Chapter 16 - The Zelda GambitThe rain had stopped by the time Elias pulled the battered SUV into the subterranean garage of a derelict strip mall in New Jersey. It was 3:00 AM.
Elias was bleeding through his tactical vest, gripping his side with a white-knuckled hand, but he refused to let Evelyn take the wheel. "We’re here," he grunted, cutting the engine. "My contact is downstairs. He’s paranoid, he’s difficult, but he’s the best digital breaker on the East Coast."
Evelyn helped Noah into his spare wheelchair, which had survived in the trunk, and then wrapped an arm around Elias to support his weight. They moved through a rusted steel door and down a dimly lit hallway that smelled of ozone and stale coffee.
Elias pounded a specific rhythm on a reinforced door: two fast, three slow, one hard.
A sliding peephole clicked open. An eye peered out, wide and bloodshot. "Elias? You look like chewed meat."
"Open the door, Jax," Elias growled. "We have a world to burn."
The door unbolted with a heavy, mechanized thud. Jax was a wiry man in his thirties, swimming in an oversized hoodie, surrounded by a fortress of glowing server racks and humming cooling fans. He took one look at Elias’s wound, tossed him a medical staple gun and a bottle of whiskey, and then turned his frantic eyes to Evelyn and Noah.
"Who are the tourists?" Jax asked, chewing on a thumbnail.
"The people holding a match to Whitmore Industries," Evelyn said smoothly, stepping forward. She placed the tiny SD card on Jax’s cluttered metal desk. "We need this decrypted. Now."
Jax scoffed, leaning over to inspect the card. "Lady, I don't just crack files for anyone. Do you know what kind of heat Charles Whitmore brings?"
"I'll pay you one million dollars from an untraceable offshore trust the second you hit enter," Evelyn lied without missing a beat, though she technically did have access to the trust.
Jax blinked. He picked up the SD card. "Sit down. Make yourselves at home."
For the next hour, while Evelyn helped Elias staple his gunshot wound shut—a brutal, agonizing process that the ex-mercenary endured in stony silence—Jax worked at his terminal. His fingers flew across the keyboard in a blur.
"Okay, bad news," Jax announced, spinning around in his chair. "This is military-grade AES-256 encryption. It's an airtight digital vault. The hardware would melt itself before a brute-force attack worked. I need a password, kid. Did your dad leave you a phrase? A sequence of numbers?"
Noah wheeled himself closer to the screen. "He said... he said the password was the answer to the question he asked me every night before I went to sleep."
Evelyn looked at Noah. "What was the question, sweetheart?"
Noah’s eyes filled with sudden, profound sadness. "He used to ask me, 'Who is the strongest man in the world?'"
"And what was the answer?" Elias asked quietly from the makeshift medical cot.
Noah looked at the glowing keyboard. "Me. Because I survived."
Jax turned to the keyboard. He typed the phrase, all lowercase, no spaces: becauseisurvived.
He hit enter.
A progress bar flashed on the screen. It hit 100%. The folder unlocked.
Jax let out a low whistle as thousands of PDFs, offshore bank records, and internal emails flooded the screen. "Jackpot," he whispered.
Evelyn stared at the monitor. It was all there. The blueprints for the defective armor. The wire transfers from known terrorist cells to Victoria's shell companies. But as Jax opened a file labeled Directive Zero, the room went dead silent.
It was an audio file. An intercepted phone call between Charles and Victoria, recorded just two days before Daniel’s plane crash.
Charles’s cold voice played through the speakers: “Daniel is going to the DOJ on Friday. He will ruin the company. He leaves us no choice, Victoria. Do what needs to be done. Ensure there are no survivors.”
Evelyn felt the blood drain from her face. Charles hadn't just looked the other way. The patriarch had personally ordered the assassination of his own son. And worse, he had ordered the death of his grandson.
Noah stared at the screen, tears silently spilling over his cheeks. Evelyn pulled him into a fierce embrace, burying his face in her shoulder so he wouldn't have to look at the monstrous truth anymore.
"Jax," Elias said, his voice deadly and cold. "Can you mask our IP and send this to every major news outlet, the FBI, the DOJ, and the SEC simultaneously?"
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"I can set up a dead-man's switch," Jax said, his fingers already flying. "It’ll broadcast to every server on the eastern seaboard in exactly twelve hours. Unstoppable."
"Do it," Evelyn ordered, her eyes burning with a mother’s vengeance. "Let's see how Victoria likes the fire."
