Chapter 6 - The Dead Man's Switch
The double doors clicked shut behind Vincent Vance. I sat alone in the sunroom, staring at the gold-plated flash drive resting on the glass table like a ticking landmine.
Outside, the gray waters of Lake Michigan churned under a heavy, overcast sky. The illusion of corporate invulnerability that my family had spent decades cultivating was sitting right there in front of me, compressed into a few gigabytes of encrypted files. Vance thought he had checkmated me. He thought the fear of public scandal and federal scrutiny would force me to let him walk away with millions of dollars stolen from the most vulnerable people in my employ.
He didn't understand the fundamental difference between his kind of greed and my kind of survival.
My phone buzzed violently on the table. I picked it up. It was Isaac.
"Marcus, you still breathing in there?" Isaac’s raspy voice came through the speaker. "The digital mirror from headquarters is fully processed. We decrypted Vance’s secondary routing nodes ten minutes ago."
"Did you find the Meridian Trust backup?" I asked, my voice flat.
"We found it," Isaac said, a dark chuckle rumbling in his throat. "And we found something else. Vance wasn't just running a shadow ledger through Blackwell Domestic Services. He was double-dipping. He set up a parallel server farm in a commercial warehouse in Cicero registered under a dummy logistics LLC. That’s where his actual dead man’s switch infrastructure is hosted—not on that little flash drive he probably waved in your face like a magician's prop."
I narrowed my eyes. "He was bluffing about the automated upload?"
"Not entirely bluffing," Isaac clarified. "The physical drive in his hand is a live transmission node. But it’s not connected to federal reporters or prosecutors. It’s connected to a private proxy server managed by a corrupt federal bankruptcy trustee named Julian Cross. Cross has been helping Vance launder commercial real estate assets in exchange for kickbacks from our municipal development bids."
The puzzle pieces clicked into a terrifying, complete picture. This wasn't just a rogue executive skimming payroll; it was a systemic conspiracy involving federal oversight corruption, municipal zoning extortion, and corporate asset stripping.
"Can you intercept the transmission node before it pings Cross?" I asked, standing up from the table and pocketing Vance's flash drive.
"Already done," Isaac said, his tone turning ice-cold. "My team in Bridgeport spoofed the proxy handshake three minutes ago. Cross thinks he’s receiving Vance's encrypted insurance file, but all he's getting is an infinite loop of corrupted garbage data that will brick his decryption software if he tries to force it open. Vance is flying blind right now, kid. He just doesn't know it yet."
"Where is he going?"
"His Maybach just cleared the estate gates," Isaac said, the sound of keyboard clacking rustling in the background. "He’s heading south on the Edens Expressway toward downtown. Probably planning to clean out his private safety deposit box at the Michigan Avenue branch and catch a private flight out of Midway before sundown."
"Not today," I said.
May you like
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(1003x375:1005x377)/savannah-guthrie-husband-michael-feldman-mental-health-festival-020326-e956c20f55bf40e5bac82f6ed580d3e1.jpg)
I walked out of the sunroom, leaving my coffee untouched, and strode through the grand foyer toward the subterranean security garage where my personal vehicles were housed.
"Isaac," I said into the encrypted comms. "Activate the municipal traffic grid override. Route Vance's Maybach off the expressway and into the industrial rail yards off 22nd Street. Let's see how comfortable he feels negotiating corporate terms in a place where no one can hear him scream."
