Chapter 8 - The Sabotage Attempt
"Ethan, what's happening?" Vanessa asked, leaning across the table as she saw the change in my expression.
"Grant," I said, sliding out of the booth and throwing a twenty-dollar bill onto the table. "He made bail. He just hacked into Site 4's control network."
Vanessa’s face went bone-white. "Site 4... that's the two-hundred-megawatt grid facility outside Albany. If the thermal controls fail during a load test, the cells will undergo thermal runaway. It could destroy the entire substation. It could kill people!"
"Get in the car," I ordered.
Within three minutes, my Maybach was screaming down the Schuylkill Expressway toward Hawthorne Ridge Tower's command center. Maya had already assembled our cyber response team and industrial engineering consultants.
Vanessa sat beside me in the passenger seat, furiously typing commands into her secure laptop.
"The access credentials he used... they're my master administrative keys," she said, her voice trembling with rising panic. "He duplicated my security tokens before he was escorted out of the building. The system thinks I am the one ordering the cooling pumps to shut down!"
"Can you revoke the token?" I demanded, dialing Maya on speaker.
"I'm trying! But Grant initiated a nested lockout loop. Every time I attempt an administrative override, the server requires a two-factor physical confirmation from the local server room at the facility!"
"He's at the facility," I said, the realization clicking into place with cold certainty. "He didn't just log in remotely. He went directly to Site 4."
Maya's voice crackled through the car speakers: "Ethan, state troopers are en route, but Site 4 is in a rural industrial park twenty miles outside Albany. The closest patrol car is twenty-five minutes away. The telemetry shows the core cell temperatures are rising at four degrees per minute. If they hit ninety degrees Celsius, the chemical chain reaction becomes irreversible."
"Current temp?" I asked.
"Seventy-six degrees," Maya replied. "You have less than fifteen minutes before the first bank ignites."
Vanessa looked at the screen, tears of sheer helplessness spilling over her lashes. "He's destroying it. He knows if the facility blows up on the same day the Hawthorne deal was announced, the regulatory fallout will crush Cole Dynamics permanently. He's taking us down with him."
"Maya," I said, my voice steady despite the adrenaline roaring in my veins. "Connect my laptop to the Hawthorne Ridge auxiliary grid network. Now."
"Ethan," Vanessa said, turning to me in confusion. "Hawthorne Ridge doesn't have operational control over Site 4 yet. The network bridges haven't been synchronized."
"Your main facility doesn't," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the rain-slicked highway ahead. "But who do you think supplies the auxiliary transmission feed to the Albany industrial corridor?"
Vanessa froze. "The Hudson Valley Substation Project..."
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"Hawthorne Ridge acquired that corridor three years ago," I said, opening my own laptop and entering a long sequence of cryptographic security keys. "Grant thinks he has you trapped inside your own software. But he forgot that software doesn't mean a damn thing if the physical electrons don't flow."
***
