Chapter 17 - The Frame-UpBy noon, the situation had escalated from a cyber-attack to a total catastrophe.
I was pacing the floor of an FBI secure location on the outskirts of the city, Amy huddled on the sofa with Frederick clutched tightly in her arms. She wasn't crying. She was furious. After surviving my mother and her father, Amy had developed a spine of absolute titanium.
"They locked us out of the firm's mainframes," I told Marcus, who was typing frantically on two laptops. "They drained the operational accounts. But that's not what scares me. My access codes were used this morning to order unauthorized, low-grade steel for the foundation of the new downtown skyscraper. If that steel is poured into the concrete..."
"The building will collapse," Amy finished, her eyes wide.
"Exactly," I rubbed my temples. "It would be the deadliest structural failure in state history. And my digital signature is all over the order. Volkov isn't just trying to kill us; he's framing me for domestic terrorism so I spend the rest of my life in a supermax prison."
Marcus hit a key in frustration. "Their hackers are world-class. I can't trace the IP. They routed it through a dozen servers in Eastern Europe."
My burner phone rang. The sound echoed in the small, concrete room like a gunshot.
I put it on speaker. "This is Connor."
"Mr. Bradley," a thick, heavily accented Russian voice purred through the line. "I see you have discovered my little redesign of your building project."
"Viktor Volkov," I said.
"I prefer things tidy," Volkov said coldly. "Arthur Vance was a fool to let a suburban engineer blackmail him. I do not make such mistakes. Here are my terms: Tonight, at midnight, you will bring the USB drive to Pier 4 on the Cumberland River. You will come alone. If you do this, I will reverse the steel order and give you your company back. If you do not..."
He paused, letting the silence hang like a guillotine.
"...I will release a dossier to the media proving you knowingly purchased faulty materials to skim millions off the top of the city budget. You will be ruined, arrested, and I assure you, you will not survive your first week in prison. And your beautiful wife? She will be left destitute, easy prey for my associates."
"If you touch her, I will end you," I snarled.
Volkov chuckled softly. "Midnight, Mr. Bradley. Do not test me."
The line went dead.
Amy stood up, handing Frederick to an FBI agent by the door. She walked over to me, her eyes burning with an intense, terrifying fire.
"We are not running," Amy said. "And we are not hiding. Connor, we are going to tear this man apart."
"We can't just hand over the drive," Marcus interjected. "If Volkov gets it, he has no reason to keep you alive. He'll kill you on that pier."
"I know," I said, a dangerous plan forming in my mind. "Which means we don't play his game. We need to find him before midnight. We need leverage that he actually cares about."
"Nobody knows where Volkov is," Marcus sighed. "He's a ghost. He operates through proxies."
I stared at the concrete wall, thinking back to the beginning of this nightmare. The ledger. The gambling debts. The underground casinos.
"Not everyone," I realized, grabbing my jacket. "I know someone who spent years in Volkov's underground VIP gambling rings in Chicago. Someone desperate enough to give up a secret."
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"Who?" Marcus asked.
I looked at him with a cold smile. "My mother."
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