Chapter 22 - The Steel Sanctuary
"You think you can walk into my home and nationalize my life's work?" I asked, my voice dropping to a lethal, freezing register.
"I don't think, Evelyn. I act," Croft sneered. "My men have already placed a localized jammer around this estate. You have no internet, no cell service, and no way to contact your lawyers. You are a ghost. Sign the transfer."
He pulled a thick, red-sealed federal dossier from his briefcase and dropped it onto the coffee table.
I looked at Croft. I looked at the six armed agents fanning out across my living room. Then, I looked back at Julian, who gave me a microscopic, imperceptible nod.
"If you want the algorithms, Director Croft," I whispered, taking a slow step backward toward the kitchen, "you are going to have to bleed for them."
I hit a concealed biometric panel on the wall.
Instantly, the heavy, reinforced steel bulkheads dropped from the ceiling, slamming down over the archways and completely sealing Julian and me inside the twelve-square-meter kitchen. Croft’s agents lunged forward, but they were a second too late. The hydraulic locks engaged with a deafening hiss, separating us from the intruders by three inches of ballistic-grade titanium.
The kitchen wasn't just designed for culinary perfection; Julian had engineered it as an impenetrable bunker. The 304 stainless steel cabinets didn't just hold dishes; they housed an entirely decentralized, offline proxy server bank that ran on a subterranean geothermal generator.
"Get the kids to the panic room," I ordered Julian, gesturing to the concealed floor hatch beneath the island that led directly to the reinforced basement.
"They are already safe downstairs. The floor sensors confirm it," Julian said, racking the slide of his weapon and taking a position by the reinforced glass viewing port in the bulkhead door. "Croft is ordering his men to bring in thermal breaching torches. They’re going to try to cut through the steel."
"Let them try," I said, a dark, predatory fire igniting in my chest. I pulled my primary encrypted laptop from a concealed drawer and booted up the offline mesh network. "Croft thinks he severed my connection to the outside world. He doesn't realize this house is the network."
I bypassed the localized jammer by routing my signal through a series of micro-satellites I had quietly funded the previous year. As the connection stabilized, I didn't just reach out to my legal team. I reached directly into the classified servers of Croft’s own intelligence division.
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"He wants my AI architecture," I told Julian, my fingers flying across the keyboard in a blur of motion. "Let's see what he plans to do with it."
Within ten minutes, I breached Croft’s personal encrypted ledgers. What I found made my blood run completely cold. Croft wasn't seizing my tech for national security. He was planning to deploy my Virtual KOC networks to execute a massive, coordinated traffic arbitrage campaign to manipulate the upcoming domestic elections. He was going to use my deepfakes to rewrite American history.
