Chapter 5 - The Sunrise Protocol"Root access," I repeated, staring at the second crimson drive dangling between Graham’s fingers. "Graham, if Richard’s team has my personal laptop from Chicago, they already have my administrative credentials. The moment my terminal connects to the corporate network, their firewall will trace the handshake and lock us out of the entire database."
"They have your old credentials," Graham said, stepping past the shattered coffee cup and tossing the second drive onto the glass table. "Not the biometric backup key we generated when we registered our marriage certificate at the Clark County courthouse at 3:15 AM."
I stared at him, bewildered. "We generated a corporate IT key at a wedding chapel?"
"The chapel uses a secure municipal fiber node tied to the county clerk’s digital registry," Graham said, his tone shifting into hyper-focused corporate command mode. "Every legal marriage filed in Clark County automatically creates a secure, encrypted peer-to-peer bridge for joint asset verification. I used it to route a back-door superuser profile straight into Reed Global’s mainframe."
"You hacked the county clerk’s office to set up a corporate backdoor?" I breathed, half-impressed and half-horrified. "That’s a federal offense. That’s ten years in a supermax prison."
"Only if we get caught," Graham replied smoothly, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the suite’s high-tech workstation console built into the mahogany wall panel. "Right now, Richard is holding a press conference downstairs in the grand ballroom at eight o'clock to announce the 'tragic resignation' of the CEO due to sudden health complications. He thinks he’s won."
I looked at the digital clock on the console: 6:42 AM.
Eighteen minutes until sunrise. Eighteen minutes until Richard Reed took the stage and buried both of our careers—and my family’s history—under an avalanche of fabricated scandals.
"If we go to the boardroom," I said, pulling my arm free and tapping the keyboard to bring up the server logs, "Marcus’s security team will intercept us before we reach the elevators. The entire forty-fifth floor is locked down under biometric quarantine."
"We aren't going to the boardroom," Graham said, sliding a sleek, black hardware dongle into the workstation’s USB port. "We're going to the server farm in the sub-basement. There's a maintenance lift behind the service kitchen that bypasses the biometric security entirely. But to use it, we need a two-person clearance code."
I raised an eyebrow, crossing my arms over the silk robe. "A two-person clearance code? Let me guess—it requires the CEO's biometric signature and a senior data strategist's master encryption string."
"Precisely," Graham said, looking down at me with a strange, lingering intensity. "And since we are legally bound as husband and wife under Nevada joint-asset statutes, the mainframe recognizes our credentials as a single unified entity."
"Don't call us a single unified entity," I snapped, though my fingers were already flying across the keyboard, bypassing the firewall with the clean, practiced keystrokes of a veteran data hunter. "We are two people in stolen bathrobes who made a terrible, drunken, legally binding mistake in a neon-lit chapel."
"A mistake that happens to be our only weapon," Graham countered softly, leaning over my shoulder. His chest brushed against my back, and for a second, the phantom memory of the previous night—his hand steady at my waist in the private elevator, the warmth of his breath against my neck while we recited vows we didn't fully understand—flashed through my mind.
I pushed the thought away with a vicious keystroke.
"The firewall is bypassed," I said, my voice cold and professional. "I’m uploading the bloodline ledger to the federal prosecutor’s secure drop-box in Chicago. Once this packet hits their servers, Richard’s shell companies will be frozen within sixty seconds."
"Do it," Graham commanded.
I hit Enter.
A progress bar appeared on the screen: Uploading... 10%... 45%... 80%...
Suddenly, the monitor flashed a violent, blinding crimson.
A blaring alarm klaxon echoed through the penthouse suite, and a bold, capitalized error message filled the screen: CRITICAL ALERT: UNAUTHORIZED INTERCEPTION DETECTED. MAINFRAME ROUTED TO LOCAL OVERRIDE. SOURCE: PENTHOUSE 41. MARCUS VANCE.
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"He didn't go to the lobby," Graham cursed, slamming his fist against the desk. "He’s routing our upload through the local router in the hallway! He’s intercepting the packet!"
Before I could react, the heavy oak doors of the suite didn't just knock—they exploded inward with a deafening crash as a SWAT-style battering ram splintered the frame into a million pieces.
