Chapter 26 - The Blue Screen of Doom
Evan rushed to the edge of the open elevator shaft, peering down into the pitch-black void, but the shaft was empty—the maintenance ladder had been pulled up from below. He swore loudly, slamming his fist against the concrete wall before turning back to me.
"Are you okay, Vic?" he asked, his hands gripping my shoulders, his eyes scanning my face for any sign of collapse.
"I'm fine," I said, though my legs felt like they were made of wet sand. I looked down at the data cloning device she had ripped from the dashboard. It was still blinking with a small, rhythmic green light. "Evan... look at the screen on that device. It didn't just copy data from your car."
Evan knelt beside the dropped gadget, picking it up carefully with a handkerchief. He squinted at the tiny OLED display screen, which was running a final, automated diagnostic readout before wiping its own memory.
"It wasn't a cloning tool," Evan whispered, horror dawning in his eyes. "It was a remote transmission relay. She didn't come here to steal data from my car... she came to upload a payload."
"A payload into what?"
Before Evan could answer, his mobile phone rang with a shrill, piercing alarm tone that made us both jump. He pulled the phone from his pocket, his face going completely white as he looked at the screen.
"It's the corporate server farm at Sterling Enterprises," Evan said, his voice tight with dread. "The main database. Every single financial record, every offshore asset freeze order, every piece of evidence we compiled for Monday morning’s federal forfeiture hearing... it’s being wiped."
"Wiped?" I gasped. "How? The servers are locked behind three layers of military-grade encryption!"
"Not if you have the master root certificate," Evan said, already sprinting back toward the private stairwell, pulling me along with him. "The certificate that only the primary founder of the Lazarus Trust possesses. She didn't just break into your life, Vic—she had administrative backdoor access to the entire corporate infrastructure since day one."
We raced back up the stairs, our lungs burning, our boots pounding against the concrete steps until we burst back into the penthouse office.
Evan threw himself into the leather chair in front of the massive dual-monitor setup. The screens, which had been displaying neat, orderly columns of financial data only twenty minutes ago, were now flashing a blinding, electric blue screen.
Across the center of both monitors, in large, pulsing red block letters, a single message scrolled endlessly on a loop:
*TRANSFER COMPLETE. ASSETS REASSIGNED. THE STERLING EMPIRE BELONGS TO THE LAZARUS TRUST. SEE YOU IN COURT, LOSERS.*
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Below the message, a digital countdown timer began ticking down from 02:00:00—two hours until the federal court opened its doors for the final judgment hearing on Monday morning.
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