Chapter 2 Bomb #2
“You couldn’t possibly know that, Pat. Any kind of breach compromises the entire system and its data, no matter the circumstances. You should have known this.”
The old man sputtered some more, making nothing but noise as I continued to slowly close the distance between us.
“The only reason I can think of that would explain your lack of disclosure of something so critical is because you didn’t want to reveal your sheer incompetence.”
Horror drew all the color from his face. “No! I…I…that’s not—”
“The truth is, you’ve been slipping for a while, Pat.
Your commitment to this role has dwindled in the past year, and it now only seems to appear when damage control is required…
to cover up your own mistakes.” The man began to shake, his lower lip trembling as his breathing became more erratic.
“I’m always watching, Pat. Always,” I sneered, my blood rushing at the scent of fear in the air.
“But in this particular case, my decision is made.”
Pat stared back at me with wide glossy eyes, his shoulders hunched with so much tension it must be killing his back.
“W-what decision?” he stuttered, still frozen in his chair.
On a deep exhale, I approached his desk, careful not to spook him as I made my way behind his chair and placed my hands on his shoulders.
“You’re fired, Pat.”
Gripping the underside of his jaw and the back of his head, I snapped his neck to the side just hard enough for a severe vertebral artery dissection. The tear in the artery I made leading up the brain stem would cause serious cerebral hemorrhaging critical enough to trigger an acute fatal stroke.
Dropping Pat’s head, his upper body fell over his desk, his limbs twitching as his oxygen-deprived brain struggled to function properly. I left Pat to his fate and discreetly exited the house, grateful the sun had finally set.
Pulling out my phone, I dialed Scott.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Locate all the members of Digital’s cyber security team and round them up. I want to know what they know.”
“Got it,” he confirmed. “Marx is still sorting through the system to make sure they didn’t leave any shit behind.”
I nodded as I mounted my bike. “Good. Let me know when he finds something.”
I hung up the phone and placed it back in my jacket pocket.
Starting my bike, I secured my helmet, then headed toward the source of my latest frustration.
Thirty minutes later, I pulled up to a hilltop over the destroyed building, overseeing the smoke still filtering through the wind in the background.
Firefighters, paramedics, police, and news reporters still littered the scene, their bodies swarming like ants over a rotting carcass. Hopefully, my team of forensic ballistic experts had already confiscated what they needed, blending in with the rest of the ants down there without suspicion.
The state authority’s investigation into the explosion would take months, if not years, and was going to be a huge pain in my ass.
But I knew whatever method of explosives Jason and his little boy band used would be untraceable.
So the investigation would just be another thorn in my side to waste my time and delay my ability to act.
With all three buildings going up at the same time, there was no way they could call it a coincidence. No prospect of an accidental gas leak or electrical fire. There was no story I could spin that would point to any other plausible explanation besides an intentional plan of assault.
Hell, the media might even call it a terrorist attack, given the implications.
The buildings were all owned by a shell company belonging to Triguard, and the servers harbored more than just my own data. Dozens of other businesses utilized the same server infrastructures.
The similarities and connections between all three locations would make it difficult to pinpoint an exact target or motive. The only thing connecting them was now lost forever.
As I looked down at the destruction, it wasn’t lost upon me that lately the tides seemed to be turning in another direction. My losses were beginning to match the weight of my wins, and some were getting heavier by the day. But this one? This was the most detrimental.
While not all of Triguard’s data had been lost, far too much of it had been, and the company might actually never recover. My management team was already implementing our disaster recovery plan, but only so much could be done to minimize the damage.
Triguard’s stocks would ultimately plummet, which would then diminish the value of the company.
Hundreds of people would likely lose their jobs due to cutbacks.
Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars would be lost before the year was over.
Bankruptcy was easily on the horizon if we didn’t move fast to salvage what we could.
Jason may have missed the head of the snake to my empire, but he had certainly severed the lower jaw in one clean slice, reducing my bite force by half.
If I wasn’t so enraged, I might have actually been impressed with the blow.
