Chapter 2 - The Lethal Frequency
The harsh red light on my father's military-grade signal jammer pulsed rhythmically, instantly killing all cellular reception in the room.
I instinctively reached for my encrypted federal smartphone, only to find the screen displaying a completely dead connection.
My mother, Helen, quietly stepped into the bedroom, her eyes cold and completely devoid of any maternal warmth.
"You really should have just stayed out of this, Maya," my mother whispered, crossing her arms tightly over her chest.
I placed my body firmly between my family and my terrified grandmother, assessing the physical threats in the room.
"You are all going to spend the rest of your miserable lives in federal prison for this," I warned them with venom in my voice.
Sarah laughed nervously, brushing a strand of perfect blonde hair out of her frantic, desperate eyes.
"We just need her to sign the final transfer forms for the primary trust, and then we will let her go," Sarah promised hollowly.
Evelyn gripped my jacket sleeve tightly and whispered that they had already successfully drained her secondary savings account this morning.
I knew that tracking the stolen funds was my exact area of expertise, but I needed an active internet connection to deploy my countermeasures.
I slowly slid my hand into my back pocket and blindly activated the offline emergency backdoor protocol on my specialized device.
My phone was designed to secretly bypass local jammers by pinging low-orbit military satellites, but it took three agonizing minutes to connect.
"You are incredibly naive if you think I came here without a heavily armed backup team completely surrounding the perimeter," I lied smoothly.
My father simply chuckled, shaking his head as if he were dealing with a wildly disobedient child.
"I know exactly how your task force operates, Maya, because I did not plan this massive heist entirely by myself," my father revealed smugly.
He reached into his other pocket and pulled out a small, specialized medical tablet that looked entirely out of place in his hands.
A massive wave of pure, unadulterated dread washed over me as I instantly recognized the complex software running on the glowing screen.
It was a black-market pacemaker override controller, highly illegal and incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands.
My grandmother suffered from a severe heart condition, and her modern pacemaker was tragically susceptible to targeted wireless hacking.
"I bought this little device on the dark web using the funds from Evelyn's first account," my father explained with a psychopathic smile.
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He slowly moved his thumb directly over the large red icon on the digital screen.
"If you do not force her to sign those documents right now, I will manually turn her heart completely off," my father threatened perfectly calmly.
