Chapter 8 - The Snake in the Glass Tower
By six o'clock the following morning, the mansion was buzzing with tense, covert activity. The smell of fresh coffee cut through the morning chill as Emmet’s top lieutenants gathered in the formal dining room, their laptops displaying encrypted surveillance feeds from the Sartori Holdings headquarters.
Sadie was sitting in the sunny breakfast nook, happily eating blueberry pancakes prepared by Elena, completely oblivious to the war being planned in the next room.
Noel walked into the dining room, dressed in a sharp, tailored navy suit that Elena had retrieved from the city's finest boutique at dawn. Her hair was pulled back into a sleek, professional bun, her chin held high.
The room fell completely silent as the mafia capos turned to look at her.
"Gentlemen," Emmet announced from the head of the table, standing up as she entered. "This is Noel Vance. She is the senior archivist of Sartori Holdings, and she is running our evidence operation today."
Several of the men exchanged skeptical glances. A scarred man named Marcus cleared his throat. "Boss, with all respect, the tribunal sits at noon. Vincent has three of the five council votes in his pocket. A secretary can't save us from an internal coup."
"She isn't just a secretary," Emmet said coldly, his eyes daring Marcus to speak another word. "She is the only person who holds the keys to Vincent’s destruction."
Noel walked to the center of the table, placing a flash drive onto the central hub.
"Vincent didn't work alone," Noel said, her voice commanding the room with absolute authority. "To forge my clearance code on that shipping container, he needed access to the internal network keys. Those keys are kept in a dual-custody vault on the sixteenth floor. Only two people have the bypass credentials: Emmet Sartori, and the Chief Financial Officer, Arthur Pendelton."
Marcus’s jaw dropped. "Pendelton? He’s been with the family for twenty years!"
"And he’s been drowning in gambling debts in Atlantic City for the last five," Noel retorted, pulling up a series of financial ledgers on the large wall monitor. "I found these anomalies six months ago hidden in the terminal maintenance reconciliation sheets. I kept backups in the offline archive because the numbers didn't make sense."
Emmet looked at the screen, his gaze turning deadly. "Pendelton sold us out to Vincent."
"Yes," Noel continued. "And at noon, Pendelton plans to ratify Vincent’s forged manifest as the council's official auditor. But if we retrieve the offline optical backup disc from the fourteenth-floor archive before eleven o'clock, we can prove Pendelton altered the server logs forty-eight hours ago."
"The fourteenth floor is locked down by Vincent’s private security," Marcus warned. "It’s a kill zone."
May you like
"They don't know where the offline archive is," Noel said with a calm, fierce smirk. "They think it’s in the server room. It’s not. It’s in the old pneumatic tube shaft behind the 1994 tax records cabinet. And only one person knows how to open it."
Emmet stepped around the table, his eyes locked on Noel. "We go together."
