Chapter 3 - The Fabricated Evidence
I dropped the phone onto the table, completely paralyzed by the sheer audacity of Arthur's malicious lie.
Victoria immediately went into survival mode, grabbing her briefcase and telling me we had to leave the building.
She explained that if the police arrested me now, Arthur would use my incarceration to contest the frozen bank accounts.
We rushed down the back stairwell of the office building, avoiding the main lobby entirely.
I climbed into the passenger seat of Victoria's black sedan as the cold reality of my situation finally settled in.
I was now a wanted fugitive in the very city where I owned a multi-million dollar private lending empire.
I told Victoria that we needed to access my company's primary secure server facility located downtown.
The server facility housed the original, unaltered cloud backups for my home security system.
If we could retrieve the raw footage, we could easily prove that Arthur had doctored the video he gave to the police.
Victoria drove aggressively through the heavy evening traffic, constantly checking her rearview mirror for any following police cruisers.
We finally reached the towering glass building that housed my company's highly secure data center.
I used my biometric thumbprint to bypass the heavy steel security doors and entered the freezing server room.
I quickly logged into the mainframe and began decrypting the massive video files from earlier that morning.
The original footage clearly showed Arthur throwing the coffee directly into my face without any hesitation.
I copied the video file onto a secure external flash drive, feeling a massive surge of triumphant hope.
Suddenly, the entire server room plunged into pitch black darkness as the main power grid was intentionally cut.
The heavy steel security doors slammed shut behind us, automatically locking us inside the freezing room.
A sinister, distorted voice echoed through the emergency intercom system mounted on the concrete wall.
May you like
The voice warned us that Arthur owed them five million dollars, and they were going to collect it from my cold, dead hands.
A thick, noxious gray gas began pouring rapidly into the sealed server room through the ceiling vents.
