My senior business partner told the board he was boarding an eleven-hour flight to Zurich for an emergency investment summit.
The national broadcast hit like a seismic shockwave. My phone, previously silent except for Bennett and Sarah, now vibrated incessantly with calls and messages from across the country. The story was everywhere. Jason Brock’s carefully constructed image of a visionary entrepreneur had shattered in a single, devastating news segment.
Sheriff Luke Callahan, however, seemed to lose his mind completely.
Detective Bennett called me, his voice urgent. “Callahan just got a call from the State Attorney General’s office. He’s panicking. I think he’s going to try and destroy evidence.”
“Where?” I asked immediately, a cold dread twisting in my stomach. I knew where he’d go. The compound.
“The compound’s secondary camera drive,” Bennett confirmed. “It contains the interior door log files. Who accessed what, when. It would show when Jason re-entered through the basement hatch and when he bolted the storm shutters.”
My mind raced. Before I had been transported to the hospital, during the chaotic moments of my rescue, I had managed a desperate, risky maneuver. I knew the compound’s security system intimately; I had helped design parts of it.
“He’s heading there now,” Bennett said, his voice tense. “I’m on my way, but he’s closer.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, a grim satisfaction in my voice. “He’ll find what he’s looking for. Just not what he expects.”
Weeks prior, during an audit of the security system’s redundancy protocols, I had noticed an identical, spare hard drive sitting in a maintenance drawer. A wild idea had sparked then. I had swapped the actual interior door log drive with the dummy unit, installing a simple, pre-programmed virus onto the dummy. Just in case.
Now, that “just in case” was playing out.
I imagined Callahan, his face probably red with desperation, kicking through the compound’s already damaged basement door. He would have gone straight to the security room, ignoring the yellow crime scene tape, and torn out the hard drive.
Bennett called me back twenty minutes later, his voice filled with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. “Emily, you won’t believe this. Callahan just connected the compound’s drive to his police computer at the station.”
“And?” I prompted, a smile finally breaking through my worry.
“The drive immediately initiated a system-wide wipe,” Bennett chuckled, “not of itself, but of Callahan’s local department server. And then it broadcasted his administrative logs, his internet history, his personal files, everything—directly to State Police headquarters.”
My smile widened into a full-blown grin. “All with a handy timestamped record of when the drive was connected.”
“He walked right into it,” Bennett said, shaking his head. “His entire department is in chaos. They’re locked out of their own systems, and his personal and professional misconduct is being downloaded as we speak.”
Callahan, in his panic, hadn’t just destroyed the evidence he wanted; he had spectacularly incriminated himself, taking his entire department down with him. The broadcast had lit a fuse, and Callahan had detonated his own bomb.
“That’s one less corrupt official to worry about,” I said, feeling a surge of vindication. “What about Jason?”
“He’s quiet,” Bennett replied, his voice turning serious again. “Too quiet. He knows the feds are coming. He’s planning something bigger.”
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