Chapter 8 - The Break-In
Jenkins froze, lowering the shotgun slightly as he stared at the blinking red light.
The distraction was all I needed.
I lunged forward, stripping the weapon from his hands and shoving him into the concrete wall.
"Let's go!" I yelled, pushing Maya and Hector out into the humid Miami night.
We sprinted toward the perimeter fence, the sound of sirens already wailing in the distance.
Vance's operation was crumbling, but the corporate war was far from over.
I hailed an anonymous cab and directed the driver to a secure underground clinic for Hector.
Once he was safe, I turned to Maya.
"How did you hack a broken body camera to broadcast to Chad's network?" I asked.
Maya wiped the dirt from her face and looked away.
"I'm not a law student, Julian," she confessed softly.
"My real name is Emma."
"I was Marcus Vance's lead forensic accountant until I found out he was embezzling billions."
"I staged the coffee spill in the plaza to get close to you."
The pieces finally clicked into place.
Vance hadn't targeted me just for TechNova's technology.
He targeted me because Emma had stolen his encrypted ledger, and he thought I was protecting her.
"Where is the ledger?" I asked, my voice deadly serious.
"It's hidden inside TechNova's main server room," she admitted.
"I planted it there during a tour last week, but it's heavily encrypted."
I checked my secure phone.
My board of directors had officially locked me out of the building.
They had hired private security to barricade the entrances, firmly aligning themselves with Vance.
"We have to break into my own company," I said.
We drove to the TechNova tower just as the sun began to rise.
Using a backdoor access code I coded years ago, we bypassed the lobby security.
We slipped into the maintenance elevator and rode it to the 50th floor.
The server room was cold, humming with the power of thousands of processors.
Emma quickly typed a sequence on the terminal, and a decryption progress bar appeared.
"It's going to take ten minutes to decrypt," she whispered nervously.
Suddenly, the heavy glass doors of the server room shattered.
Marcus Vance stepped through the broken glass, accompanied by a dozen armed police officers.
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"Arrest them," Vance commanded with a vicious smile.
"They are stealing corporate secrets."
