Chapter 14 - The Digital Siege
"Stop it," I commanded, moving swiftly around the desk. "Override the terminal port. Can your team isolate the subnet?"
Vance was already tapping furiously on his tablet, his expression tightening into a hard, focused mask. "We're trying, but whoever is running the script has root-level access. They're routing the data packet through three different proxy servers in Zurich, Cayman, and Singapore before dumping it into an external repository. If they complete the transfer, Vale Meridian loses its entire intellectual property portfolio, and the SEC investigation becomes a dead end because the primary evidence vanishes into thin air."
"Who has root access besides me and Julian?" I demanded, my mind racing through the corporate hierarchy like a struck match.
"Marcus Sterling. Chief Technology Officer David Vance—no relation to me, unfortunately. And..." Arthur paused, his fingers freezing over the glass screen. "And your former head of legal compliance, Sarah Chen. But she resigned six months ago after taking a golden parachute to join Thorne Bio-Research."
Thorne Bio-Research again. Richard Thorne. The vulture who had tried to hostile-takeover Vale Meridian eighteen months ago and failed, only to watch Julian block him at every turn—or so I had thought.
What if Julian and Thorne hadn't been enemies at all? What if their public corporate warfare was a smokescreen while they systematically gutted Vale Meridian from the inside out, using our genetic research as currency for a multi-billion-dollar merger under the table?
"Get me David Vance on the intercom," I said coldly, walking over to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looking out over the bustling streets of Manhattan. The city looked indifferent, uncaring, a machine of glass and steel grinding away while individual lives were dismantled like discarded toys.
"David isn't answering his phone," Arthur replied quietly, plugging his tablet directly into the secure console on my desk. "His office on the twenty-ninth floor is locked from the inside. Security tried using the master key five minutes ago, but the override panel was physically disabled."
I didn't hesitate. I unzipped my blazer, tossed it onto the back of my chair, and rolled up my sleeves.
"Vance, give me your encrypted bypass key."
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Arthur looked up sharply. "Evelyn, no. That’s a Class-4 military-grade decryption drive. If you plug it into a compromised subnet without proper firewall isolation, it could blow the main server grid and fry every hard drive in the building."
"Let it burn," I said, my voice dropping into an ice-cold register that left no room for argument. "If Thorne gets his hands on those clinical trial files, Vale Meridian won't exist by tomorrow morning anyway. Bring up the floor plans for the twenty-ninth floor. We're going down there."
