Chapter 14- Trapped in the Slumlord’s Web
While Marcus Vance was locked in a solitary holding cell at the garrison stockade, his private empire was desperately attempting to destroy the remaining evidence.
At the corporate headquarters of Apex Holdings—a gleaming glass-and-steel building located on the northern commercial edge of the city—Vance’s second-in-command, a ruthless executive named Gregory Thorne, was frantically shredding documents.
The executive suite on the ninth floor looked like a war zone.
Filing cabinets stood wide open, their contents dumped into massive industrial shredding bins. Hard drives were being pulled from servers and tossed into buckets of magnetic degaussing coils.
"Hurry up, you idiots!" Thorne screamed at three terrified junior accountants. "The FBI has already seized the downtown office! If the military convoy gets here before we wipe the offshore transaction records, we're all going to federal prison for thirty years!"
"Mr. Thorne!" one of the technicians yelled from the computer bank. "The network access has been cut! The firewall just dropped! Someone is overriding our root servers from an external military node!"
Thorne sprinted to the window that overlooked the main highway.
His eyes widened in sheer horror.
Sweeping down the six-lane avenue, running through every red traffic light with their sirens wailing in deafening harmony, was an entire motorized convoy. Four tactical Humvees, three armored personnel carriers, and six city police cruisers were barreling toward the headquarters building at seventy miles per hour.
Above them, the rhythmic, thumping roar of two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters rattled the glass windows of the skyscraper as they banked low over the roof.
"They're here!" Thorne shrieked, dropping his armful of ledgers. "Get the emergency cash from the vault! Head for the basement garage!"
Thorne sprinted toward the executive elevator, slamming his keycard against the reader. The doors slid open, and he dove inside, furiously mashing the button for the underground parking level.
He believed he could slip out through the service alley in his unmarked sedan, disappear into the county backroads, and catch a private flight to Mexico before the federal cordon could close around the city.
The elevator descended rapidly: 9... 8... 7... 6...
Then, with a sickening screech of emergency brakes, the elevator cab jerked to a violent halt.
The lights flickered and died, replaced by the dim, eerie amber glow of backup battery lamps.
The digital floor indicator read: LEVEL 1 – MAIN LOBBY.
The doors didn't slide open smoothly. They were violently pried apart by two hydraulic rescue spreaders with a deafening screech of tearing steel.
Standing on the polished marble floor of the lobby outside was a squad of Military Police officers, their weapons raised.
And standing right in the center of the lobby, wearing her new white dress, with her arms crossed over her chest and her father's dog tags gleaming under the lights, was eight-year-old Ruby Bennett.
Beside me stood Colonel Miller, holding a pair of heavy steel handcuffs.
"Going somewhere, Mr. Thorne?" Colonel Miller asked with a cold, mocking smile.
May you like
Thorne dropped his leather briefcase. Stacks of bundled hundred-dollar bills spilled out across the elevator floor, fluttering around his expensive leather shoes.
He fell to his knees, shaking violently, realizing that the little girl he had tried to throw out onto the street had just closed the trapdoor on his entire life.
