Chapter 4 - The Midnight Shredder
Forty-eight hours later. Sunday night, 11:45 PM.
Mercer Defense Tech World Headquarters, Bethesda, Maryland.
The sixty-story glass monolith was dark, save for the penthouse executive suite on the top floor. Inside the boardroom, empty takeout containers, crumpled printouts, and half-empty tumblers of single-malt scotch littered the sixty-foot mahogany conference table.
Arthur Mercer stood by the panoramic window, staring out at the distant lights of Washington D.C. His tie was undone, his hair disheveled. Across the room, Trevor was pacing frantically, clutching an encrypted tablet.
"She’s not bluffing, Dad!" Trevor shouted, his voice cracking with hysteria. "Her team of forensic accountants from the Defense Contract Audit Agency just served subpoenas on our server farms in Virginia! They’ve locked our external backups! If they pull the thermal imaging tests from Poland, they’re going to find the waiver I signed!"
Arthur didn't turn around. "You told me the microprocessors met military spec, Trevor. You looked me in the eye eight months ago and told me the sub-contractor was certified."
Trevor froze, his face flushing crimson. "The certified chips were eight hundred dollars a unit! The secondary vendor offered them for ninety-five! We were looking at a fifty-million-dollar quarterly deficit if we didn't hit our margin targets before the annual shareholder meeting! You told me to protect the stock price at all costs! You said, *'Winners deliver numbers, Trevor, losers make excuses!'*"
Arthur whirled around, slamming his fist onto the table. Glassware rattled. "I didn't tell you to commit treason, you idiot!"
"Treason?!" Trevor laughed bitterly. "It's defense contracting! Everybody cuts corners! Everybody lobbies for waivers! We've done it for twenty years! The only reason we’re caught is because that bitch—your daughter—is running the show! She’s doing this for revenge, Dad! She wants to ruin us because you cut her out of the will!"
The heavy double doors of the boardroom clicked open. Evelyn walked in, wearing an expensive camel-hair coat, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.
"Arthur," she whispered, clutching her handbag. "I just spoke with Senator Jenkins’s chief of staff. Jenkins won't take your calls. He told his aide to tell us that anyone associated with Project Aegis is radioactive. The Department of Justice has already impaneled a grand jury."
Arthur sank into the high-backed leather chair at the head of the table—the throne from which he had ruled his corporate empire for four decades. The silence in the room was suffocating.
"She won't destroy me," Arthur muttered, his fingers drumming against the armrest, his mind spinning frantic webs of denial. "She can't. She’s my blood. Everything I did, I did to teach her a lesson. She was twenty-two! She was stubborn! She needed to learn that the real world doesn't care about medals and ideals. Power is money."
"Dad, she doesn't care about your money!" Trevor screamed. "Did you see her chest? Did you see the three stars? She commands fifty thousand troops! She reports to the President! She doesn't want your inheritance, she wants our heads on pikes!"
Arthur looked up, his eyes narrowing with a dangerous, desperate glint. "Then we give her something she does care about."
Evelyn frowned nervously. "What do you mean, Arthur?"
"Kate is a soldier," Arthur said, his voice dropping into a sinister, conspiratorial register. "Soldiers care about their reputations. They care about their pristine military records. In twenty-six years of command, nobody comes out clean. Nobody. She served in Iraq. She served in Afghanistan. She made decisions in combat. People died."
Trevor’s eyes widened. "You have dirt on her?"
"I have five million dollars in an offshore account dedicated to corporate intelligence," Arthur said coldly. "Call Bradley at Blackwood Intelligence. Tell him I want every combat incident report, every operational casualty log, every civilian collateral assessment from General Katherine Mercer’s entire twenty-six-year career. I want it on my desk by sunrise."
"Arthur, no," Evelyn whispered, sudden dread washing over her. "If you attack her publicly—if you go after her service record—"
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"If we don't, Trevor goes to federal prison, the stock crashes to zero, and Mercer Defense Tech is liquidated by the end of the month!" Arthur roared, rising to his feet. "She wants a war? She forgot who taught her how to fight. I built this empire with blood and iron, and I will tear down my own flesh and blood before I let her take it away from me."
***
