Chapter 11 - THE AUCTION OF THRONES
Dominic Sterling looked at the two of them with amused contempt.
"You're late, Adrian," Dominic said, checking his gold Patek Philippe watch.
"The transfer is at ninety-four percent."
"In six minutes, Thorne Maritime’s shipping manifests, bank accounts, and federal customs bonds belong to Sterling Logistics."
"Your father's name will be erased from every port on the Great Lakes."
Adrian took two slow, measured steps onto the marble floor.
His hands were open at his sides.
The suppressed Colt was tucked into his waistband, hidden by his dark sweater.
"You always were impatient, Dominic," Adrian said smoothly.
"You steal another man's work because you never had the talent to build your own."
Dominic’s jaw tightened.
His aristocratic smile slipped for a fraction of a second.
"I built this tower!" Dominic snapped.
"Emma built this tower," Adrian countered, nodding toward her.
"You just wrote the checks with dirty cartel money."
David Miller sat frozen behind the laptops, his hands trembling over the keyboard.
"Emma," David stammered, his eyes darting frantically between her and Dominic's bodyguards.
"Emma, you don't understand."
"They were going to break my legs."
"I owed three hundred thousand dollars to the Greeks in Cicero."
Emma looked at her business partner.
There were no tears in her eyes now.
Only a profound, suffocating disgust.
"You gave them the security codes to my apartment, David," Emma said.
Her voice was steady as a surgeon's blade.
"You sent killers to my home."
"You made me an accomplice to high treason."
"I was going to wire you half a million!" David pleaded.
"I had an account set up for you in Belize!"
"Shut up, David," Dominic ordered coldly.
Dominic turned his cold gray eyes toward Emma.
"You should have taken the Belize money, Miss Hayes."
"Now, unfortunately, you're going to share Adrian's grave."
Dominic gave a slight flick of his right fingers to his lead bodyguard.
"Kill the girl first," Dominic commanded.
"Let Adrian watch his little architect die."
The lead guard drew a customized automatic pistol, taking a step toward Emma.
He never finished the step.
Adrian moved with blinding, explosive speed.
His hand dipped into his waistband.
The suppressed Colt fired twice in three-tenths of a second.
Two heavy rounds punched through the lead guard's tactical vest, dropping him like a sack of concrete.
The remaining three bodyguards lunged for cover behind marble pillars, unholstering their submachine guns.
Gunfire ripped through the executive suite in a deafening crescendo.
Crystal lamps shattered into sparkling dust.
High-velocity rounds pulverized the glass display cases, throwing shrapnel across the room.
Adrian shoved Emma behind a massive bronze sculpture of a lunging bull.
"David's laptop!" Emma screamed over the roar of gunfire.
"He's at ninety-seven percent!"
Adrian leaned around the bronze flank, firing three rapid shots to suppress the guards behind the pillars.
One mercenary collapsed, clutching his thigh.
"Cover me!" Emma yelled.
Before Adrian could grab her arm, Emma threw herself across the open marble floor.
She slid beneath the conference table as bullets chewed the mahogany surface into smoking splinters.
She surfaced behind David's desk like a rising ghost.
David scrambled backward out of his ergonomic chair, knocking over monitors.
"Emma, don't!" David shrieked.
Emma didn't reach for a gun.
She grabbed a heavy crystal paperweight shaped like the Sears Tower from the desk.
She swung it with all her strength into David's nose.
The crunch of cartilage was audible even over the gunfire.
David howled in agony, collapsing onto his back, blood gushing over his designer silk tie.
Emma leaped into the executive leather chair.
She grabbed the keyboard.
UPLOAD STATUS: 99% COMPLETE.
The system was flashing red:
MASTER PASSKEY REQUIRED TO ABORT TRANSFER.
Emma didn't know the passkey.
She had three seconds.
Her eyes darted to the building's environmental control interface running in the corner of the desktop.
She didn't try to crack the encryption.
She accessed the fire suppression protocol for the sixty-fourth floor server node.
She overrode the safety locks using her master architectural bypass code:
H-A-Y-E-S - 1-9-8-4.
She hit EXECUTE EMERGENCY FLOOD.
High-pressure Halon gas and industrial deluge foam exploded from forty ceiling nozzles with the roar of a jet engine.
The servers short-circuited in blinding blue electrical arcs.
The laptops exploded in showers of sparks.
May you like
The screens went completely black.
The upload was dead.
