw," Daniel replied calmly. He pulled up a complex architectural blueprint of the estate on a secondary monitor. "Arthur upgraded his security grid last year. He used Bennett Technologies hardware. Specifically, the hardware I designed for the regional logistics centers."
Daniel pointed to a small, heavily shielded room in the center of the blueprint.
"The main server room is in the basement," Daniel explained. "Arthur is paranoid. He doesn't trust cloud storage for his illegal ledgers. The proof of his cartel connections, the shell companies, the payoff to El Espectro—it is all sitting on a physical hard drive in that room."
"If we get that drive, we can prove your innocence and destroy Arthur," Victoria said. "But how do you get past fifty armed guards and a laser grid?"
"I don't go through the front door," Daniel said, zipping up a black tactical infiltration suit. "I go through the mountain."
At midnight, a torrential rainstorm battered the wealthy hills outside the city, masking the sound of Daniel’s approach.
He scaled the sheer, jagged cliff face behind Arthur’s estate without ropes, relying solely on his raw physical strength and the gripping gloves Jax had provided him.
The freezing rain whipped against his face, but he didn't slow down. He hauled himself over the stone retaining wall and slipped into the shadows of the manicured gardens.
He was completely invisible in the storm.
He bypassed the thermal cameras by crawling through the icy, rushing water of the estate’s decorative aqueduct system. He reached the heavy steel maintenance hatch at the rear of the mansion.
He bypassed the electronic keypad in less than thirty seconds using a decrypting device he had built from spare parts in the subway tunnel.
Daniel slipped silently into the warm, brightly lit basement corridors of the estate.
He could hear the faint sound of classical music and clinking glasses coming from the ballroom upstairs. The board meeting was disguised as a lavish gala.
Daniel moved like a ghost, taking down two patrolling guards with silent, non-lethal sleeper holds before they even realized he was there. He dragged their unconscious bodies into a supply closet.
He reached the heavy vault door of Arthur’s private server room. It required a retinal scan.
Daniel pulled a small, clear piece of silicone from his pouch. Victoria had lifted Arthur’s fingerprint and high-resolution eye profile from the company’s medical database.
Daniel placed the silicone over the scanner. The machine chirped happily, and the heavy vault door swung open.
He stepped into the cold, humming server room. Sitting in the center of the room was the master terminal.
Daniel quickly connected his encrypted flash drive and began downloading the master ledger.
The progress bar moved agonizingly slowly.
Fifty percent.
Seventy percent.
Ninety percent.
Suddenly, the lights in the server room snapped on.
Daniel spun around, raising his weapon.
Standing in the doorway was El Espectro. He was holding a suppressed pistol, aimed directly at Daniel’s head.
"You are a very persistent insect, Mr. Carter," El Espectro smiled cruelly. "But you just walked into your own coffin."
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Before Daniel could pull the trigger, three cartel enforcers stepped out from behind the server racks behind him and smashed the butt of a rifle violently into the back of his skull.
The world exploded in pain, and everything faded to black.
