Chapter 19 - Race Against Time
The blood froze in my veins. The engine roar of my sedan suddenly sounded distant, muffled by the roaring blood rushing through my ears. June. They had bypassed me entirely and gone straight for June. "If you touch her," I screamed into the phone, my voice cracking with absolute terror, "I will upload every single byte of that encrypted ledger to every federal news outlet, Interpol, and the Department of Justice before you can even blink!" Julian let out a harsh, rattling laugh on the other end of the line. "Do it, Nora. Upload it. But you won't live to see the fallout. Turn your car around, bring the key to the designated drop point at the downtown rail yards, or watch your daughter's sketchbooks burn from the ashes of your precious home." The line went dead. I slammed my foot down on the accelerator, the speedometer needle climbing past eighty miles per hour as I took a sharp, screeching turn toward Elmhurst Lane. My hands shook violently against the steering wheel, my mind screaming in panic. The police were useless; if I called them now, response times wouldn't beat a coordinated arson team. I was completely on my own. As I tore down our suburban street, my heart plummeted into my stomach. Wisps of dark, oily gray smoke were curling lazily out from under the eaves of our roof, drifting into the crisp autumn sky. Parked across our driveway was a nondescript black van with its engine idling, doors sliding open. I didn't brake. I slammed my car directly into the side panel of the van with a thunderous crash of shattering glass and crumpled steel, pinning their vehicle against our front lawn. The driver’s side door of the van flew open, and a burly man stumbled out, coughing violently from the impact. I burst out of my car, grabbed the heavy iron tire iron from my trunk, and charged forward with a primal roar that startled even the seasoned criminal.
