Chapter 9 - The Broadcast
The underground server room smelled of ozone and hot copper. Rows of massive cooling towers hummed behind wire mesh cages, their blue LED lights blinking in rhythmic synchronization in the dim light.
Viktor stood over the central console, his fingers flying across a mechanical keyboard as he patched the physical ledger's scanned pages directly into the city’s emergency broadcast override frequency—a backdoor network hackers and high-level syndicates used to bypass municipal censorship.
"Firewall is breached," Viktor muttered, sweat beading on his forehead as the heavy steel exterior doors of the warehouse groaned under the battering ram of the tactical police unit outside. BAM! BAM! The sound of hydraulic tools tearing through iron echoed through the concrete corridors. "Boss, we've got thirty seconds before they blow the inner vault."
"Make it twenty, Viktor," Lawrence replied calmly, standing behind me with his hand resting on the back of my chair. He looked down at me, where I sat typing out the final authorization signature using my father’s digital corporate certificate—a cryptographic key hidden deep within the ledger's binding.
"Are you ready for this, Genevieve?" Lawrence asked quietly. "Once you hit enter, there's no going back. You become public enemy number one to every corrupt politician, judge, and corporate executive in the state of Illinois."
I looked at the screen. Reflected in the glass was not the terrified girl who had stood outside Preston’s private room three hours ago, listening to him laugh about her father’s death. That girl had died the moment she heard the phrase twelve million in unallocated equity.
"My father spent his entire life building this company with clean hands," I said steadily, my finger hovering over the enter key. "It’s time dirty hands paid for it."
I pressed down.
Across the city of Chicago—on every digital billboard in Millennium Park, on every television screen broadcasting the late-night news, and on the personal smartphones of five hundred wedding guests still sitting in stunned silence inside the cathedral—the regular programming cut out instantly.
In its place appeared a high-resolution, unredacted digital copy of the ledger, complete with bank routing numbers, audio transcripts of Judge Witmore discussing the acquisition of Hayes Logistics, and a signed confession detailing the vehicular sabotage that had ended my father’s life.
May you like
From the hallway outside the server room came the terrifying sound of the inner vault door blowing inward with a massive sheet of white flame and flying steel shrapnel.
---
