Chapter 17 - The Dead Man's Switch
David stumbled backward, dropping my hand as if it had suddenly caught fire.
He stared at the biometric scanner, his mind desperately trying to comprehend the sheer scale of his failure.
"You altered your own fingerprints?" David gasped, his professional composure entirely shattered.
"I told you, I knew you were the traitor the moment I found that vanishing ink pen," I replied coldly.
I knelt down on the carpet and picked up Vance’s dropped firearm, leveling it directly at David’s chest.
"I knew you were arrogant enough to forge the federal release order, so I changed the locks before you even tried."
Vance groaned in pain but managed to sit up against the wall, clutching his bleeding shoulder.
"The money is permanently locked in the recovery trust, David, and no one is ever getting it out," I stated firmly.
David let out a manic, completely unhinged laugh, running his hands through his ruined hair.
"You just signed our death warrants, Maya!" he screamed, his voice cracking with pure terror.
"The cartel gave me exactly forty-eight hours to secure those funds, or they burn this entire city to the ground."
He dropped his suppressed pistol onto the carpet and fell to his knees, utterly defeated.
"They are already here," David whispered, staring blankly at the floor.
Before I could ask him what he meant, the entire executive floor violently shuddered.
A massive explosion echoed from the ground floor, rattling the heavy titanium security gates.
The cartel wasn't waiting for David to quietly transfer the money anymore.
They were breaching my corporate fortress by absolute, brute force.
"They are going to blow the structural supports and bring the building down," Vance warned, struggling to his feet.
I looked at the heavy titanium gates that I had just used to trap us on the fiftieth floor.
I had successfully locked David in, but I had also trapped myself inside a massive glass tomb.
The emergency alarms began blaring as a second explosion echoed from the lower levels.
Thick black smoke began rising through the ventilation shafts, choking the air in the corridor.
I grabbed David by the collar of his expensive suit and hauled him roughly to his feet.
"You built this building's security grid, David," I yelled over the deafening alarms.
"How do we manually override the titanium gates without the main servers?"
David shook his head in terror, his eyes wide with absolute panic.
"We can't," he stammered, coughing as the smoke thickened. "The system is permanently hardwired to prevent escape during a breach."
I looked at the massive, floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the stormy city.
We were fifty stories in the air, completely trapped, with a heavily armed cartel death squad ascending the stairs.
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I realized with absolute certainty that I was not going to survive the night.
But I was absolutely going to make sure the monsters didn't win either.
