Chapter 5 - The Sabotaged Nerve-5
The high-performance luxury SUV my brother Victor had deployed for our tactical operations detail sat idling in the private subterranean parking structure of the Beverly Hills transit annex. The time was 11:24 p.m. We had precisely thirty-six minutes before the financial clearing servers executed the automatic verification script that would permanently lock the forged land deeds inside the Nicosia vaults.
I sat in the passenger seat, my personal laptop terminal open on my knees, my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard as Victor’s forensic IT specialists bypassed the primary firewalls of the DeLuca mansion’s security network.
"The location marker is centering on the sub-basement disaster recovery center beneath the carriage house, Maria," Victor’s voice crackled through my hands-free earpiece, his tone a hard baritone of absolute tactical authority. "Martin Pierce just swiped his master administrative keycard at the server room elevator block. He’s executing the permanent zero-fill wipe script to incinerate the evidence of the signature forgeries before our field units can mirror the drive cores."
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"He won't finish the wipe, Victor," I said, my teeth clenching tightly against the wheel as I launched my large frame out into the freezing autumn rain that had begun to sweep across the Los Angeles basin. I clutched a heavy steel demolition crowbar in my right hand, my combat boots clicking a rapid, lethal rhythm against the concrete tracks as we sprinted toward the narrow utility access doors of Sector 4.
We plunged down into the dark, concrete bowels of the mansion's foundations, the air down here hot, thick, smelling faintly of hot axle grease, diesel soot, and the unmistakable high-pitched digital whine of a high-density server core operating on a stolen industrial power grid.
