Chapter 9 - The Motel on Route 9
The ceiling of Room 14 at the Starlight Motel on Route 9 had a brown water stain shaped like a skull.
Luke Vance lay on the thin, stained mattress, staring up at it.
The smell of stale cigarette smoke and cheap bleach burned his nostrils. His cast was filthy, the fiberglass gray and fraying at the edges.
On the nightstand sat a half-eaten bag of potato chips and a plastic bottle of tap water. That was all he had left.
Across the room, his mother, Barbara, was sitting in a broken vinyl chair, staring blankly at the static-filled television screen. She was wearing a stained silk bathrobe over sweatpants she had purchased at a truck stop with change scavenged from the bottom of her purse.
Her phone—a cheap prepaid flip phone—rang.
Luke didn't even move. “Don't answer it. It’s another creditor.”
Barbara flipped it open anyway, pressing it to her ear. “Hello? Yes... this is Barbara Vance. Who is this?”
She listened for ten seconds. Then her eyes went wide, and she leaped to her feet.
“Luke! Luke, get up!” she screamed, shaking his shoulder. “It’s Richard! Richard Thorne!”
Luke bolted upright, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Richard Thorne was the chief competitor of VanceTech. He owned Thorne Dynamics, a cutthroat private intelligence and defense contractor who had tried to buy VanceTech’s proprietary encryption algorithms two years ago.
Luke grabbed the phone with trembling fingers. “Mr. Thorne! Luke Vance here! Thank God you called—”
“Cut the groveling, Vance,” a harsh, gravelly voice cut through the speaker. “I saw the press conference. Samantha Sterling just turned your company into a non-profit charity for coders.”
“She stole it from me!” Luke spat, venom returning to his voice. “It was my code! My patents!”
“I don't care about your marital drama,” Thorne replied cold as steel. “What I care about is the master encryption key for VanceTech’s military logistics software. The kernel code. The one you kept bragging was stored on a private cold-storage drive.”
Luke hesitated.
The cold-storage drive. It was an encrypted black USB thumb drive containing the uncompiled source code for the entire platform. Before Samantha took the office, Luke had hidden it inside the lining of his personal laptop sleeve—the only thing security hadn't confiscated.
“I have it,” Luke whispered, his hand tightening around the cheap plastic phone. “I have the drive right here in my pocket.”
“Bring it to my warehouse in Brooklyn tonight at midnight,” Thorne said. “Give me that drive, and I’ll wire five million dollars to a Swiss account in your mother’s name. You can disappear to South America. Start over. What do you say, Vance?”
Luke looked down at his dirty cast, then over at his weeping, broken mother in the corner.
The desire for revenge surged through him like pure, toxic adrenaline.
If he couldn't have VanceTech, he would burn it to the ground. He would ruin Samantha’s precious legacy before she could even celebrate her victory.
“I’ll be there at midnight,” Luke said.
He hung up, a sickening smirk returning to his bruised lips.
He thought he was finally playing the game like a titan.
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He didn't know he was walking straight into the slaughterhouse.
***
