Chapter 9 - THE BROADCAST OF TRUTH — JUSTICE LIVE ON AIRThe mercenaries dropped their weapons, clutching their ears in agony as the painful sound shattered the glass faces of the clock tower.
"FIRE!" Sarah Cole yelled, charging up the stairs with her tactical team.
Gunfire erupted across the upper gallery. Nathaniel tackled Croft to the floor, knocking the revolver from his hand. The two men wrestled on the iron catwalk, suspended fifty feet above the marble floor of the foyer.
"You ruined everything!" Croft roared, choking Nathaniel against the railings. "I spent twelve years building this empire from the shadows!"
"You didn't build anything!" Nathaniel gasped, grabbing a heavy iron wrench from a tool rack beside the clock gears and swinging it with all his strength.
The blow struck Croft across the chest, knocking him backward against the central drive gear of the massive clock.
At that exact moment, the clock chimed 11:55 PM.
The massive iron gears groaned and began to turn. Croft’s designer jacket got caught in the giant teeth of the central gear, pinning him helplessly against the wall as the machinery locked him in place.
"Stop it! Turn it off!" Croft screamed in terror as the gears tightened.
Eleanor stepped onto the catwalk, carrying a sleek black hard drive recovered from behind the clock face. She plugged it directly into a portable transmitter unit Sarah brought up.
"It's time to end this, Richard," Eleanor said coldly.
She hit ENTER.
Instantly, the encrypted data stored on the drive bypasses Croft’s private servers, connecting directly to the Federal Securities Commission and every major news network in the country.
On the floor-to-ceiling screens back in Graves Tower, on millions of televisions across the state, and on every news station in North America, the truth was broadcast live:
BREAKING NEWS: GRAVES ENERGY EMBEZZLEMENT UNCOVERED
RICHARD CROFT AND VICTOR STERLING INDICTED FOR CORPORATE TREASON, KIDNAPPING, AND ATTEMPTED MURDER
Down in the foyer, tactical police forces flooded through the broken doors, taking Croft’s surviving mercenaries into custody and securing the building.
May you like
The clock struck 12:00 MIDNIGHT.
The legal deadline had passed—and the true heirs of Graves Energy were standing tall.
