Chapter 7 - The Server Room
The reality of their impending doom finally shattered whatever remained of Charles Herrera's sanity.
He looked at Richard weeping on the floor, the other board members paralyzed by fear, and the elderly woman holding all the cards.
He realized with terrifying clarity that his luxurious life was over, and a federal prison cell was waiting for him.
A sudden, desperate, and deeply irrational thought violently took root in his mind.
"The server room," Charles muttered to himself, his eyes darting wildly around the office.
If he could destroy the physical hard drives in the sub-basement, he could eliminate the primary evidence of his personal embezzlement.
Without the master drives, all of Evelyn's downloaded copies could be dismissed in court as manipulated digital forgeries.
It was a billion-to-one shot, but it was the only shot he had left.
Charles slowly stood up, pretending to be having a massive panic attack, clutching his chest and gasping for air.
"I need... I need air," he choked out, stumbling toward the heavy office doors.
Evelyn's auditors moved to block him, but she raised a single hand, signaling them to stop.
"Let him go," Evelyn commanded softly.
Charles didn't wait to question his sudden stroke of luck; he burst through the doors and sprinted down the hallway.
He bypassed the elevators, knowing they were too slow, and threw open the door to the emergency stairwell.
His expensive dress shoes echoed loudly on the concrete stairs as he practically threw himself down six flights of stairs toward the basement.
His lungs burned, and his silk tie felt like a noose around his neck, but the adrenaline fueled his frantic descent.
He burst into the dark, heavily air-conditioned sub-basement, running toward the reinforced steel door of the master server room.
He punched in his private executive override code, praying that Janet hadn't revoked his physical access yet.
The keypad beeped green, and the heavy door clicked open.
Charles rushed inside, grabbing a heavy metal fire extinguisher from the wall bracket, preparing to smash the server racks to pieces.
He raised the heavy red cylinder above his head, letting out a primal scream of rage and desperation.
Suddenly, the fluorescent lights in the server room snapped on, blinding him temporarily.
"I really wouldn't do that if I were you, Mr. Herrera."
Charles froze, lowering the fire extinguisher slightly to squint through the bright light.
Standing at the end of the server aisle were three more men in black suits, completely relaxed and entirely unsurprised by his arrival.
One of them was holding a large, heavy-duty duffel bag that looked completely full.
"What is this?" Charles demanded, his voice cracking with hysteria.
"Where are the primary drives?"
The auditor patted the duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
"They have been in this bag for the last twenty minutes, sir," the man replied calmly.
"Mrs. Vance anticipated you might try something desperate, so we removed the physical evidence before she even walked into your office."
Charles dropped the fire extinguisher, the heavy metal canister hitting the raised floor with a deafening clang.
He fell to his knees in the narrow aisle between the empty server racks, completely broken.
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He had been outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and utterly destroyed by a woman he had dismissed as a nobody just an hour ago.
His master plan to save himself had been nothing more than a rat running deeper into a trap that had already been sprung.
