Chapter 6 - The Weight of Steel
Dominic didn’t flinch. His fingers remained poised lightly above the mechanical keys of the console, his eyes reflecting the soft green cascade of the firewall diagnostics.
“Port sixty-four,” I repeated, my voice dropping into that flat, deadened register I usually reserved for boardroom executions. My hand stayed buried inside my jacket pocket, gripping the cold checkering of my Sig Sauer. “You’ve worked for me for six years, Dominic. You took shrapnel out of your own shoulder when the car blew up. You pulled Matteo from the backseat before the tank ignited. Explain to me why an outbound data ping to Marcus Vance’s Cayman holdings is routing through your personal terminal right now.”
Dominic slowly lifted his hands away from the keyboard. He turned his chair around, his face devoid of panic, bearing only a quiet, weary resignation.
“Because sixty acres of concrete, forty armed guards, and a subterranean bunker don’t keep a ghost out of your head, Vincent,” Dominic said softly.
Through the glass partition of the control room, the heavy steel door clicked open. Clara stepped inside. She didn’t look surprised. She moved with the calm, methodical deliberation of a field operative who had seen this exact betrayal play out a hundred times before.
“He didn’t sell your shipping lines to Vance for the money,” Clara said, stopping beside my shoulder. Her eyes locked onto Dominic. “He sold them because Vance told him it was the only way to keep the security grid from being turned against Matteo.”
My grip on my pistol tightened. “What are you talking about?”
Dominic looked up at me, his eyes dark with a pain I hadn’t noticed underneath his usual stoic exterior.
“Fourteen months ago, before the car bomb, I received an encrypted file on my home terminal,” Dominic said, his voice steady. “It wasn't a threat from Vance. It was an engineering schematic of the neural bypass system Matteo’s spine specialist was developing at the Johns Hopkins research lab. Vance’s people had the doctor’s family locked down in a safehouse in Zurich. They told me that if I didn’t allow their telemetry software a silent backdoor into your perimeter router every quarter, the doctor’s research would be wiped, and Matteo would never walk again.”
The air in the control room seemed to curdle.
I looked from Dominic to Clara, and then back to the monitors where monitor four still showed my son sitting quietly on the south terrace, wrapped in his blanket, staring out at the grey Atlantic.
“You traded my shipping data... you let a saboteur compromise my family’s security... to save a doctor?” I asked, every muscle in my body locking up.
“I traded data that was already insured against corporate loss,” Dominic corrected, standing up slowly. He didn't try to reach for a weapon. He stood tall, looking me dead in the eye. “I chose the boy over the balance sheet, Vincent. Exactly like you would have done if you had known. But I couldn't tell you, because the moment you found out, you would have declared war on Vance openly—and Vance would have had the doctor terminated before the research ever reached clinical trials.”
I pulled my hand out of my pocket. My fingers were empty. I let the Sig Sauer slide back into its holster.
“The research,” I whispered, the rage draining out of me, leaving behind a cold, hollow shock. “Did it work?”
Dominic’s expression softened into a heartbreakingly fragile smile.
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“The clinical trial phase cleared yesterday morning,” Dominic said quietly. “The data packet I routed through port sixty-four wasn't a corporate leak to Vance. It was the final encryption key sending the neural mapping files to the surgical team in Switzerland. Matteo’s medical file is clean. The operation is scheduled for next month.”
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