Chapter 8 - The Night of Reckoning
Matteo froze, his hand hovering inches from the encrypted hard drive.
“Don't listen to him,” Tommy stammered, backing away toward the corner. “It’s a bluff! He’s just trying to scare us!”
“Is it?” Harrison’s voice echoed through the intercom, smooth and utterly devoid of human warmth. "Nurse Jenkins knows medical engineering. She knows that without continuous climate control and filtered oxygen, a premature infant with hyperesthesia goes into full neurogenic shock within four minutes. You have ten seconds to walk out of my office and leave the drive on the desk, or the boy dies right here on the table."
Rachel looked down at baby Leo. The tiny infant was sleeping peacefully, his chest rising and falling against her hand, completely unaware that his life was currently hanging by a thread controlled by a traitorous doctor.
“Rachel, don't,” Matteo warned, his jaw tight. “If we give him that drive, the boss loses his only leverage. Harrison will kill us all the second he gets it anyway.”
“And if we don't,” Rachel whispered, her voice cracking with suppressed terror, “Leo dies.”
She looked up at the security camera mounted in the corner of the office, knowing Harrison was watching them through a remote terminal somewhere in the hospital.
“You’re a doctor,” Rachel spoke directly into the lens, her voice suddenly steadying into pure, unyielding professional fury. “You took an oath to do no harm.”
Harrison’s laugh echoed coldly through the room. "My dear girl, oaths don't pay off offshore bank accounts. Greyson offered me a kingdom. Daniel Russo offered me a salary. The math was simple."
“The math is about to catch up to you, Alan,” a new voice cut through the intercom speaker.
It wasn't Rachel. It wasn't Matteo.
The audio feed hissed as a second microphone clicked open.
"Daniel?" Harrison’s calm demeanor flickered for the first time, a sudden edge of panic creeping into his tone. "Where are you?"
“I’m standing right outside the door of your private server room on the fourth floor,” Daniel Russo’s voice answered. It was dangerously calm—the voice of a man who had stepped through fire and come out the other side holding a loaded gun. “And my finger is resting on the master thermal override switch that controls the coolant lines to your private offshore server rack in the Cayman Islands.”
A heavy silence fell over the room.
"You're bluffing," Harrison hissed over the intercom. "You don't know where the servers are."
“I built this hospital’s foundation data grid twelve years ago, Alan,” Daniel replied smoothly. “I own the walls you’re standing inside. You have thirty seconds to unlock the pediatric wing power grid, or I wipe every dollar you stole off the face of the earth before I put a bullet between your eyes.”
Ten seconds passed. Twenty.
Then, the overhead lights in Room 312 flickered, snapped from emergency red back to bright, steady white, and the low hum of the medical ventilators in the background returned to full power.
Click.
May you like
The digital lock on the office door clicked open.
“Matteo,” Daniel’s voice came through the comms. “Secure the drive. Bring them to the roof. We’re ending this.”
