Chapter 8 - The Exposure
"You're not my mother," I said, stepping forward, keeping my body between Eleanor and Elena, who was quietly prepping a flashbang grenade behind her back.
Eleanor laughed—a sharp, rattling sound that filled the sterile corridor. "Oh, thank God I don't have to pretend anymore. Do you have any idea how exhausting it was? Watching you grow up, looking just like Clara, having to play the doting parents while we waited for the offshore accounts to mature? Every birthday party was a chore. Every asthma attack was a missed opportunity."
"Where is Richard?" I demanded, my fingers tightening around the diary.
"Richard is upstairs, finalizing the transfer of the remaining assets to our private accounts in Macau," Eleanor said, raising a hand. The guards raised their automatic weapons. "Once the transfer is complete, this facility will experience a very tragic, very accidental chemical containment failure. You, your little federal friend, and all of Clara’s old files will be completely vaporized. A beautiful, tragic ending to a troubled girl’s story."
"Not today," Elena muttered.
She threw the flashbang.
The corridor erupted into a blinding white flash and a deafening roar. The guards fired blindly, the bullets ricocheting off the reinforced concrete walls. Elena tackled the nearest guard, wrestling his weapon away, while I sprinted past the chaos toward the main server terminal at the end of the hall.
My hands flew across the keyboard, my fingers moving by pure muscle memory as I typed the long string of alphanumeric codes from the final page of Clara’s diary.
System Override Initiated, the computer screen flashed in bright red letters. Data Uplink to Interpol: 10%... 30%...
"Stop her!" Eleanor screamed, her voice cracking with absolute panic as she realized what I was doing. She grabbed a dropped pistol from the floor and leveled it at my back.
Before she could pull the trigger, the heavy security door behind her blew outward. A team of fully armed Swiss tactical police, led by an Interpol agent, flooded the room.
May you like
"Drop the weapon! Now!"
Eleanor froze, the gun trembling in her hand as she looked around the room. The screens were flashing, broadcasting twenty years of human trafficking, corporate fraud, and illegal chemical manufacturing to law enforcement agencies across the globe. The Lucien Group was dying in real-time.