No one had ever come so close to exacting my ruin in so short a time. Except for maybe my wife, who was still determined to dismantle my inner peace every chance she got.
I tried to pay Jaden’s surprise bombshell about my mother little attention, but I couldn’t deny it hadn’t left behind a crack in my exterior. Not deep enough to warrant any change in my desires or plans, but it was difficult to ignore a surface-level itch that tormented me relentlessly.
The war my mother had started helped shape me into the man I was today, her plans backfiring astronomically. But I couldn’t help but wonder if things would have been different if she had stayed the course of her fate.
Would I have felt differently if I had watched her deteriorate day by day from the cancer until her death?
Would the perspective of witnessing my own mother slowly die in front of me change my ability to sympathize?
Would it have made me a softer man? Or would my father had just worked ten times harder to beat it out of me anyway?
While I still had the ability to feel empathy, it was a rare occurrence since my instincts to override emotional connections were stronger.
I’d learned to disassociate and disconnect from human attachment long before my mother had left us.
It had been so strong at one point it almost became my entire personality until I got older and learned to balance it to my advantage.
Would my mother being alive have made any bit of a difference? Would my life be any different? Would I be any different? The more I thought about it, the more I knew the truth. No, it wouldn’t, because my father would have never allowed it. Just like I won’t allow it with Jaden.
My father did not permit my mother to influence our childhood in any way, and Jaden would be no different. She would not change the course of our child’s upbringing, no matter what she did, and if she wanted to even see her children, she’d be mindful of that.
She thought that letter would serve as some kind of threat, a dark omen of the future, but all it did was reinforce what I already knew and had long ago accepted.
I could never trust my wife.
Jaden might be far more cunning than my mother ever was, but Jaden had far less freedom to act on it.
My father didn’t limit his wife the way I do mine.
He didn’t need to. My mother knew her place and was happy to stay there.
He had no reason to suspect her of such treacherous capability, so of course, it was easy for her to move between the shadows unnoticed.
Jaden would not be so lucky.
The spotlight I consistently kept her under was eternally inescapable, and it would stay that way. She could continue fighting me until the end of time, and it wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.
I was never letting her go, no matter what she did, and for any hardships she managed to cause me, I would only blame myself.
Her behavior was my responsibility, and her actions were my responsibility. Jaden was a pain in the ass most of the time, but she was my pain to have and no one else’s. Ever.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket with Daniel on the other line. I wanted to ignore him since I was still pissed about him intentionally baiting Jaden earlier, but I knew he would just keep calling. I didn’t even get the chance to answer before he started screaming into the phone.
“What the fuck is going on?!” he nearly shrieked. “How the hell did this happen, Darren?”
I sighed into the phone. “Patrick failed to alert us about a security breach they had in the system a week ago. Somehow, they figured out which locations to hit.”
“Who the fuck is they?!” Daniel growled angrily.
I paused for a moment, contemplating whether to divulge the exact who, but in the end, I decided a united front was best.
“Jaden’s ex-boyfriend,” I bit out.
I was met with nothing but blissful silence for a few seconds before he finally spoke, his voice finally at a reasonable decibel.
“What the fuck do you mean, her ex-boyfriend?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” I replied. “Turns out, he’s been that secret thorn in my side I could never seem to find.”
More silence as Daniel started to put everything together. I could hear him scratching his jaw and pacing the room.
“How?” he asked, his voice still heavily coated in disbelief. “He was a fucking nobody. How the fuck is that possible?”
Good. Fucking. Question.
“Apparently, he’s been doing a lot more than just hiding from me. The fucker has been very busy,” I replied.
How he’d been able to do it, I had no idea. But I would find out.
“Hold on,” Daniel snapped, taking in a sharp breath. “So you’re telling me, the ex-boyfriend, who you’ve been hunting for years, who has evaded you the entire time, is the reason we’ve lost decades worth of blackmail that has kept us on top since the 1990s?”
For the second time today, I almost crushed my phone in my hand.