Chapter 6 - THE RAT IN THE TRAP
Forty minutes later, the door to Gabriel’s conference room opened. Renata stumbled inside, clutching a leather designer bag to her chest like a life preserver.
Her hair was disheveled, her mascara smeared across her pale face, and she walked with a heavy, unglamorous limp. Gone was the arrogant executive who had stood smirking beside Alejandro in the hospital room.
She dumped the contents of her bag onto Gabriel’s conference table: three external hard drives, two burner smartphones, and a stack of printed financial statements from an offshore entity in the Cayman Islands.
“He told me he loved me,” Renata whispered, collapsing into a chair, her voice hollow and defeated. “He told me that Valeria was holding the company back, that her moral objections to monetizing the emergency dispatch network were costing us tens of millions. He promised we would move to Madrid as soon as the city contract was finalized.”
Valeria leaned over the table, her gaze piercing right through her. “Where are the encryption keys for the core servers?”
“He kept them in his private safe at the corporate penthouse,” Renata said, pushing a sleek black USB drive toward Gabriel. “But I recorded our private conversations. For eight months. Every time he talked about falsifying the safety benchmarks to cut costs on the municipal sensors, every time he discussed forging your digital certificate… I recorded it on my personal cloud.”
Gabriel plugged the drive into his forensic workstation. Within seconds, Alejandro’s crisp, arrogant voice filled the conference room:
*“...Valeria’s algorithms are too cautious. If the system warns people every time there’s a minor tremor, commercial centers lose millions in evacuation downtime. We dial down the sensitivity thresholds by forty percent, package it as an efficiency upgrade, and pocket the licensing margin. If a real disaster hits, we blame structural flaws in the municipal infrastructure, not our code…”*
Valeria felt a chill course through her veins. “He didn't just steal the tech. He sabotaged the safety thresholds to make the company look more profitable.”
“That is corporate manslaughter in the making,” Gabriel said grimly. “If that earthquake had been an 8.0, his modified code would have suppressed the evacuation sirens until the buildings were already collapsing.”
“He knew,” Renata sobbed, burying her face in her hands. “When the mall started shaking, he knew the alerts hadn't fired in time because of his modifications. That’s why he panicked. That’s why he grabbed me and ran. He knew the structural collapse was on his hands.”
Suddenly, the lights in Gabriel’s office flickered.
Outside, the quiet residential street of Lomas de Chapultepec was pierced by the screech of tires. Gabriel immediately moved to the window, pulling back the blind with two fingers.
A black armored SUV was parked across the street, its headlights off. Two men in dark tactical jackets stepped out, heading directly toward the building’s entrance.
“He tracked Renata’s phone,” Gabriel said, his voice dropping into immediate tactical command. “Valeria, wake Mateo. Now.”
Valeria rushed to the sofa, scooping Mateo into her arms. The boy blinked awake, rubbing his eyes. “Mommy? Are we going home?”
“Shh, sweetheart. We’re going on a little adventure with Mr. Vance. Stay quiet for Mommy, okay?”
“Renata, did you leave your location services active on those burner phones?” Gabriel demanded.
Renata’s eyes widened in sheer panic. “I… I turned off the GPS, but I didn't remove the SIM cards!”
“Idiot,” Gabriel hissed. He grabbed the USB drives, slammed his encrypted laptop shut, and tossed them into his satchel. He pulled open a credenza behind his desk, revealing a secure biometric keypad. He punched in a six-digit code, and a concealed steel security door slid open in the wood-paneled wall.
“Private emergency egress to the underground parking garage,” Gabriel said. “Move. Now.”
They rushed down the narrow concrete stairwell just as the muffled sound of a shattered glass door echoed from the floor above.
Mateo clung to Valeria’s neck, burying his face in her shoulder. Valeria ignored the searing agony in her injured leg, descending each step with ferocious determination. She was not the helpless woman pinned beneath concrete anymore.
They reached the subterranean garage just as Gabriel’s armored sedan unlocked with a soft chirp. Gabriel shoved Renata into the rear seat, helped Valeria and Mateo into the opposite side, and slid behind the wheel.
He slammed the engine start button. The twin-turbo V8 roared to life.
As Gabriel reversed out of the bay, the stairwell door burst open. Alejandro Mendoza stepped into the garage, flanked by two private security contractors wearing tactical earpieces.
Alejandro’s face was twisted in a manic, desperate snarl. He spotted Valeria through the tinted glass, raised a finger, and pointed directly at the windshield.
“Stop the car!” Alejandro screamed, his voice echoing off the concrete walls. “Valeria, give me the drives or you won't leave this garage alive!”
Gabriel didn't even tap the brakes. He shifted into drive, floored the accelerator, and launched two tons of armored steel straight down the egress ramp toward the closed security gate.
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The private contractors dove out of the way. Alejandro scrambled backward, falling onto his hands and knees as the sedan blew past him by inches, smashing straight through the wooden barrier arm and tearing out into the rainy midnight streets of Mexico City.
***
