Chapter 39 - The Final Confrontation
"Stay back, Álvaro," Marcos commanded, his voice cutting through the roar of the gale. He didn't even flinch.
"You don't understand!" Álvaro screamed, tears mixing with the rain on his gaunt face. "He’s going to kill me! Cassian is inside the aerostat above the clouds! If I don't bring you to the extraction chopper, this beacon will detonate! It will take the whole tower down with us!"
Mateo didn't stop typing. His fingers were numb from the cold, but his keystrokes were flawless. "You never were a father, Álvaro. Even now, with a bomb strapped to your ribs, you come to sacrifice us to save your own miserable skin."
"I took you in!" Álvaro shrieked, taking a desperate step forward along the narrow catwalk. "I raised you! When Lucía was broke and terrified, my name gave you shelter! You owe me your lives!"
"You took forty million dollars from our mother's secret accounts and gambled it away in Macau," Marcos replied with icy precision, reciting line by line the data from the Blue Folder. "You forged our names on corporate indemnity waivers to shield your embezzlement. You treated us like stray animals until you realized our brains could win you prestige at Apex Dynamics."
"I am an elite!" Álvaro roared, his mind completely broken by narcissism and terror. "I am Álvaro Miller! Without me, you are nothing! You are lab experiments!"
"No," Mateo said quietly, pressing the final execution command on his laptop. "We are the architects of your ruin."
A deafening hum resonated through the steel tower as the main transmission dish pivoted smoothly on its hydraulic mount, locking onto an invisible point directly in the stormy stratosphere above.
`TRANSMISSION COMMENCING.`
`OVERRIDE FREQUENCY BROADCASTING AT 500 MEGAWATTS.`
Álvaro stared in horror as the pulsing red light on his chest suddenly switched from a steady blink to a rapid, panicked flicker.
"What did you do?!" Álvaro screamed, clawing frantically at the beacon strapped to his chest.
"We didn't just hack the satellite relay, Álvaro," Marcos said, watching him with calm, pitiless hazel eyes. "We hijacked the aerostat's command receiver. Mateo just sent an emergency abort signal directly into your vest's control board."
The magnetic clamps holding the bomb to Álvaro’s chest clicked open. The explosive device fell from his torso, tumbling through the darkness three hundred feet below into the empty cooling reservoir of the facility.
A muffled *boom* vibrated deep in the reservoir, harmlessly sending a plume of water into the night air.
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Álvaro dropped to his knees on the slick metal catwalk, clutching his empty chest, staring at the two twin boys who looked down upon him not with anger, but with total, absolute indifference.
"You're free, Álvaro," Marcos said coldly. "Go crawl back into the dark where you belong."
