Chapter 13 - Shadows of Geneva
The room was deathly quiet. The hum of the laptop fan sounded like a roaring turbine in Maya’s ears.
She looked at the screen, at the cold, arrogant face of Julian Vance—a man who lived in a world of unimpeachable wealth, protected by diplomatic immunity and international shell corporations that no domestic law enforcement agency could ever touch.
He thinks I'm like them, Maya realized. He thinks everyone has a price.
Maya slowly reached into her pocket, pulling out a small black flash drive given to her by Detective Reed—a direct, encrypted uplink to the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) Cyber-Crimes Task Force.
She plugged the drive into her USB port.
"You miscalculated, Julian," Maya whispered to the screen. "You think Eleanor’s mistake was letting me read the files. Her mistake was leaving me alive under that bed."
Maya opened a secondary command line, executing a sweeping script that mirrored the entire private vault—every facility coordinate, every live telemetry feed, every financial ledger, and every bank account associated with the Vance family—directly into Interpol's central database.
Simultaneously, she executed a secondary command: HYDATID-NEUTRALIZE-ALL.
Across the world, in forty hidden clinics, the automated delivery systems attached to the children's medical beds received a hard override, dumping the synthetic pathogen tanks into waste containment and locking the automated doors.
On the screen in Geneva, Julian Vance’s calm expression shattered. His eyes widened as his personal terminal began flashing red with catastrophic system failures.
"What did you do?!" Julian screamed into the camera, his refined veneer dissolving into absolute, panicked fury. "You've ruined three billion dollars of research!"
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"I didn't ruin it," Maya said cold, her finger hovering over the enter key. "I shut it down."
She struck the key. The connection terminated, plunging the screen into total blackness.
