Chapter 56 - The Digital Ambush
The heavy blast doors of the master closet slammed shut with the force of a thunderclap.
Hydraulic locks engaged with sickening, sequential clicks. The lights died, plunging the sealed vault room into pitch-black darkness, illuminated only by the mocking red glow of the safe's digital screen.
"Alexander!" I shouted, slamming my palm against the reinforced steel door.
"Boss! The external override locked down the entire penthouse wing!" Alexander's muffled voice came through my earpiece, accompanied by the deafening rattle of automatic gunfire from the foyer. "We have secondary bogeys breaching through the balcony! Arthur sent an extraction team!"
On the monitor, Arthur Vance sat in an antique leather armchair in an opulent, wood-paneled library—the Black Forest fortress in Baden-Baden. Behind him stood six masked figures in formal sovereign robes: the elders of the Sovereign Conclave.
"You are trapped, Katherine," Arthur said, sipping from a glass of vintage port. "That vault is rated to survive a tactical nuclear strike. In ten minutes, the air supply inside will terminate. Hand the crystalline drive to my recovery team when they breach the outer seal, and I will spare your security team and bring you to Germany in chains. Keep it, and you will suffocate in the dark while your children are collected from Regent's Park."
"You touched my children's safehouse?" A white-hot fury erupted inside my chest, cold and terrifying in its intensity.
Arthur smiled coldly. "Did you truly believe two children and a handful of mercenaries could withstand the Sovereign Guard? My transport units are already entering the outer gates of Regent's Park."
"Mom!" Leo’s voice suddenly cut through the encrypted comms channel, sharp, electric, and completely devoid of fear. "Mom, don't listen to him! He hasn't breached the gate!"
Arthur’s eyebrow twitched slightly on the monitor.
"Maya, execute code Omega!" Leo shouted.
Through the earpiece, I heard the faint, distant whine of high-voltage capacitors discharging.
"What is that?" Arthur whispered on his end, his cold composure cracking for the first time.
"That," I said, stepping closer to the vault camera with a razor-thin smile, "is my children showing you what happens when an old man underestimates a new generation."
Over the comms, Maya’s calm, analytical voice echoed: "Founder Arthur Vance. You utilized the 1982 Directorate satellite relay to route your command signal to this vault. But that relay still runs on the legacy Arpanet routing tables. I just flooded your Baden-Baden terminal with a localized electromagnetic pulse command through your own telemetry uplink."
On the monitor in front of me, the lights in Arthur's grand library flickered violently. The screens behind the Conclave elders exploded in showers of sparks. The masked elders scrambled in panic as the heavy chandeliers above them swayed and went dark.
"What have you done?!" Arthur hissed, rising from his chair, his ebony cane trembling in his grip.
"They just severed your global command link, Arthur," I said. "And now, I am opening this door."
Using the crystalline drive from the locket, I inserted the edge directly into the Bismarck safe’s internal administrative bus port. Leo fed the override sequence from Regent's Park.
*Override accepted. Root authority: Founder Sovereign Zero.*
May you like
*Vault doors unlocking.*
The massive hydraulic locks disengaged with a triumphant metallic groan. The doors swung open.
