Chapter 22 - The War Room Protocol
I didn't scream. I didn't panic. Panic is a luxury reserved for the weak, and I had buried my weakness years ago.
"Mark, pack their bags," I ordered, my mind instantly shifting into combat mode. "Take the kids to the secondary safe house in the mountains. No digital devices. No smart cars. Take the old analog SUV. You do not stop, you do not communicate with anyone until I send the all-clear sequence."
"I am not leaving you here alone!" Mark argued, his dark eyes fierce with devotion.
"You aren't leaving me. You are protecting my heart so I can rip out theirs," I said, grabbing his face and pulling him into a hard, desperate kiss. "If I am going to burn the internet to the ground tonight, I need to know my children are completely out of the blast radius. Go."
Within twenty minutes, the taillights of Mark's SUV disappeared into the driving rain. I was completely alone in the sprawling estate.
I walked down to the subterranean level of the house, placing my hand against the biometric scanner of a hidden reinforced steel door. It hissed open, revealing my private war room. It was a sensory deprivation chamber filled with towering server racks, cooling units, and a semi-circle of curved monitors. This was the dark heart of APT Vietnam, the very system that had brought me to power.
I initiated the lockdown sequence. I severed the estate from the main grid, running entirely on subterranean generators and satellite uplinks.
I started tracking the breach. The hacker was brilliant, masking their digital footprint through a labyrinth of proxy servers and cloned Meta accounts. But they made one fatal error. They assumed I was just a corporate CEO who relied on federal protection. They didn't know that long before I wore designer suits, I was a ghost in the traffic arbitrage underworld. I knew how to hunt in the dark.
I traced the malicious code back through a series of offshore data dumps. The coding language was highly specific, possessing a distinct signature that I recognized from a decade ago. It wasn't a foreign syndicate. It wasn't a shadow government.
May you like
It was Silas Reed.
Silas was my first mentor in the digital marketing underworld, the man who taught me how to manipulate algorithms and control virtual narratives. He had vanished five years ago, presumed dead after a massive federal sting. He wasn't dead. He had been waiting in the shadows, letting Morgan soften me up, letting me consolidate the market, only to strike when the prize was at its absolute peak.
