Chapter 9
The master bedroom was bathed in the amber glow of the setting sun as they slammed the heavy bedroom door behind them, throwing the interior privacy latch. Chen rushed straight to the towering white wardrobe, her hands moving along the interior side panel with practiced familiarity. She pressed her palm against a hidden indentation near the baseboard, and with a heavy, pneumatic hiss, the entire wardrobe unit—clothes and all—swung inward on concealed hydraulic arms, revealing a dark, steel-reinforced entryway.
“Get inside,” Chen commanded, stepping aside to let Lin and Jin-woo enter first.
The panic room was surprisingly spacious, lit by a soft, amber strip of LED light running along the perimeter of the ceiling. The walls were lined with banks of computer monitors, communication arrays, and emergency supplies neatly stacked in clear plastic bins. On a central steel desk sat a secure terminal connected to an external antenna array.
Jin-woo stepped inside, his service weapon still raised, sweeping the corners before lowering the barrel. “This isn't just a panic room. It’s a parallel command center.”
“David built it after the first warning threats,” Chen explained as she stepped inside last, reaching for the heavy manual override lever on the interior wall. Her face was pale, but her movements were utterly precise. “He knew that if the corporation wanted to silence him, they wouldn't use the police. They would use the building itself.”
Lin pulled the leather ledger from her coat pocket, placing it gently on the central steel desk. She opened the cover, the aged paper rustling softly in the quiet room. “The uplink. Can we route these financial records directly to the federal cybercrime division before they breach the outer door?”
“The encryption protocols require a dual-key authorization,” Chen said, walking over to the terminal and tapping a series of keys with mechanical speed. “My biometric signature and David’s cryptographic password. But David’s password was stored on a physical token that was taken from his desk the night of the accident.”
“Not necessarily,” Jin-woo said, stepping closer to the desk. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, metallic flash drive he had retrieved from the underside of the teak sideboard during their initial search. “When we were under the furniture earlier, I found this taped to the structural support beam. It wasn't there during the initial property management sweep.”
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Chen stared at the small drive in his white-gloved hand, her breath catching. “David’s backup token.”
Outside the heavy steel door of the panic room, a low, metallic scraping sound vibrated through the floor. The intruders had bypassed the apartment’s front barricade and were now standing in the master bedroom, testing the outer frame of the wardrobe.
