Chapter 6 - Rigging the Trap
For the next two hours, Julian worked like a man possessed.
He left Clara safe on the 45th floor, taking the freight elevator down to the bottlenecks of the building—the 40th-floor stairwells and the main elevator shafts.
This wasn't a finished building with safety protocols and insulated walls. It was a raw construction site. Julian stripped heavy-gauge electrical cables, running live wires across the metal doorframes of the stairwells. He bypassed the circuit breakers, ensuring that any surge wouldn't trip the power—it would just keep burning.
He rigged the emergency sprinkler system on the 42nd floor to flood the concrete deck, then dropped a live 220-volt line inches above the water, hooked to a remote trigger on his phone.
He was turning the skyscraper into an electro-magnetic fortress.
Back on the 45th floor, Clara watched him work. The timid, exhausted woman who had hidden under a quilt for a month was gone. In her place was a mother, fiercely protecting her unborn child. She picked up a heavy framing hammer from the floor, resting it in her lap.
“Julian,” she called out as he wired the final trap near the freight elevator doors. “If he gets past you… I won’t let him take me alive. I won’t let him take the baby.”
Julian walked over, dropping to his knees, and placed his hands over her swollen belly. He could feel the faint, fluttering kick of their child.
“He’s not getting past me, Sofia,” Julian promised, using her real name for the first time. “He’s going to wish he never learned how to read a blueprint.”
Down on the street level, the screech of tires echoed up the concrete shafts.
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Julian walked to the edge of the glassless window and looked down. Five black SUVs had just smashed through the chain-link security gates of the construction site. Over twenty armed men poured out, carrying assault rifles and tactical gear.
And stepping out of the lead vehicle was a tall man in a pristine tailored suit, holding a silver cane. Victor Vargas.
