CHAPTER 8: THE MAN WHO CREATED THE FOUNDATION FINALLY STEPPED OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Police headquarters was in complete lockdown.
Screens flashed red.
Evidence servers crashed one after another.
But Detective Laura Hayes had anticipated something like this.
Before the hackers erased the files, she had secretly copied everything onto an offline drive hidden inside her father's old revolver.
"The evidence is safe," she whispered.
Ethan let out a breath of relief.
For the first time, they finally had something the Foundation couldn't destroy.
Or so they thought.
Hours later, Laura received an emergency phone call.
Her father, Robert Hayes, had been found.
Alive.
Barely.
He had been abandoned outside an old monastery nearly fifty miles away.
When Ethan and Laura arrived, Robert was unconscious and connected to life support.
The doctors warned he might never wake up.
But just before midnight...
Robert suddenly opened his eyes.
He grabbed Ethan's wrist with surprising strength.
"You were wrong..." he whispered.
"It wasn't Pastor Daniel who built the Foundation."
Ethan leaned closer.
"Who did?"
Robert struggled to breathe.
"The Founder..."
"...is already dead."
Silence filled the room.
Laura frowned.
"Then who's giving the orders now?"
Robert slowly reached into his hospital gown and pulled out a tiny brass key that had been sewn into the fabric decades earlier.
"I stole this... twenty-two years ago."
"It opens his vault."
Before Ethan could ask another question, every light in the hospital went dark.
The backup generators failed.
Monitors shut off.
Doctors shouted through the hallway.
Someone had cut the building's power.
A loud explosion shattered the emergency entrance.
Masked men dressed as paramedics stormed inside carrying suppressed weapons.
"They're here!" Laura yelled.
She pulled Ethan behind the hospital bed just as bullets ripped through the room.
Glass exploded everywhere.
One attacker rushed toward Robert.
But the old police chief smiled.
"You came exactly as I expected."
With his final strength, Robert pressed a hidden switch beneath the bed.
The brass key snapped in half.
A deafening alarm echoed throughout the hospital.
Across the city...
Inside the oldest bank in Brookhaven...
A forgotten safety vault automatically unlocked.
Its door slowly swung open.
Inside waited hundreds of classified files...
Millions of dollars in gold bars...
And one sealed envelope marked:
"TO MY SON — IF THEY EVER COME FOR YOU."
The signature at the bottom made Ethan's blood freeze.
It wasn't his mother's.
It wasn't Robert's.
It was his father.
Michael Brooks.
The man everyone believed had died twenty-three years ago.
At that exact moment, Ethan's phone buzzed.
An unknown number.
Only one sentence appeared on the screen.
"Stop looking for the dead... because your father never died."
The phone immediately lost signal.
Ethan stared at the message, unable to breathe.
May you like
If Michael Brooks was alive...
Then whose body had they buried all those years ago?
