A teenage girl had been vomiting for three days, and her father said

"Make the call, Evelyn," Caldwell ordered, not breaking eye contact with me.

"No! Wait!" I screamed, slamming my hands on the glass table.

Evelyn paused, her thumb hovering over her phone screen.

"You have exactly ten seconds to give me the encryption keys, David, or those men walk into that room and finish what your sister started," Caldwell warned, his voice devoid of any mercy.

My mind raced at a million miles an hour.

The signal jammer blocked the FBI, Evelyn had a gun on me, and Caldwell’s men were seconds away from hurting my little girl.

I reached into my suit jacket pocket.

Evelyn immediately raised her pistol, aiming it directly at my forehead.

"It's just a flash drive," I said frantically, pulling a silver USB drive from my pocket and tossing it onto the table.

"The encryption codes are on there."

Caldwell nodded to Evelyn.

She kept the gun trained on me with one hand while grabbing a laptop with the other.

She plugged the drive in and began typing rapidly.

"The codes are verifying," Evelyn confirmed after a tense moment. "We have full access to the South Side manifests."

Caldwell smiled, straightening his tie.

"See, David? We can be reasonable."

"Call your men off," I demanded, pointing at the live feed still playing on the phone.

Caldwell chuckled. "I will. Right after Evelyn escorts you to the roof. I'm afraid you are going to have a tragic, grief-induced fall."

Evelyn stepped toward me, gesturing with the barrel of the gun for me to stand up.

But she didn't realize what I had actually given them.

The USB drive wasn't just holding the encryption keys.

Before I met with Agent Vance, I had paid a desperate visit to a former cyber-security expert who used to work for my father.

"Are the manifests loading?" Caldwell asked Evelyn.

Suddenly, Evelyn’s laptop screen went entirely black.

A second later, a bright red warning flashed across the screen.

"What is this?" Evelyn snapped, hitting the keyboard aggressively.

"It's a localized network worm," I said, my voice eerily calm as I stood up.

"It just bypassed your building's firewall using your own administrative laptop."

Caldwell’s face finally showed a flicker of real panic. "Shut it down!"

"You can't," I told him. "It just disabled the signal jammers in this room. And it just mass-emailed every piece of encrypted financial data on that laptop directly to the FBI servers."