Chapter 9 - The Zurich Handshake
Mark Vance swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing violently against the cold steel of my sidearm.
"I didn't have a choice," Mark whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of terror and desperation. "Uncle Victor... he said the Directorate was expanding, that old blood needed to be cleared out. He said your grandfather was getting too close to uncovering the black-budget allocation network."
"The network that's been selling classified drone logistics data to foreign brokers?" I demanded, pressing the barrel slightly harder against his neck.
"Not just brokers," Mark confessed, his eyes darting frantically toward the monitor where the progress bar of the Zurich download was currently flashing at 98%. "State-sponsored actors. The syndicate uses front companies like your father’s to launder the kickbacks. When Walter died, Victor thought the terminal and the command codes were lost forever. But when you brought the box to Fort Blackwood this morning, Uncle Victor realized you had the master key."
"And your job was to hack the terminal and wipe the audit trails before the federal forfeiture warrants hit the banks," I finished for him.
Before Mark could answer, the progress bar on the monitor abruptly flashed a bright, blinding red.
DOWNLOAD COMPLETE. ENCRYPTION PROTOCOL ACTIVATED.
"Too late," Mark muttered, a hysterical, nervous laugh escaping his lips. "The data packets are already halfway across the Atlantic. You can't stop it now, Captain. The syndicate has everything."
I didn't panic. I reached down with my left hand—the one bearing Walter Palmer’s gold signet ring—and slammed it directly onto the biometric sensor pad embedded in the terminal desk.
The terminal screen blinked violently, shifting from red to an electric, flashing amber.
BIOMETRIC OVERRIDE DETECTED. DIRECTOR LEVEL-1 AUTHORITY.
A sharp, digital klaxon began to wail through the server room as the master override protocol—a failsafe my grandfather had coded into the system decades ago—kicked into gear.
"What are you doing?" Mark screamed, clutching his head as the server racks around us began to shut down one by one, their cooling fans spinning down into silence. "You're locking the entire network! You're destroying the whole database!"
"I'm not destroying it," I said coldly, watching the data stream reverse direction, pulling the encrypted packets back across the secure satellite tunnel before they could clear the European gateway. "I'm recalling it. And freezing every asset attached to the Zurich node."
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Suddenly, the secure radio transmitter on the desk hissed to life, and the heavy, furious voice of Victor Vance came booming through the speaker.
“Mark! Report! Why did the Zurich tunnel bounce back? What’s happening to the server cluster?”
