Chapter 4 - The Knock on the Door
The silence inside Maya’s apartment became absolute, broken only by the frantic pounding of her own pulse in her ears.
WE SEE YOUR LIGHT IS ON, MS. CHEN. OPEN THE DOOR.
She backed away from the counter, her eyes darting toward the front hallway. The heavy oak door of her brownstone unit separated her from the stairwell—a stairwell that led directly down to the icy street where the black Lincoln Navigator was still idling.
She didn't turn on any more lights. She moved in the dim, amber glow of the single desk lamp in the living room, her movements swift and silent.
First, she reached into her backpack and pulled out a secondary, encrypted burner drive—a secure cold-storage unit she used for off-site code backups. She plugged it into the ThinkPad, unlocked the encrypted container, and copied the entire /media/iso/secure directory onto the backup drive.
Then she unplugged both drives. She slipped the original SanDisk flash drive into the change pocket of her jeans and tucked the backup drive deep inside her bra against her ribs.
If they break in, she thought, her jaw set with cold resolve, they aren't getting the data.
A heavy, authoritative knock echoed through the hallway.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
It wasn't a frantic pounding. It was the calm, measured knock of someone who knew the door would eventually open, whether by invitation or force.
“Ms. Chen?” a muffled voice called through the wood. It was smooth, controlled, carrying a slight mid-Atlantic cadence that Maya recognized instantly.
Richard Vale.
He hadn't sent a goon. He hadn't sent a low-level security thug. The Chief Operating Officer of Cole Meridian Group had come himself, wading through a Chicago blizzard at one in the morning, to retrieve a four-billion-dollar secret from a junior analyst’s apartment.
“Ms. Chen, I know you’re awake,” Richard said, his voice carrying clearly through the hollow-core door. “Your kitchen light is quite distinct from the street. Please, let’s not make this unpleasant. We both know you have something that belongs to the executive suite.”
Maya crept down the hallway, keeping her footsteps light against the hardwood floor. She stopped inches from the door, staring at the brass peephole.
She leaned down and peered through the glass lens.
The fisheye view distorted the hallway, but there was no mistaking the figure standing under the flickering overhead bulb. Richard Vale stood alone, coatless, wearing his immaculate charcoal suit and tie, his hands neatly folded in front of him. But just behind him, standing half-obscured in the shadows of the stairwell landing, were two men in heavy winter coats, their hands shoved deep into their pockets with the unmistakable bulk of concealed shoulder holsters beneath their wool.
“Open the door, Maya,” Richard said, his tone shifting from polite corporate diplomacy to something cold and chillingly intimate. “You’re a bright girl. You understand how supply and demand work. What you have in your possession is a liability that carries an expiration date. Your life is that expiration date.”
Maya’s hand hovered over the brass security chain.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Vale,” she called out, her voice remarkably steady.
Richard let out a soft, dry chuckle.
“Adrian Cole is currently sedated in the ICU at Northwestern Memorial Hospital,” Richard said smoothly. “His prognosis is guarded. Should his heart fail a second time—which, given his fragile state, is statistically probable—control of the board reverts permanently to the Chief Operating Officer under the emergency corporate succession clause. In approximately six hours, I assume full control of Cole Meridian Group.”
He took a step closer to the door, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
“You are standing between a multi-national conglomerate and its legitimate governance, Ms. Chen. Hand over the flash drive, sign a standard non-disclosure agreement with a severance package that will buy you a very comfortable house in the Pacific Northwest, and this evening becomes nothing more than a bad dream.”
“And if I don’t?” Maya asked.
The silence in the hallway stretched for two long seconds.
“Then we retrieve the property,” Richard said simply. “And the coroner has a very easy time explaining why a junior data analyst slipped on the ice during a blizzard and froze to death in an alley behind her apartment.”
Maya didn't answer.
She turned around silently, her eyes scanning the layout of her apartment. The front door was solid wood, but the frame was old nineteenth-century pine; a well-placed shoulder charge from the two men in the stairwell would splinter the deadbolt within seconds.
Her bedroom window at the back of the apartment opened onto an iron fire escape that zigzagged down into the alleyway behind Erie Street. It was snowing sideways, and the metal steps would be coated in three inches of sheer ice, but it was the only way out.
She grabbed her heavy winter parka off the coat hook, shoved her arms into the sleeves, pulled her woolen beanie down over her ears, and crept back toward the bedroom.
As she reached the bedroom threshold, the sound of splintering wood echoed from the front hallway.
Crack.
The brass security chain sheared through the pine frame with a loud, metallic pop.
Maya didn't hesitate. She threw open her bedroom window, letting a blast of freezing arctic air and swirling snow rush into the warm room, and climbed out onto the icy metal grating of the fire escape.
Behind her, heavy footsteps thundered onto the hardwood floors of her apartment.
May you like
“She’s in the back!” a gruff voice shouted.
Maya grabbed the rusted iron railing of the fire escape, her boots slipping on the frozen metal, and began to run down into the dark, howling maw of the Chicago blizzard.
