Chapter 7 - THE SPARK
Sparks showered onto the marble floor. The motorized wheels of the wheelchair locked with a violent lurch. The sudden smell of ozone and burning plastic filled the lobby.
“What is she doing?” Sterling barked, taking a step back.
Eleanor stared, horrified, as Olivia continued to pull at the wiring, her hands moving with desperate, calculated precision.
Olivia wasn't just destroying the chair’s mobility. She was tearing into the internal power supply that she knew fed the heavy-duty lithium battery.
“Dad!” Olivia yelled over the sound of crackling electricity. “The fire suppression system! The Halon tanks!”
Richard’s head snapped up. In a fraction of a second, the defeated old man vanished, replaced by the ruthless architect who had built this skyscraper. He understood exactly what she was doing.
Hartwell Tower’s server room was on this floor, right behind the boardroom. The fire suppression system wasn't water—it was Halon gas, designed to suffocate flames by instantly removing oxygen from the room. And the manual override was right next to the elevator.
“Stop him!” Eleanor screamed to the guards.
The men lunged, but Richard was already moving. He threw his sixty-five-year-old body across the marble floor, slamming his fist into the glass panel covering the red lever, shattering it. He yanked the lever down.
Sirens immediately began to scream. A robotic voice echoed through the PA system: “CRITICAL FIRE ALARM. HALON DEPLOYMENT IN THIRTY SECONDS. EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.”
“You crazy bitch!” Sterling yelled, turning on Olivia.
Olivia didn’t flinch. She grabbed the two thickest wires from her battery pack—the positive and negative leads. They were sparking furiously, hot enough to burn her fingers.
She held them up.
“You have twenty-five seconds before this floor seals and the oxygen is sucked out of the room, Thomas,” Olivia said, her voice eerily calm over the sirens. “Leave the laptop. Leave my father. Get in the elevator. Or I touch these wires together and we see how fast lithium explodes.”
Sterling’s eyes went wide. He looked at the sparking wires, then at the heavy steel fire doors that were already beginning to slide shut down the hallway.
“Ten seconds,” Olivia lied.
“Drop the laptop!” Sterling screamed at Eleanor. He abandoned his composure entirely, sprinting toward the VIP elevator and furiously mashing the button.
The armed guards didn't hesitate. They abandoned their posts and ran for the stairwell doors.
Eleanor stood frozen, gripping the laptop. She looked at Olivia, her niece, who was sitting in a smoking wheelchair, holding a makeshift bomb, looking like an avenging angel.
“You’d kill us both?” Eleanor whispered.
“I’d protect my mother’s name,” Olivia said coldly. “Drop it.”
“HALON DEPLOYMENT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS.”
Eleanor dropped the laptop on the marble floor and ran for the elevator, slipping in behind Sterling just as the doors closed.
The lobby was suddenly empty, save for the blaring sirens.
Richard scrambled over to Olivia. He fell to his knees, his hands trembling as he reached for the laptop. He looked up at her, tears streaming down his face.
“Liv… my god, Liv, what did you do?”
“I took back my life, Dad,” she said, her hands shaking so violently she dropped the wires. They sparked weakly on the floor.
“We have to go,” Richard said, grabbing the handles of her manual push-bars. He shoved the heavy, dead-weight chair toward the stairwell just as the massive fire doors began to seal the lobby.
They burst through the stairwell doors just as the heavy thud of the floor sealing echoed behind them. Through the small reinforced window, they saw a thick white fog of Halon gas instantly flood the lobby they had just vacated.
They were safe. But they were trapped on the 59th-floor landing.
Richard slumped against the concrete wall, clutching the laptop. He looked at Olivia. The silence in the stairwell was heavy, broken only by their ragged breathing.
“They’ll wait for us at the bottom,” Richard said quietly. “Sterling controls security. He won't let us out of the building with this data.”
Olivia leaned her head back against her chair. The adrenaline was fading, replaced by the agonizing burn of the fracturing titanium in her spine. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Then we don't go down,” a voice echoed from above.
Olivia’s eyes flew open.
Standing on the landing one flight up, silhouetted in the dim emergency lighting, was Simon.
And standing right beside him was Evan Cole, holding the silver steel briefcase.
“Simon,” Olivia breathed. “How did you—”
“I don't leave my VIP behind,” Simon grunted, walking down the steps. He looked battered; his lip was bleeding, and his knuckles were bruised. “I intercepted Mr. Cole after the SUV left. We took the service elevator up before they locked down the grid.”
Evan rushed down the stairs, his eyes scanning Olivia with desperate concern. “Are you hurt? Did they touch you?”
“I’m okay,” she lied, wincing as a spasm rocked her leg. “Where is Leo?”
“Safe,” Evan said. “With Marta, your night nurse. I called her.”
Evan looked at Richard. The two men stared at each other, years of animosity and secrets hanging between them.
“You have the data?” Evan asked.
Richard slowly stood up, holding out the laptop. “I have it. But we have no way to broadcast it. Sterling cut the internal network when the fire alarm tripped. We’re ghosts in a steel box.”
Evan looked down at the heavy steel briefcase in his hand. He placed it on the concrete floor and popped the latches. The silver, spinal-like neuromodulator gleamed in the dim light.
“Sterling thinks he cut the network,” Evan said, pulling a tangle of cables from the bottom of the case. “But this device is designed to interface with the human nervous system via satellite up-link. It has a military-grade transceiver built-in, completely independent of Hartwell Tower's servers.”
Olivia stared at him. “You can use your medical prototype as a router?”
“I can use it as a megaphone,” Evan corrected. He plugged a cable from the laptop into the silver device. “If we bypass the local encryption, we can broadcast your mother’s emails and Sterling’s metallurgical reports to every major news outlet, the SEC, and the FBI simultaneously.”
“Do it,” Richard said, his voice firm. He had finally chosen a side.
Evan typed furiously on the laptop. A progress bar appeared on the screen.
“It’s encrypting the packet,” Evan said. “Ninety seconds to broadcast.”
Suddenly, the heavy metal door to the 59th floor groaned.
Simon drew his weapon, aiming it at the door. “Company.”
The door burst open. Five of Sterling’s security men spilled onto the landing, weapons raised.
“Put it down, Cole!” the lead guard shouted. “Sterling said shoot to kill if you try to broadcast!”
Simon fired a warning shot into the ceiling, the deafening crack echoing in the stairwell. “Back off!”
“Sixty seconds!” Evan yelled, shielding the laptop with his body.
The guards raised their weapons, taking aim at Evan.
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Olivia didn't think. She didn't hesitate.
With a scream of sheer willpower and agonizing pain, she threw her upper body forward, knocking the steel briefcase and the laptop off the landing, sending them clattering down the concrete stairs, out of the line of fire.
