Chapter 5 - The Ghost Drive
They relocated to a safehouse Elias maintained—an abandoned hunting lodge deep in the Appalachian foothills, three hours outside of Oakridge. It was fortified, stocked with weapons, and entirely cut off from cellular networks.
Lucas was asleep on a cot by the woodstove, finally finding peace.
In the main room, Elias hooked the stolen hard drive into an air-gapped military-grade laptop. “Aris taught me a few things before he went into hiding,” Elias muttered, typing furiously. “This drive is protected by AES-256 encryption. But Arthur is arrogant. He uses the same cipher for everything.”
“Which is?” Cho asked.
“His father’s date of birth, mixed with the coordinates of their first property.” Elias hit enter.
A progress bar flashed across the screen, turning green. The drive unspooled.
Jenkins gasped. The screen was populated with thousands of files. Videos, ledgers, banking transactions. It was a horrifying index of corruption.
“Look at the names,” Cho said, pointing at a spreadsheet. “Judge Hayes. Chief of Police Miller. Mayor Higgins. They’ve all been compromised. They all participated.”
“They are bound by shared guilt,” Elias said, his voice laced with venom. “Arthur holds the master key. As long as he has the other two drives, he owns this state.”
“We can’t just leak this,” Jenkins said, pacing the floor. “The local media is owned by Sterling’s holding company. They’ll bury it, and frame us as rogue cops who kidnapped a kid.”
“We go federal,” Cho suggested. “The FBI field office in Chicago.”
“No,” Elias interrupted. “Half the feds in this sector are on Arthur’s payroll. You send it through official channels, it gets intercepted, and we all get a bullet in the back of the head.”
“So what’s the play?” Jenkins asked, staring at the scarred man who had spent his life preparing for this moment.
“Tomorrow night is the Oakridge Founders' Gala,” Elias said, pulling up a blueprint of a massive, fortress-like mansion on the lake. “Every man on this list will be there. Arthur will be there. He’ll be feeling invincible. We infiltrate the gala, tap directly into their private server, and broadcast the unencrypted files simultaneously to every major news network on the planet. We burn the shadows away with a spotlight so bright they can’t hide.”
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“And how do we get into a gala guarded by heavily armed fixers?” Cho asked.
Elias smiled grimly. “We don’t sneak in. We walk in through the front door. We use their arrogance against them.”
