Chapter 100 The Jammer
David’s POV
Leo’s frantic alert screamed through my earpiece, and I did not wait for him to finish his explanation. I moved immediately. I ignored the gasps of the socialites around me. I ignored the flashing cameras that were still trying to capture my father’s face. I turned away from the center of the ballroom and pushed through the heavy velvet curtains. I headed toward the venue's eastern communications panel. I had identified and memorized this location on my walk through the previous afternoon. I do not enter spaces without knowing where the infrastructure lives. My father taught me that. He taught me that power does not sit in the hands of the people in the room. It sits in the wires behind the walls.
The jammer was a portable unit. That fact alone made my blood run cold as I sprinted through the service halls. A portable unit meant someone had placed it in the building before the event even started. It meant Harrison's preparation was deeper than we had mapped. He had played us. He had allowed us to think we were the ones setting the stage. I checked my watch. I had approximately 4 minutes before the jammer's interference would fully propagate through the grid. If I did not reach it in time, the filing confirmation signal would be lost. Crane’s legal strike would vanish into the air.
"David, you are running out of time!" The growing interference distorted Leo’s voice. "The packet loss is already at forty percent. If it hits sixty, the handshake fails. You have to kill that signal now!"
"I am almost there, Leo," I grunted.
I reached the eastern panel room. It was a narrow service corridor hidden behind the ballroom's north wall. I skidded around the corner and stopped. The door was already open. It was cracked just an inch, allowing a sliver of fluorescent light to spill onto the dusty floor. My heart hammered against my ribs. An open door meant someone had been here recently. Or worse, it meant they were still here, waiting for me to arrive. I reached into my jacket and gripped the small flashlight I always carried. I did not have a weapon. I only had my hands and my knowledge of the building.
I pushed the door fully open. The hinges groaned, a sound that seemed loud enough to alert the entire building. I scanned the room with rapid, practiced movements. The space was cramped, filled with tangled wires and humming servers. I saw it almost immediately. The jammer was sitting on the utility shelf near the primary riser. It was a black device the size of a hardback book. It was active and running. A small green light pulsed on its side, a steady heartbeat of digital destruction.
"I found it," I said into my lapel. "I am looking at it now."
"Pull the power, David!" Leo shouted. "Don't try to hack it. Just rip the battery out!"
I stepped deeper into the room. I looked around for any sign of an ambush, but the corridor was empty. The silence here was a sharp contrast to the roar of the gala next door. I could still hear the muffled sound of a hundred voices, but they felt like they belonged to another world. I reached the shelf. The device felt warm to the touch. It was vibrating slightly, pumping out enough white noise to drown out the truth.
"Three minutes, David," Leo warned. "The signal is dying. Do it now!"
I reached out. My fingers brushed the cold plastic casing of the jammer. I thought about Brittany. I thought about the way her eyes had lit up when she thought we had finally won. I thought about the thirty years of lies that were about to be erased by a single legal document. I could feel the victory in my grasp. I gripped the device firmly. I prepared to yank the cables from the back.
"Wait," I muttered to myself.
I noticed a thin wire running from the base of the jammer into the wall. It was not a power cable. It was a trigger wire. My father was a man of contingencies. He never left a device unprotected. If I pulled this, what would happen? I looked at the green light. It was so steady. It was so calm.
"David, what are you waiting for?" Leo’s voice was almost gone now, buried under a layer of electronic static. "Pull the plug!"
"There is a secondary lead, Leo," I said. "I think it is a failsafe."
"We don't have time for a bomb squad, David! If that filing doesn't go through, we are finished. Harrison walks. Pull it!"
He was right. We had come too far to stop because of a wire. I took a deep breath. I braced my feet against the floor. I reached for the main power coupling on the back of the black box. I could imagine my father’s smile as he waited for the clock to run out. I refused to let him win this.
"Goodbye, Harrison," I whispered.
I lunged forward. I gripped the jammer and pulled it toward me with a violent jerk. The wires snapped. The humming in the room changed frequency, dropping into a low moan before going silent. I felt a surge of triumph. The green light on the face of the device flickered. I expected it to go dark. I expected the room to return to its natural state.
I looked down at the device in my hands. The light did not go out. Instead, the small bulb shifted. It turned from a calm green to a bright, angry red. It began to pulse rapidly. The sound in the room did not stop. It changed. A high-pitched whistle started to emit from the casing. It was a sound that pierced right through my skull. I realized with a sudden, sickening clarity that this was not what a device did when it was simply disconnected. It was what a device did when it had been triggered to switch to a secondary transmission mode. I had not deactivated it. I had activated something else.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. The sensation was so sudden that I almost dropped the black box. I pulled the phone out with a shaking hand. The screen lit up the dark room. I had received a message from an unknown number. There were only four words on the screen.
Check your wife's position.
The blood drained from my face. My heart stopped. I looked at the red light on the jammer. I understood then that the jammer was never the primary target. It was the lure. It was the thing meant to pull me away from the one person who mattered.
"Brittany," I gasped.
I didn't think. I didn't try to call Leo back. I didn't try to fix the signal. I dropped the jammer onto the hard floor. The plastic cracked, but the red light kept pulsing. I turned and ran. I sprinted out of the panel room and back into the service corridor. I pushed my body harder than I ever had before. My lungs burned. My vision blurred. I had to get back to the ballroom. I had to find her.
I crossed the room and pulled the jammer from the shelf and the light on it changed from green to red which was not what a device did when it was simply disconnected. It was what a device did when it had been triggered to switch to a secondary transmission mode. I had not deactivated it. I had activated something else. My phone immediately received a message from an unknown number: Check your wife's position. I dropped the jammer and ran.