Chapter 8 - THE DENVER CRISIS
The Hidden TerminalDaniel slammed his foot on the accelerator, the delivery van roaring to life as he pulled into the driveway of his small home. He didn't waste a second. He carried Emma into the house, locking the heavy deadbolts behind him.
"Emma, listen to me very carefully," Daniel said, kneeling in front of her, his hands on her shoulders. "I need you to go into the hidden room in the basement. Play your video games, put your headphones on, and do not come out until I come get you. No matter what you hear. Understand?"
Emma saw the absolute gravity in her father’s eyes. She didn't argue. She just nodded, her lip trembling slightly. "Is it the bad men again?"
"Daddy’s going to take care of it," Daniel promised, kissing her forehead. "Go. Now."
The moment the basement door clicked shut, Daniel ran to his workbench. He ripped the protective tarp off his diagnostic setup. His scarred black laptop was already connected to a high-speed satellite uplink he had installed after the incident at Asteron.
He fired up the machine. The screen flickered to life, immediately intercepted by a flashing red prompt: INCOMING CONNECTION REQUEST - SOURCE: UNKNOWN.
Daniel didn't accept the file. Instead, he opened a terminal window and began typing commands at a furious pace. He needed to intercept the telemetry of Asteron Flight One, which was currently taxiing on the runway at Denver International Airport.
Using a backdoor protocol he had retained from his military days—one that Vance didn't even know existed—Daniel bypassed the commercial air traffic control servers and patched directly into the aircraft’s transponder array.
Data streams began to cascade down his screen in emerald green text.
"Damn it," Daniel cursed under his breath. Harding hadn't built just one backdoor. The Horizon Group had embedded a time-delayed logic bomb deep within the flight computer's read-only memory (ROM). It had remained completely invisible during Daniel’s initial repair because it was programmed to trigger only when the aircraft reached a specific GPS coordinate over the Rocky Mountains.
He looked at the countdown timer on his screen. 28 minutes remaining.
He dialed Victoria’s private cell phone. It rang three times before she picked up over a noisy connection. "Daniel? I’m just boarding the Seattle flight. We’re about to pull back from the gate."
"Victoria, you need to abort the flight right now," Daniel said, his voice cutting through the cockpit noise on her end. "Get off the plane. Tell the pilot to shut down the engines."
"What? Daniel, what are you talking about? The Seattle chairman is sitting right next to me. If we abort now, the entire contract defaults—"
"The plane is booby-trapped," Daniel interrupted savagely. "The Horizon Group has a logic bomb in the ROM architecture. The moment you hit thirty thousand feet over the Rockies, they’re going to lock your tail flaps and pitch you into a terminal dive. They’re using it to blackmail me into uploading a virus into the regional supply grid."
There was a long pause on the line. He could hear Victoria’s sharp intake of breath. "Are you sure?"
"I’m looking at the hexadecimal code right now," Daniel said. "It’s a countdown sequence. You have twenty-six minutes before the trigger coordinate is reached."
Suddenly, Victoria’s voice cut out, replaced by a loud, piercing static. On Daniel’s laptop screen, the flight status text abruptly shifted color from green to an ominous, flashing amber.
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The Horizon Group had taken remote control of the aircraft while it was still on the ground. They had bypassed the pilots entirely, forcing the throttles forward and commanding an immediate, unauthorized emergency takeoff.
"Victoria! Victoria, do you hear me?!" Daniel shouted into the phone, but the line was completely dead. Asteron Flight One was in the air, climbing rapidly into the thin mountain air, controlled by a ghost miles away.
