Chapter 12 - The Phantom Protocol
Evelyn's arrogance was her fatal flaw. She believed her control was absolute. She openly admitted to orchestrating Rebecca's death to me, confirming that she had ordered Corbin to sever the brake lines of Rebecca’s car. "Rebecca died because she lacked the vision to see the future," Evelyn stated coldly.
I felt a sickening surge of hatred, a primal urge to leap across the table and strangle her, but I forced my focus onto the digital tablet. "Sign it, Evelyn. Or the federal agents above ground will cut the power, and your life's work dies in the dark." I knew she wouldn't destroy her legacy without securing the data first.
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Evelyn, confident she held all the cards, placed her thumb on the scanner. The tablet chimed: VAULT ACCESS APPROVED. But Evelyn didn't know about the phantom protocol Rebecca had engineered into the Vale Trust servers before her death. The moment all three signatures—mine, Camille's, and now Evelyn's—were authenticated, a hidden script executed in the cloud. Instead of merely releasing the map to me, the protocol simultaneously blasted every terabyte of Evelyn’s illegal research, video evidence, and offshore financial trails directly to the FBI servers, bypassing the lab's encrypted firewall entirely.
Red emergency lights instantly began to strobe furiously across the lab. A computerized voice echoed from the ceiling: UNAUTHORIZED NETWORK INTRUSION. MASS DATA EXFILTRATION DETECTED. THERMAL PURGE INITIATED. SEVEN MINUTES. Evelyn’s face twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated fury. She drew a suppressed pistol from her suit jacket and leveled it directly at my chest. "What did you do, Adrian?"
