Chapter 17 - The Boardroom Trap-17
"Step away from the console, Marcus!" Agent Vance ordered, her service weapon drawn and raised, her laser sight painting a bright red dot directly on the center of Marcus’s chest. "Aborts the wipe script immediately! Put your hands on your head!"
Marcus let out a frantic, breathless laugh, his eyes cutting between the barrel of the gun and the blinking progress bar on the monitor.
PROGRESS: 12%... 14%... 15%...
"It’s too late, Evelyn!" Marcus shouted, using Agent Vance's first name, revealing that he knew her through his family connections. "The script is a localized, non-networked cascade partition format! Once it passes twenty percent, the master boot sectors of every drive in the Vanguard network are permanently overwritten with random garbage data! There is no remote abort code! There is no physical override!"
"You betrayed me, Marcus," I said, stepping past Vance’s outstretched arm, moving slowly down the aisle toward the man I had called my brother. "Sarah loved you. She treated you like a member of our family. And you... you sent a wolf into my home to torture my daughter just to cover your gambling debts?"
Marcus’s face contorted into an expression of agonizing shame, but the desperation in his eyes didn't fade. "You don't understand, Arthur! Those people... the syndicates... they weren't just going to sue me! They were going to kill me! They sent a man to my apartment last year who cut off my little finger on my left hand just to show me they were serious!"
He held up his left hand, and for the first time, I noticed he was wearing a flesh-colored prosthetic over his pinky finger.
"I was drowning, Arthur! I asked you for a short-term corporate loan last year, remember? And what did you say? You said it was against company policy! You said we had to maintain absolute compliance for the upcoming merger! You chose your precious regulations over my life!"
"I didn't know your life was in danger, Marcus! You told me it was for a real estate investment!" I screamed, the pain of his betrayal bursting through my chest like a physical fire. "If you had told me the truth, I would have given you the money out of my own pocket! I would have saved you! But instead, you brought Rachel Lawson into my life. You let her burn my child!"
"I didn't know she was going to hurt Grace!" Marcus sobbed, tears finally spilling down his face. "I swear to God, Arthur, I didn't know! Rachel told me she was just going to play the role of the perfect wife, keep you distracted, and then we would execute a clean, victimless digital theft! She told me she was a professional! She didn't tell me she was a sadist! When I found out what she was doing to Grace... when I saw the medical reports this morning... I tried to stop her! I tried to abort the wire!"
"But you didn't call the police," Agent Vance said coldly, her laser sight steady on his chest. "You didn't go to the hospital. You came here to erase the evidence to save your own skin."
PROGRESS: 18%... 19%...
"Because if I go to jail, those people will still find me!" Marcus screamed, his hand moving down toward his jacket pocket. "I’m sorry, Arthur! I am so, so sorry! But I can’t let you stop this wipe!"
"He’s got a weapon!" Vance yelled.
Before she could fire, Marcus didn't pull a gun. He pulled a small, high-density industrial electromagnet—a tool used by server technicians to manually degauss damaged hard drives in an emergency. He lunged forward, aiming the heavy magnetic plate directly at the central master storage unit that housed the entire system’s primary recovery sector.
If that magnet touched the unit, the recovery files would be vaporized instantly, making a system restore completely impossible even if we stopped the script.
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I didn't think about the gun, the script, or the company. I only thought about Grace's drawings, locked away in that closet, hidden from me by the conspiracy of these two monsters.
I launched my body across the console table, slamming into Marcus with a brutal, clumsy tackle.
