Chapter 8 - Ammonia and Bleach
Behind the narrow slit of the sixteenth-floor pantry service panel, Daniel’s blood turned to ice as he stared into the illuminated glass server vault across the corridor.
Deputy Defense Secretary Richard Vance—the high-ranking Pentagon official who had awarded Carter Ridge Technologies the fifty-million-dollar Aegis-Nine contract six months ago—was standing calmly beside Chairman Arthur Sterling, inspecting the stolen quantum guidance chip under the vault lights.
“Once the server wipe finishes in four minutes and the Chicago police arrest the Martinez maid for stealing this prototype,” Deputy Secretary Vance said coldly, snapping the silver containment case shut, “the Defense Department will declare Daniel Carter in catastrophic breach of national security, seize his controlling shares without compensation, and transfer the entire Aegis program to Sterling Defense Holdings by noon tomorrow.”
“And what about the night-shift IT director here once he finishes entering the final root password?” Marcus Reed asked, gesturing with the barrel of his nine-millimeter pistol toward twenty-six-year-old Kevin Park, who was trembling violently at the master console with tears streaming down his face.
“Stage it so it looks like the janitor panicked when Kevin caught her in the server room and pushed him down the stairwell on her way out,” Arthur Sterling replied without a flicker of remorse.
Beside Daniel in the dark pantry, Elena gasped so softly it was barely a breath, yet as Daniel shifted his weight to draw the compact pistol he had brought from his penthouse safe, the heel of his leather dress shoe clicked sharply against an empty aluminum coffee canister on the pantry floor.
Inside the server vault, Marcus Reed spun around instantly, his eyes locking onto the shadowed crack of the pantry door across the hall.
“Someone is behind the kitchen service wall!” Marcus barked, waving two of his armed Blackthorne security contractors toward the pantry with their submachine guns raised.
“Check the pantry and kill anyone who isn’t on our payroll!”
Daniel grabbed Elena by the waist to pull her back into the vertical freight shaft, only to see that one of the basement guards had just called the mechanical platform back down to the first floor, leaving them trapped inside the windowless ten-by-ten pantry with an eight-story drop beneath the shaft doors and two armed mercenaries ten feet from the entrance!
“Stay behind the steel refrigerator, Elena—I’ll take the first man through the door,” Daniel whispered fiercely, raising his compact pistol toward the frosted glass door as the heavy footsteps of the two gunmen reached the threshold.
Instead of hiding behind the refrigerator, Elena moved with the blinding, decisive speed of a woman who knew every chemical compound inside her janitorial closet.
Before Daniel could stop her, she grabbed a two-gallon industrial jug of concentrated sodium hypochlorite bleach and a full container of twenty-percent commercial ammonia floor stripper off her stainless-steel cleaning cart, pulled the rubber door sweep off the bottom of the pantry door, and poured both liquids simultaneously into the heated return-air floor trough directly outside the threshold!
The instant the industrial bleach and concentrated ammonia collided over the warm ventilation grate, a thick, rolling white cloud of toxic chloramine gas erupted upward into the narrow corridor just as the two Blackthorne mercenaries reached for the door handle.
Both gunmen inhaled a lungful of the scorching chemical vapor, instantly dropping their submachine guns as they collapsed onto the carpet choking, blinded, and retching violently!
Holding a wet microfiber towel soaked in cold sink water tightly over Daniel’s nose and mouth with one hand and another over her own face, Elena kicked open the side maintenance door through the blinding white cloud, grabbed the silver containment case that a coughing Victoria Sterling dropped as she fled toward the stairwell, and pulled Daniel straight into the adjacent fire-rated server vault!
Daniel slammed the six-inch reinforced glass-and-steel vault door shut from the inside, engaging the internal magnetic lockdown bolts to seal Marcus and his coughing guards out in the smoky hallway while knocking Marcus’s remaining gunman unconscious with a single devastating right hook to the jaw.
While Kevin Park sobbed in relief on the floor, Daniel jammed his hardware override token into the master server terminal at ninety-eight percent, aborting the system wipe with four seconds to spare and broadcasting the 2018 murder video of his brother Lucas along with the live audio-video feed of Deputy Defense Secretary Vance and Arthur Sterling directly to the FBI Director, the Associated Press, and every member of the Board of Directors!
Outside the thick glass wall, Marcus Reed pressed his furious, tear-stained face against the window, stopped running toward the stairs, and held up his smartphone with a live video feed displaying on the screen.
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Daniel and Elena stepped closer to the glass, and Elena let out a blood-chilling scream that tore through Daniel’s soul.
On Marcus’s phone screen, the hidden wall of Daniel’s penthouse studio had been blown open with breaching charges, the two off-duty police guards lay unconscious on the floor, and four armed mercenaries were dragging Roberto and eight-year-old Maya into the back of a black armored van down on the riverfront!
