Chapter 13 - The Sixty-Second Countdown
The digital numbers on the server monitor flickered in a harsh red hue, ticking down with merciless speed: 00:59... 00:58... 00:57.
Arthur Pendelton kept his cold, unblinking eyes locked on Marcus Sterling, a smirk playing across his thin lips. "That countdown isn't a bomb, Sterling. It’s a remote wipe protocol. The moment it hits zero, every server in this building—and every backup copy mirrored to your corporate cloud—will be overwritten with military-grade garbage data. All your proof, all your evidence, gone in a single second."
Marcus didn't flinch. He kept his weapon leveled at Arthur’s chest, but his mind raced, calculating data transmission speeds and cloud backup buffers. "You think our mainframe is that vulnerable? Evelyn anticipated a data purge the moment we breached the network."
"Did she?" Arthur chuckled softly, taking a slow step forward. "Evelyn Vance built her tech empire on predictive analytics, but she never factored in a physical circuit breaker tied directly to the building’s main transformer. My men cut the exterior substation lines three minutes ago. Your cloud sync lost its handshake the second the power flickered."
Across the country in her glass-walled boardroom, Evelyn watched the encrypted connection terminal on her laptop screen begin to lag. The data transfer progress bar froze at ninety-eight percent. The red glow in her eyes flared intensely, casting long, menacing shadows across the walnut table as her fingers flew across her wireless keyboard, attempting to force-override the mainframe protocol.
"Marcus," Evelyn’s voice crackled through the comms piece in Marcus’s ear, urgent and razor-sharp. "He’s right. The local substation is dumping our sync buffer. You have thirty seconds to pull the physical hard drives out of the primary rack before the thermal wipe fries the components."
Marcus didn't hesitate. He spun on his heel, abandoning the standoff in the foyer, and bolted down the hallway toward the server room stairs, leaving the armed operatives behind.
"Stop him!" Arthur shouted, raising his own sidearm.
Two tactical guards raised their carbines to fire, but before they could squeeze the triggers, the heavy metal security doors at the end of the hall slammed shut automatically, locking down under emergency corporate protocol controlled directly by Evelyn from fifty miles away.
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Marcus hit the basement stairs at a dead run, his boots pounding against the concrete as the timer on the monitor hit fifteen seconds.
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