Chapter 13 - The Intruder in the Penthouse
The men who burst through the boardroom doors were not federal agents. They were four operators dressed in nondescript black tactical gear, their faces hidden behind balaclavas, wielding suppressed submachine guns.
"Down! Everybody down!" Daniel roared, reacting with the combat instincts he had honed during his years in private military security before taking over the family throne.
Daniel grabbed Emily by the shoulders, shoving her behind the heavy, bulletproof mahogany podium just as the first suppressed burst erupted. The boardroom’s floor-to-ceiling glass windows shattered into thousands of crystal shards, swirling into the room like a blizzard of diamonds as the high-altitude winds howled through the breach.
Jonathan Croft stood frozen in shock, his mouth open. "Wait! It's me—Croft! You weren't supposed to strike here!"
A single bullet punched through the center of Croft’s chest, dropping the elderly director instantly onto the Persian rug. The message was unmistakable: Croft was a loose end being tied up.
"Harrison!" Daniel shouted into his lapel communicator, drawing his own customized Glock 19 from beneath his jacket. "Security breach on the executive floor! Lethal force authorized!"
Emily didn't panic. Her heart hammered against her ribs, but the terrifying survival instinct she had inherited from her mother took over. She scanned the room, spotting Croft’s open briefcase lying just five feet away amidst the flying glass. Inside, a flashing red hard drive was plugged into a miniature satellite uplink.
"Daniel, they’re not here to assassinate us!" Emily yelled over the roar of wind and suppressed gunfire. "They’re executing Croft and stealing the master registry of the offshore accounts!"
"Stay down, Em!" Daniel fired three precise rounds past the edge of the mahogany table. The lead mercenary collapsed with a dull thud, his weapon clattering across the floor.
The remaining three operators laid down a suppressive volley, chewing through the wood of the boardroom table. Emily dropped to her stomach, crawling through the jagged glass toward Croft’s corpse. A ricocheting round grazed her sleeve, tearing the white fabric and grazing her shoulder with white-hot heat, but she gritted her teeth, lunged forward, and ripped the hard drive from the briefcase just as an operator stepped around the corner to eliminate her.
Before the shooter could squeeze the trigger, Daniel vaulted over the conference table, tackling the gunman into the shattered window frame. For a terrifying second, both men teetered seventy-two stories above the streets of Manhattan. With a feral roar, Daniel drove his combat blade into the operator’s tactical vest, spinning out of the way as the assassin tumbled backward into the void, plummeting silently into the city below.
Alarms blared across the building. Heavy boots thundered in the corridor as Harrison and the elite Sterling security detail breached the boardroom, eliminating the remaining two intruders in a storm of precision fire.
The room fell into a heavy, ringing quiet, punctuated only by the whistle of the wind through the blown-out windows.
Daniel rushed to Emily, his hands trembling as he checked her injured arm. "You’re bleeding. Dammit, Emily, I told you to stay down!"
"I'm fine," Emily gasped, her hand clenched tightly around the stolen hard drive. She held it up, her knuckles white. "Look at the encryption tag on this drive, Daniel. It’s marked with the seal of the Federal Department of Corrections."
Daniel’s eyes narrowed into slits. "Federal Corrections? Richard Vance is in a maximum-security penitentiary in upstate New York. How could a prison drive be running a cyber-offensive against Sterling Enterprises?"
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"It’s not Richard Vance," Emily said, breathing heavily as Harrison wrapped a tourniquet around her arm. "The serial number matches the transfer ledger from the state women’s correctional facility. Vanessa Vance escaped this morning."
***
