Chapter 8 - The Leak
The rain had stopped, leaving Manhattan’s towering glass facades gleaming under a bruised, twilight sky. Inside the subterranean server room of Sterling Tower, the air was cold, smelling of ozone and hum of a thousand high-capacity cooling fans.
Miller stood in front of a wall of monitors, his fingers flying across a mechanical keyboard with terrifying speed. "Encryption keys loaded, boss. The data packet is ready to deploy to forty independent news agencies simultaneously. Once I hit execute, there's no calling it back. Every black-ops contractor from here to Tel Aviv is going to know the Sterling network just opened the vault."
Harrison stood beside him, his arms crossed over his chest, watching the progress bar crawl across the primary display. He turned his head and looked at me, standing near the entrance with my hand resting on the tactical knife strapped to my thigh.
"Ready, Captain?" he asked quietly.
"Born ready," I said. "Let's burn the house down."
"Execute," Harrison commanded.
Miller slammed his palm down on the enter key.
On the monitors, the progress bar flashed green. *Upload complete.* Across the globe—from the newsrooms of London and Geneva to the independent blogs of Washington—encrypted servers pinged simultaneously as gigabytes of classified financial records, intercepted satellite communications, and operational logs from Apex Security flooded the public domain.
Within sixty seconds, the notifications started rolling in.
"Phones are lighting up," Miller muttered, checking a secondary monitor. "DOJ press office is in full meltdown. The Pentagon switchboard has flatlined. And... we have incoming."
"Tracing?" Harrison asked sharply.
"Encrypted ping from an offshore proxy server in the Cayman Islands," Miller replied, his fingers flying across the keys again. "Originates from Apex Security’s primary command node. They know we have the remaining financial backups."
A red alert flashed across the central screen: *Inbound security breach detected on lower basement levels.*
I didn't blink. The adrenaline spiked through my veins like ice-cold water. "They didn't waste any time."
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"They never do," Harrison said, his voice dropping an octave as he reached into his jacket and pulled out a suppressed Sig Sauer P326, checking the magazine with a practiced click. He tossed a secondary sidearm across the table to me. I caught it out of the air instinctively, the checkered grip fitting perfectly into my palm.
"Miller, lock down the subterranean levels," Harrison ordered, his eyes fixed on the reinforced steel door at the end of the server room corridor. "Route the security feeds to my terminal. Aiden... looks like we have company."
