Chapter 5 - Two Hours to Zero
Inside the 42nd-floor executive suite, the atmosphere had deteriorated into pure terror.
Logan Pierce was sitting on the floor behind the desk, his back against the wall, clutching his hair with both hands. His tie was completely undone, his jacket was balled up in the corner of the room, and empty paper cups of espresso were scattered across the mahogany surface.
"I can't do it, Caleb," Logan choked out, hyperventilating. "I can't crack it. The cipher is a randomized 128-byte hash based on the timestamp of the separation event down to the millisecond! You fired her at 4:47 p.m., but the database recorded the server tick at 16:47:32.409! Without the exact cryptographic seed, any random attempt has a one in seventy-two quadrillion chance of succeeding!"
Caleb stood over him, looking disheveled, his eyes wild and bloodshot. The pristine, untouchable CEO was completely unspooling.
"Get up," Caleb snarled, kicking Logan’s foot. "Get up and sit in that chair!"
"No! I'm not touching that keyboard again!" Logan screamed, tears leaking from his eyes. "We have two attempts left, Caleb! Two! If I touch that enter key and fail, the system broadcasts the fraud alert! Do you know what happens then? Wire fraud! Bank fraud! Conspiracy! We’re looking at twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary!"
"You're already in it, you pathetic coward!" Caleb roared, grabbing Logan by the collar of his shirt and hauling him to his feet. "Who set up the Aegis Meridian shell company? Who signed the transfer instructions for the Swiss accounts? You did! Your name is on the incorporation papers in George Town! If I go down, you go down with me, Logan! You think you can walk out of here and play the innocent junior analyst? I will hand the Department of Justice your encrypted hard drives before my handcuffs are even clicked shut!"
Logan’s knees buckled. He slumped into the executive chair, staring at the flashing red prompt on the screen.
*WARNING: TWO ATTEMPTS REMAINING.*
*SYSTEM LOCKDOWN IMMINENT.*
*TIME TO TRANSACTION TIMEOUT: 01 HOUR, 18 MINUTES.*
Caleb paced the floor like a caged panther. He pulled out his phone again. He dialed Marissa Vance, the Head of HR.
She picked up on the first ring, her voice thick with sleep. "Caleb? It’s past one in the morning—"
"Marissa, shut up and listen to me," Caleb commanded, his voice shaking with barely suppressed hysteria. "You are going to log into the HR portal right now. You are going to retroactively delete Rebecca Sterling’s termination notice. You are going to change her status back to Active. And you are going to backdate the change to 4:45 p.m."
There was a long silence on the other end.
"Caleb... I can't do that," Marissa said slowly, suddenly wide awake. "The termination event was already written to the immutable compliance log. It requires the Chief Compliance Officer’s digital authorization to alter a finalized personnel record."
"I am the Chief Executive Officer!" Caleb bellowed into the phone, loud enough to rattle the glass windows. "You work for me! Do as I order you to do, or I will terminate you before you can blink!"
"Caleb, listen to yourself," Marissa’s voice sounded alarmed, almost frightened. "Even if I had the technical ability to do that, the human resources database is cryptographically signed every hour. If I retroactively alter a timestamp, the internal audit logs will flag it as a manual data breach. That’s a federal crime under Sarbanes-Oxley!"
"I don't give a damn about Sarbanes-Oxley!" Caleb screamed. "Do it! Do it now!"
"No, Caleb. I won't."
*Click.*
The line went dead.
Caleb stared at his phone in utter disbelief. Marissa Vance—the woman who had meekly nodded at every single one of his demands for three years, the woman who had sat quietly while he manufactured a ridiculous lie to fire an eighteen-year executive—had just hung up on him.
"She hung up on me," Caleb whispered, his face pale.
"It's over, Caleb," Logan muttered from the desk, his eyes blank and defeated. "It's over. Just cancel the transaction. Let Lantern fail. We can tell the foreign partners there was a technical glitch. We can cover it up..."
"We can't cover it up, you idiot!" Caleb hissed. "The Swiss bank already issued the standby letter of credit against our balance sheet! If the four hundred and twenty million isn't in their clearing account by 3:00 a.m., they execute their default clause! They call the collateral! That triggers an immediate, mandatory public disclosure to the New York Stock Exchange!"
Caleb walked back to the desk, his hands trembling. He looked at the keyboard.
There was only one way out.
He had to guess.
He had to use the master executive root key that IT had given him when he took office—the key he had promised the board he would never use without a full quorum of directors present.
"Get out of the chair," Caleb ordered Logan.
Logan didn't argue. He scrambled out of the chair and backed away into the shadows of the office.
Caleb sat down. He pulled a silver USB drive from his pocket—the Executive Emergency Override. He inserted it into the drive bay.
The screen shifted. The crimson warning box vanished, replaced by an ominous, blinking prompt:
*EXECUTIVE LEVEL OVERRIDE DETECTED.*
*USER: ROWAN, C. (CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER).*
*WARNING: INITIATING UNILATERAL OVERRIDE ON TIER-1 ASSETS WITHOUT QUORUM WILL AUTOMATICALLY NOTIFY THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS.*
*PROCEED? (Y/N)*
Caleb’s finger hovered over the 'Y' key.
His phone buzzed on the desk.
An automated email notification appeared at the top of the screen:
*NOTICE: AN EMERGENCY MEETING OF THE BLUECREST BOARD OF DIRECTORS HAS BEEN CONVENED BY LEAD INDEPENDENT DIRECTOR EVELYN REED.*
*TIME: 2:00 A.M.*
*LOCATION: EXECUTIVE BOARDROOM / VIRTUAL QUORUM.*
*AGENDA: SPECIAL INQUIRY INTO EXECUTIVE CONDUCT AND SYSTEM GOVERNANCE.*
Caleb froze. The blood drained entirely from his face.
May you like
He looked at the door of his office. Down the hall, forty yards away, the frosted glass doors of the grand boardroom suddenly lit up with bright, fluorescent light.
***
