Chapter 93 Leo’s Finest Hour
Leo’s POV
Brittany's command hit my earpiece like a shot of pure adrenaline. My hands were already moving across the keys before she even finished her sentence. I felt the familiar hum of the processors beneath my fingertips. It was a vibration that usually calmed my nerves, but right now it felt like the steady ticking of a countdown to an explosion. I pulled up the venue's full camera grid on my primary laptop. On my secondary screen, the facial recognition feed I had armed since noon started scrolling through biometric data at a blinding speed. It was a river of faces, names, and data points, all of them useless until the one I wanted appeared.
"I hear you, Brittany," I muttered into my headset. "I am making it a masterpiece. He won't even be able to blink without it being captured in 4K resolution. I have the whole grid ready to flip on my mark."
I began rerouting every display screen in the ballroom. I was creating a single trigger point for the entire network. The moment Harrison's face cleared the main entrance threshold, I wanted every screen to flip simultaneously. I was not just showing his face to the crowd. I was building a visual story of a massive lie. I layered the display with a precision that would make a museum curator jealous. On the left side of the layout, I placed Harrison's current face, captured from the hallway cameras in high definition. In the center, I pulled his pre-death photographs from the Blackwell family archive. On the right, I splashed his official death certificate in bright, clinical white. It was clean. It was undeniable. It was very, very public. I wanted the contrast to be so sharp that it hurt to look at. I wanted the people in that room to feel the lie in their teeth when they saw the dead man standing right in front of them.
"Let's see you lie your way out of being a ghost, Harrison," I whispered to the empty corridor.
I tested the sequence once. The code held. I tested it a second time in the thirty seconds I had left before he reached the door. It worked perfectly again. This made me deeply suspicious. In my world, things that work perfectly twice in a row are usually just setting you up for a spectacular failure at the worst possible moment. I did not take chances with a man like Harrison Blackwell. I built a manual override backup on my phone. Then I built a secondary trigger on Rosa's sleeve camera frequency. I wanted three ways to kill his reputation. I wanted him boxed in from every digital angle. I checked the bandwidth. I checked the latency. Everything was green.
"Leo, status report?" David’s voice crackled in my ear. He sounded like he was holding his breath. His voice was tight with the pressure of the ballroom.
"I am ready, David," I said. My voice was steady despite the sweat stinging my eyes. "I am more than ready. I am, frankly, the most prepared person in any wall in Houston tonight. If he takes one step into that room, he belongs to the world. We are going to turn his grand entrance into a public arrest. Just give him ten more feet and it is over."
I watched the entrance feed and waited. The silence in the stone passage was heavy and thick with the smell of old dust. I could hear the distant, muffled sound of the orchestra through the air vents. They were playing some upbeat track that felt completely wrong for a looming execution. The thirty seconds felt like an entire hour. My finger hovered over the deployment key. My heart was a hammer against my ribs. It was thumping so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I watched the monitor as the silver haired man approached the threshold. He looked like he was walking into a coronation. He had no idea that I was about to tear the floor out from under him.
He reached the line. He crossed the sensor.
"Got you," I hissed. My eyes were wide and my pulse was skyrocketing.
My finger moved to the deployment key. I pressed down with everything I had. I expected the glorious glow of my graphics to fill the ballroom and end this war. Instead, every monitor in front of me went pitch black. My laptops did not just dim. They died. Every screen in the entire venue went dark at the exact same time. The hum of the servers in the room next to me dropped an octave and then stopped. The sudden silence was more terrifying than a scream.
"No, no, no!" I shouted. I slammed my hand against the desk. "Come on, you piece of trash! Work!"
This was not a simple power failure. This was not my doing. This was a complete external blackout of the digital grid. It was professional. It was total. It had the signature of a counter-hack I had never encountered before. It was like a digital curtain had been dropped over the world by a giant, invisible hand. I frantically tried to reboot my systems. My keyboard was unresponsive. The system was locked tight behind a wall of encrypted nonsense that was rewriting itself every second. I tried to force a hard reset. The hardware itself seemed to be frozen in place.
From somewhere in the venue below me, I heard it. It was faint, coming through the air ducts, but it was unmistakable. Someone was laughing. It was not a laugh of joy or victory. It is a dry, mocking sound that made the blood in my veins turn to slush. It was the sound of someone who had been watching me the entire time. Someone who knew exactly where I was hiding and what I was planning to do.
"Leo? What happened?" Brittany’s voice was panicked in my ear. "The room is dark. Every screen is off. The emergency lights aren't even coming on. Leo, talk to me right now!"
"I am locked out!" I yelled back. My fingers clawed at a backup tablet that was still trying to find a signal. "Someone just killed the entire grid. I am trying to trace the source, but the protocols are alien. They are eating my firewalls like they are made of paper. This isn't just a hack. This is a total takeover of the venue."
I bypassed the main server and went through the hardwired security hub. My hands were shaking so hard I almost dropped the tablet. I traced the blackout origin in forty seconds flat. I was looking for an outside signal or a satellite bounce. I was looking for a Blackwell move. I was looking for something from Harrison's hidden arsenal. But I did not find any of those things.
I went completely still in the passage. The darkness feels like it was closing in on me. It was swallowing the small glow of my tablet. The counter-hack did not come from outside the venue. It came from a device registered to the venue's own internal network. It had been active for the past six minutes. It was hiding in plain sight like a parasite. I stared at the MAC address on the small, glowing screen. I recognized the sequence. I remembered the file. I remembered the context of the last time I saw this signature in a high security clearance report I swiped from the federal database months ago.
It made no sense here tonight. It was impossible. That device belonged to a man who was supposed to be in a federal holding facility three states away. He was supposed to be behind bars awaiting a trial that would put him away for life. The screen flickered one last time. It showed a location tag for a room just three floors below me.
I traced the blackout origin in forty seconds flat and I went completely still in the passage because the counter-hack did not come from outside the venue. It came from a device registered to the venue's own internal network. It was active for the past six minutes. I stared at the MAC address. It matched a laptop I had seen before in a file and in a context that made no sense here tonight. It belonged to a man who was supposed to be in a federal holding facility three states away.