Chapter 6 - The Ghost in the System
Reaching the secluded mountain cabin just as dusk began to bleed into the horizon, David quickly bolted the heavy oak door and slid the iron security bar into place. He lowered baby Liam into a makeshift crib crafted from a padded laundry basket while gently examining Emily’s bleeding ankle. After disinfecting the wound and wrapping it tightly with gauze, David turned his attention to the cabin’s primitive radio rig and encrypted satellite terminal. He needed to find out who inside Apex Global Security had sold them out. Typing rapidly into the console, David bypassed three layers of military-grade firewalls, accessing the restricted director-level archives. What he found made his blood run cold. Sarah, his missing wife—whom everyone presumed had died in a plane crash two years ago—wasn't dead at all. Her biometric signature had logged into the Apex mainframe just forty-eight hours ago from an offshore research facility known as Project Janus. A secondary file popped up on the monitor: a live video feed of Sarah, bound to a chair in a sterile white room, staring blankly into a security camera lens. Below the video, a text prompt blinked monotonously: Deliver the children by midnight, or she dies.
