Chapter 13: The Prosecutor's Gambit
Chapter 13: The Prosecutor's Gambit
The Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan was a brutalist concrete monolith that smelled of industrial floor cleaner and despair. In a small, windowless interrogation room, Damian Cross sat in an orange jumpsuit. He looked ten years older than he had a week ago. The arrogant spark in his eyes had been replaced by a hollow, gnawing bitterness.
The heavy steel door clanked open, and Arthur Vance, the US Attorney, walked in. He carried a single manila folder and a steaming cup of bad cafeteria coffee. He set the coffee down in front of Damian.
"You look terrible, Damian," Vance said casually, pulling out a metal chair and sitting across from him.
"Go to hell, Arthur," Damian rasped, not touching the coffee. "If you're here to gloat, get it over with. If you're here for a confession, talk to my lawyer."
"Your lawyer dropped you yesterday when your retainer bounced," Vance reminded him cheerfully. "No, I'm not here for a confession. You've already confessed enough on digital paper to lock you up until the sun burns out. I'm here because I don't like unfinished business."
Damian looked up, a glimmer of suspicion cutting through his depression. "What do you mean?"
Vance leaned over the table. "Elena Voss. She's good, Damian. I’ll give her that. She scrubbed the servers clean. She burned the physical ledgers. She paid off the underworld and insulated the company so flawlessly that my forensic accountants are practically crying themselves to sleep. She beat you, and she beat you so badly she made it look effortless."
Damian’s jaw tightened. Mentioning Elena’s name was like twisting a knife in his gut. "She built the system. She knew every backdoor."
"Ah, but did she?" Vance asked, his eyes gleaming with a predatory light. "Nobody builds a fortress without missing a single cracked brick. You were the CEO for ten years, Damian. You had all the money and all the power. Are you really telling me you just sat blindly in your penthouse while she built the entire digital infrastructure? You didn't install a single failsafe of your own?"
Damian stared at the coffee cup. His mind raced. He had been an idiot to trust her, yes. But he had always been paranoid.
"What's in it for me?" Damian asked, his voice a low, gravelly whisper.
"You're facing forty years," Vance replied immediately. "Help me take her down—give me the smoking gun that connects her legitimate empire to the shadow funds she just buried—and I will personally advocate for a sentence reduction to five years in a minimum-security federal camp. You’ll be out in three with good behavior."
Damian closed his eyes. Three years. It was a lifeline. But more importantly, it was a weapon. He could drag the ice queen down into the mud with him.
"Before Elena initiated the coup," Damian began slowly, opening his eyes, "we were upgrading the server farms for a new global initiative. Project Apex. It’s a clean energy grid, heavily reliant on AI infrastructure. She designed the software, but I hired an external contractor to physically build the server racks."
Vance leaned in closer. "And?"
"And I paid the contractor an extra two million dollars in untraceable crypto to hardwire a physical backdoor into the motherboard architecture of the Apex mainframe," Damian confessed, a vicious smile creeping onto his face. "A ghost-port. It bypasses her firewalls completely because it operates at the hardware level. She doesn't know it's there. As long as the servers are plugged in, someone with the right encrypted key can access the core drives and manipulate the ledgers."
Vance’s heart hammered in his chest. A hardware backdoor. It was the holy grail. "Where is the key, Damian?"
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"I memorized the access protocol," Damian lied. He hadn't memorized it; he had engraved it on the inside of a cheap pair of reading glasses currently sitting in his personal effects box in the prison lockup. "I can give you the code. But if you use it, the intrusion will trigger a silent alarm on her end. You’ll only have a window of a few minutes before she locks down the system entirely."
"A few minutes is all I need to download the encrypted backups of her laundering operations," Vance said, standing up. He felt the thrill of the hunt coursing through his veins. "I’ll draft the immunity agreement tonight. Get comfortable, Damian. You just became my star witness."
