Chapter 6 - THE TRUCK WITHOUT A DRIVERThe driver threw the armored vehicle into reverse.
Thomas fired twice at the windshield.
The reinforced glass held, but white cracks spread across its surface.
Deputy Price’s pickup accelerated toward us.
There was nowhere to turn.
The road beside the server facility ran between a concrete wall and the lake.
“Brace!” the driver shouted.
The pickup struck our front corner.
The impact spun us sideways.
My cast slammed against the door, and darkness flashed through my vision.
The pickup continued forward, crossed the road, and crashed through the lakeside barrier.
Its rear wheels lifted.
For a second, the truck balanced above the water.
Then it disappeared into the lake.
Thomas ran toward a waiting motorcycle.
I unfastened my seat belt.
“Stay inside,” the driver ordered.
Thomas had planned everything around people following instructions.
I opened the rear door.
He reached the motorcycle and threw one leg over it.
I grabbed the emergency road flare from the vehicle’s equipment compartment and struck it against the pavement.
Red fire erupted from the tip.
Thomas looked back.
I threw it beneath the motorcycle.
The flare did not explode anything, but smoke and sparks forced him away from the fuel line.
He drew his gun.
I dropped behind the armored door.
A federal driver returned fire, and Thomas fled toward the facility’s maintenance yard.
I followed at a distance.
Not because I believed I could capture him.
Because he had left something beside the motorcycle.
A phone.
I reached it before he realized.
The screen showed an active call.
My mother’s attorney.
Thomas had been receiving information directly from someone connected to her defense team.
A hand closed around the back of my vest.
Thomas pulled me away from the motorcycle and slammed me against a storage container.
The gun had disappeared from his hand. Maybe he had dropped it while running.
He no longer needed it.
He had me.
“You never learned,” he said.
“I learned everything.”
He twisted my cast.
I cried out and drove my knee upward.
He turned enough that the strike hit his thigh instead of where I intended.
He laughed and seized my hair.
I grabbed the hot road flare from the ground.
I did not touch it to him.
I thrust it between us.
He recoiled from the heat, loosening his grip.
I swung the metal end against his wrist.
He struck me across the face.
The world tilted.
Thomas grabbed my vest and threw me onto the hood of a parked utility cart.
“You think those recordings make you strong?”
“No,” I said, struggling to breathe. “They make you predictable.”
He raised his fist.
I pulled the cart’s parking brake.
We were on a slope.
The cart rolled backward.
Thomas lost his balance and fell across the hood beside me.
The vehicle gained speed.
It struck a row of empty barrels, sending them crashing across the yard.
Thomas and I rolled from the hood.
He landed first and tried to pin me.
I protected my cast and hooked my leg behind his knee. We wrestled across wet gravel while the utility cart continued toward the concrete wall.
Thomas wrapped both hands around my throat.
My vision narrowed.
Then the facility’s emergency cooling system activated.
Water cannons mounted along the roof blasted the maintenance yard.
A powerful stream struck Thomas’s back and knocked him sideways.
I crawled away.
Agent Bell’s team emerged from the cooling tunnel.
Thomas ran through the artificial rain and climbed a maintenance ladder attached to the outer wall.
Bell ordered him to stop.
Thomas reached the roof.
A helicopter appeared above the lake.
Caleb Rusk’s company logo had been painted over, but I recognized the aircraft from photographs in Thomas’s hidden basement.
A rope ladder dropped.
Thomas jumped for it.
Agent Bell fired at the helicopter’s engine housing, forcing it to climb before Thomas secured his grip.
He fell onto the roof but disappeared behind the ventilation units.
By the time agents reached him, he had entered the facility through an upper hatch.
The false assault team had planted charges throughout the server floor. They fled through another exit, leaving Thomas to trigger the final blast remotely.
Inside the control room, a technician named Marcus Lee maintained the security lockdown.
He had been injured by falling debris but refused to abandon the system.
“If the charges destroy the authentication servers, the records are gone,” he told us through the intercom.
“Can they be transferred?” Bennett asked remotely.
“Only with the beneficiary’s authorization.”
Everyone looked at me.
The system needed my voice and the hardware token.
Agent Bell had both.
We entered through the eastern maintenance corridor.
The building shook with another explosion.
Ceiling panels fell.
Emergency lights flashed red through smoke.
Marcus guided us by intercom.
“Turn left at the cooling junction. Do not use the main stairs.”
We reached the server floor.
Thomas stood behind a glass security barrier holding the detonation controller.
“You took everything from me,” he said.
I approached the glass.
“You took it from yourself.”
He raised the controller.
“Open the barrier.”
Agent Bell aimed his weapon.
“If you press that trigger, you lose your leverage.”
“I don’t need leverage.”
He wanted destruction now.
Not money.
Not escape.
He wanted to erase the proof and punish me for forcing the world to see him.
I held up the hardware token.
“You destroy the servers, and the company shuts down. Every contract disappears. Every person you bribed realizes you have nothing left to offer.”
His thumb hovered over the button.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“You.”
Agent Bell stepped forward.
“No.”
Thomas ignored him.
“Claire enters alone. Everyone else backs away.”
I looked at the barrier’s emergency controls.
My father had designed the facility.
He had taught me one rule about secure systems.
Every lock required two independent exits.
One for people.
One for power.
I placed the token against the authentication panel.
The glass barrier opened several inches.
Thomas smiled.
I slipped through before Agent Bell could stop me.
The barrier sealed behind me.
Thomas grabbed my hoodie and pulled me close.
“You should have stayed frightened.”
“I was frightened every day.”
He pressed the controller against my chest.
“And what did that teach you?”
“How to keep you talking.”
Behind him, the server lights changed from blue to white.
The transfer had started when I placed the token against the panel.
Thomas looked over his shoulder.
I struck his wrist with the edge of my cast.
The controller dropped.
We both reached for it.
He threw me against a server rack.
I slid beneath his arm and kicked the controller across the floor.
Thomas tackled me.
We hit the ground, knocking cables loose from a maintenance console.
He tried to reach the controller.
I wrapped my good arm around his elbow and pulled backward.
He rolled, lifting me off the floor, then slammed me against the rack.
The cast split along one side.
Pain nearly made me release him.
Marcus’s voice came over the intercom.
“Transfer at seventy percent.”
Thomas heard it.
He abandoned the controller and ran toward the manual power cutoff.
If he killed the system before the transfer finished, the authentication records would be corrupted.
I grabbed the loose cable at my feet and looped it around his ankle.
He fell forward.
The controller lay between us.
Thomas reached it first.
Before he could press the trigger, the glass barrier opened.
Dr. Reed stepped through holding a fire extinguisher.
He had arrived with the second emergency team.
He discharged the extinguisher directly into Thomas’s face.
Thomas dropped the controller.
Agent Bell entered and kicked it away.
The transfer reached one hundred percent.
Thomas crawled through the white chemical cloud and disappeared into a floor-level cooling hatch.
The hatch led to drainage tunnels beneath the lake.
Again, he escaped.
But the servers survived.
The transferred records revealed more than shipping crimes.
They included the location history of every Vance Logistics vehicle.
One truck had visited my father’s crash site three hours before authorities arrived.
The same truck traveled to an abandoned hunting cabin the following morning.
Federal agents searched the cabin.
Inside, they found my father’s watch, bloodstained clothing, and photographs taken after the crash.
My father had survived the initial collision.
Thomas and Deputy Price had pulled him from the car.
What happened afterward was documented in a single image.
My father sat alive in the cabin, tied to a chair.
My mother stood behind him.
May you like
On the photograph’s white border, she had written a date.
Two days after the world was told my father had died.
