Chapter 13
"Stay back!" the intruder shouted, turning toward Martha with a heavy pistol drawn from his holster. His face was weathered and hard, marked by the callous indifference of a man who had spent decades cleaning up loose ends for powerful people. "Don't move another inch, or the old man takes the next one."
Martha stopped dead in her tracks at the foot of the porch steps, her chest heaving as she fought to control her breathing. Her hands were empty, the yellow gardening gloves still sitting on the porch bench behind the intruder. She looked past him into the dimly lit hallway, where David was struggling to push himself up from the floor, his face pale and strained.
Julian sprinted up the side steps from the yard, moving fast and low, but the second intruder stepped out from the shadows of the porch overhang, leveling a heavy flashlight straight into Julian’s eyes and shoving him back down the wooden steps with brutal efficiency. Julian hit the gravel hard, rolling to his side before scrambling back to his feet.
"You're twenty-five years too late, boys," the lead intruder sneered, keeping his gun trained steadily on Martha. "The boss wants the property cleared, and the files returned. Where is the drive?"
Martha didn't flinch. She looked the armed man straight in the eye, drawing upon every ounce of resilience she had cultivated over five decades of quiet survival. "You think you can just come onto our property and take what isn't yours? Thomas's files are already backed up off-site. The moment you pull that trigger, an automated protocol sends everything to every federal news outlet in the country."
It was a bluff—there was no internet connection on David's old desktop, and Julian's server was entirely localized—but it hit its mark. The intruder hesitated for a fraction of a second, his eyes flickering toward Julian, who was already reaching into his jacket for his phone to simulate a broadcast transmission.
"Don't listen to her!" the second man yelled from the doorway. "She's bluffing! Search the study!"
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"Do it and you die in prison," Julian yelled back, his voice cutting through the night air with absolute, chilling certainty. "My servers have been pinging federal backup nodes every ten minutes since sunset. The FBI already has the property coordinates."
The lead intruder’s face tightened with genuine panic. He looked back at David, then at Martha, weighing the risk of a high-profile federal investigation against the quiet cover-up they had maintained for a quarter-century. Sirens suddenly wailed in the distance, faint at first, but growing rapidly louder as they crested the ridge down the county road. Whether Julian’s bluff was real or not, the local police—alerted by the automated panic button on Julian's security system—were already inbound.
