Chapter 9 - THE ULTIMATE TRAPSarah let out a short, hysterical laugh. She reached into her blazer pocket, pulled out a sleek smartphone, and tapped the screen.
"You think you won, Eleanor? Look at the security monitors."
The massive smart-screen on the boardroom wall flickered to life, switching from financial market charts to the live security feed of the subterranean labs thirty-eight floors down.
On the screen, Marcus Vance and the infant were visible inside the secure medical suite. But they weren't alone. Three armed tactical guards stood over them, their rifles pointed directly at the doctor’s head. Standing behind them, smirking at the camera, was James Calder.
"While you were busy driving your motorboat across your little lake, my team secured the backup facility," Sarah said, triumph gleaming in her eyes. "The micro-SD card you pulled from the locket? It’s useless without the master encryption key, which is currently stored on the main mainframe right here in this building. Now, Eleanor... hand over the card, sign over your voting shares to the board, and step down as CEO. Do that, and maybe I’ll let the doctor and your precious little alleyway baby live."
The board members leaned back, watching the standoff with cold indifference. To them, human lives were just acceptable losses on a quarterly balance sheet.
Eleanor sat perfectly still. She looked at the screen. She saw Marcus trembling, holding the baby close. She saw the cold barrels of the guns.
For a long moment, the room was dead silent.
Then, a slow, terrifying smile spread across Eleanor’s face. It was the same smile she used right before executing a hostile corporate takeover that crushed her competitors into dust.
"Sarah," Eleanor said smoothly, picking up her tablet. "Did you ever wonder why I walked into this building through the front lobby instead of taking a private chopper straight to the roof?"
Sarah’s smirk faltered. "What are you talking about?"
"When I plugged that micro-SD card into my private terminal this morning before I came up here," Eleanor tapped her screen with a single, manicured fingernail, "I didn't just read the DNA sequence. I synced it with the federal securities exchange regulatory database, the FBI's cyber-crime division, and every major international media outlet."
Sarah’s face turned the color of chalk. "You... you didn't."
"The moment you threatened that child on live camera," Eleanor pressed a single button on her tablet, "an automated dead-man switch transmitted every single financial record, black-budget ledger, and human-experimentation log of Project Genesis directly to public servers worldwide."
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A sharp, shrill alarm began to wail across Montgomery Tower.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the distant sound of flashing red-and-blue emergency sirens began to echo up from the Manhattan streets below—dozens of federal vehicles, FBI cruisers, and tactical response units swarming the base of the tower.
