Chapter 6 - The Hospital Lockdown-6
The interior of the pediatric trauma wing at St. Jude Children’s Hospital was a chaotic forest of emergency medical personnel, uniform state troopers, and blinking red-and-blue lights that blurred into long, jagged streaks as our tactical convoy settled against the intake curb.
The time was 2:14 p.m. We had precisely thirty-six minutes before the syndicate operators in Geneva executed their final threat against my mother, Eleanor Vance.
I left Harper inside the secure base medical sanctuary on the third floor under the protection of two armed FBI operators, before I sprinted down the long, fluorescent-lit concrete corridor toward the building’s lowest subterranean sub-levels alongside Agent Harris and Marcus Vance—the CFO, who had been detained at his corporate annex twenty minutes ago by a federal financial crimes task force.
Marcus Vance looked completely unrecognizable. The polished, impeccably tailored corporate executive who had dominated LaSalle Street was gone. He wore a rumpled charcoal suit, his tie torn away, his hands secured by heavy steel handcuffs that clinked dismally against his belt loop with every step. On his left hand, a flesh-colored prosthetic over his little finger was missing—revealing the raw, scarred pylon where the Eastern European syndicate had cut off his bone last year to show him they were serious about his gambling debts.
"Open the vault door, Marcus," I growled, my voice dropping into a freezing baritone as we reached the heavy steel blast doors of the building’s legacy disaster recovery center—the old bomb shelter from the 1960s where the primary backup server core for our company was housed behind an independent power grid.
"I can't bypass the master encryption block from here, Claire!" Marcus sobbed, his face a pale mask of absolute, primal terror as he stared down at the electronic keypad. "The Senator’s people... they’ve already initiated the secondary cascade partition format from the surface terminal! Once that progress bar hits twenty percent, the master boot sectors of every drive in the Vance network are permanently overwritten with random garbage data! There is no remote abort code! There is no physical override!"
"We don't need a remote code, Marcus," I said, reaching into my travel jacket pocket and pulling out the small, heavy iron fire ax I had quietly taken from the security station in the lobby.
May you like
I didn't think about the company, the portfolios, or the multi-million-dollar merger contracts. I only saw my daughter's face when she had raised her small hand in that courtroom box, and the memory of the father who had died to keep our family’s truth alive.
With a raw, desperate roar of pure maternal fury, I slammed the heavy steel blade of the ax directly into the center of the vault's high-voltage electrical transformer box mounted on the concrete pylon.
