Chapter 2 - THE 180-SECOND COUNTDOWN"Luis, take the parents and Grandma to the federal safe house in downtown Portland immediately," I ordered, sliding my tactical vest higher on my shoulders as I sprinted up the basement stairs. "Do not use the main highway. Take the industrial bypass. Chloe knows we're here."
"Maya, what about you?" Luis shouted, pushing my protesting father toward the front door where backup units were just pulling up with sirens muted.
"My apartment is rigged," I yelled over my shoulder, diving into the driver's seat of my unmarked federal cruiser. "She’s clearing out my safe."
I hit the siren, slamming the transmission into drive. The tires sprayed gravel across my parents' manicured lawn as I launched the vehicle onto the rain-slicked asphalt of the Portland suburbs.
My mind raced through the digital layout of my apartment. Inside my reinforced bedroom closet, behind a false panel of acoustic dampening foam, sat a biometric steel vault. It didn't just hold my savings; it held every classified case file, decryption key, and personal dossier I had compiled on the Aethelgard syndicate over the last seven years. I had kept it off the cloud because I knew, deep down, that someone inside the Bureau had been leaking our operational parameters.
I never suspected Chloe. I thought she was just an overachieving corporate drone who looked down on her 'unemployed' sister.
Thirty-five and still renting.
The memory of her condescending toast at last year's Christmas dinner made my knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. She hadn't been mocking my rent. She had been laughing at the fact that I was hunting ghosts while living paycheck to paycheck on a government salary, completely blind to the fact that her luxury lifestyle was funded by draining the retirement accounts of seniors across three states.
My dashboard terminal chirped. A secure line from Vance connected through the car's audio system.
"Maya, we intercepted a burner phone transmission originating from your IP address," Vance said without preamble. "Your apartment building's smart-lock system has been overridden. Local precinct units are five minutes out, but Chloe has a head start."
"She’s not just stealing files, Vance. She’s planting evidence," I realized with a jolt of ice in my chest. "If she accesses that vault, she can upload a false data payload that frames me as the syndicate's internal mole."
"Can you lock her out remotely?"
"The hardware is offline," I said, cutting hard through a red light with my emergency strobes flashing. "I have forty-five seconds."
When my tires screeched to a halt outside my apartment complex, the courtyard was eerily silent. The security gate hung open, its electronic panel sparking with fried circuits. I drew my sidearm, cleared the lobby in three swift tactical strides, and vaulted up the stairwell instead of waiting for the elevator.
By the time I kicked open my apartment door, the living room was empty.
The bedroom closet door stood wide open. The false panel was smashed to splinters.
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And glowing brightly on the wall-mounted screen inside the vault was a live video feed of Grandma Evelyn sitting safely in Luis’s transport vehicle—followed by a digital message blinking in stark red letters:
Too slow, Agent Cole. Check your back.
