Chapter 7 Wyatt #2
He stood there for a long moment, his jaw tightening as he looked up the sheer, broken face of the skyscraper.
Forty-two floors of dark, unheated concrete.
No electricity. No security patrols. It was the perfect place for a professional drop-point or a highly sophisticated corporate listening post. He coveted the security of his system too much to allow a single tear in the fabric.
He imagined a team of foreign operators, heavily funded, sitting in the dark with military-grade tactical routing rigs, pulling down Enigma’s core architecture to sell to the highest bidder in Europe or Asia.
"Enjoy the line while you can," Wyatt murmured into the cold air, his breath curling white against the gray brick. "You have twenty-four hours left."
Friday afternoon rolled in with a heavy, slow weight as the deadline crept closer.
Vic arrived at the executive suite around noon, carrying a stack of catering trays he’d just taken from a delivery courier, alongside a folder of internal corporate mail.
He unceremoniously set the food down on the conference table, cracked open the lids, and took his usual seat next to Lennon.
Wyatt leaned back in his seat, his arms crossing over his chest as Zane and Silas reached for the trays.
His mind was completely detached from the casual layout of the room.
His focus was entirely locked on the clock on the wall, tracking the minutes until the club's main floor downstairs would start filling up, drawing everyone away from the core network grids.
By eight o'clock, the lower floors of Enigma were fully alive.
The heavy, subterranean thrum of the bass vibrated faintly through the floorboards of the executive suite, a familiar cue that the weekend rush was hitting the main floor downstairs.
On any other Friday night, Wyatt might have headed down to grab a drink and look over the floor, but tonight he had a ghost to catch.
He waited out the hour upstairs, giving the intruder time to move, before finally heading down to the secure parking lot just after nine o'clock. He slid into his SUV and left the club behind, navigating the dark city streets for the brief, ten-minute drive toward the industrial sector.
By the time he pulled into the area, it was nearly nine-fifteen.
He purposefully didn't park close to the 4th and Main building, instead rolling into the deep, unlit shadow of a collapsed warehouse across the street before killing the engine and the headlights. He knew from tracking the intruder’s routine over the past three weeks that the line was always active by this time on a Friday night, meaning whoever it was had already slipped inside the dark high-rise well before he arrived.
Wyatt sat motionless against the leather seat for a few quiet moments, letting his eyes adjust to the absolute pitch-black of the industrial strip. He pulled up his secondary screen, waiting for the system to process the live connection.
At exactly nine-forty-two, a tiny, green light pulsed on the monitor.
The containment routine had successfully deployed, completely isolating the node.
Connection initiated. Node 4th & Main locked.
Wyatt didn't look at the data streams. He didn't care about the encryption styles anymore.
He swiped the interface shut, killing the dashboard screens until the SUV was completely dark.
He reached into the glove compartment, pulling out a heavy, tactical flashlight, and slipped out of the vehicle, closing the door without a sound.
The damp air hit his face like a slap, but his pulse didn't even quicken.
It was a cold, absolute precision that carried him across the cracked asphalt of the empty street.
He bypassed the main entrance, moving straight for the rear dumpsters.
He reached the loose plywood panel, his large hand gripping the edge of the wood and pulling it back just enough to slide his massive frame through the gap.
Inside, the silence of the building was heavy, thick with the scent of damp concrete, old dust, and dead winter air.
He didn't turn the flashlight on. He didn't need to.
His eyes adjusted to the deep gloom, tracking the concrete hallway until he reached the heavy fire doors of the central stairwell.
He began the climb.
Ten floors. Twenty floors. Thirty floors.
He moved with a slow, rhythmic silence, his heavy boots making no sound against the solid concrete steps.
His breathing remained perfectly deep, perfectly controlled.
The physical strain of the forty-two-story climb was nothing compared to the heavy iron sets he pushed through every morning in his gym.
With every flight of stairs he conquered, the dark anticipation in his chest grew heavier, sharper.
He was going to find them. He was going to take their hardware, dismantle their operation, and make sure whoever had dared to touch his work understood exactly what kind of monster they had awoken.
When he reached the forty-second floor, he paused, his hand resting lightly on the cold iron handle of the fire door. He pushed it open a fraction of an inch.
The top floor was a vast, unfinished cavern of exposed steel girders, raw concrete pillars, and massive open spaces where the perimeter walls hadn't been completed. The cold wind howled through the open framework, carrying the distant, muted sounds of the city below.
And there, deep in the shadows behind a massive drywall column near the center of the floor, was a soft, glowing pool of blue light.
Wyatt let the fire door click shut behind him, his boots finally landing on the grit-covered floor as he walked out into the open space.
He didn't hide his approach. He wanted them to hear him.
He wanted to see the panic in their eyes when they realized their digital escape routes were completely frozen.
As his heavy footsteps crunched against the loose gravel and construction dust, the blue light suddenly flinched.
Wyatt stepped around the concrete pillar, his massive hand reaching out to grab whoever was sitting there by the collar of their tactical gear—
He stopped dead in his tracks.
The tactical flashlight remained unlit in his hand. The aggressive, lethal focus that had carried him up forty-two flights of stairs vanished in a single, breathless second, replaced by a sheer, unadulterated bafflement that made his brain stall out entirely.
It wasn't a team of foreign operators. It wasn't a corporate spy in a tailored suit.
Sitting on a cracked plastic milk crate, tucked into the freezing, concrete dust, was a girl.
She looked impossibly small, completely swallowed by an oversized, bright pastel pink hoodie with a faded cartoon kitten on the front, the fabric soft and worn from being washed a thousand times.
A pair of gray sweatpants with tiny white stars scattered down the legs clung to her thin frame, and her feet were tucked back into a pair of cheap, scuffed sneakers.
Her hair was a wild, flyaway cloud of soft brown strands, completely unruly, framing a face that was pale from the cold and struck with a sudden, absolute terror.
In her lap, she was clutching a battered, bulky old laptop—the source of the blue light that illuminated her wide, panicked eyes.
The thick casing was scuffed, its modified cooling fan whirring loudly in the quiet space, looking like an outdated piece of salvaged tech that barely held together.
And bolted to the concrete pillar next to her was a patchwork rig that looked like it had been dragged out of a junkyard, held together by electrical tape and hand-soldered copper wiring.
Wyatt stared down at her, his massive frame towering over her like a dark monument in the winter wind.
He couldn't move. He couldn't even speak. His mind, usually a flawless machine capable of parsing millions of lines of data in seconds, was completely blank, struggling to connect the brilliant, painfully elegant encryption scripts he’d been studying for three weeks with the tiny, shivering creature cowering on a milk crate in front of him.
She didn't run. She couldn't. She just looked up at him, her breath pluming white and shaky in the space between them, her chest heaving with a quiet, terrified gasp as she pulled the laptop tighter against her ribs like a shield.
"You," Wyatt whispered, his deep, gravelly voice cutting through the howl of the wind, his eyes dropping to the brilliant, glowing interface of his own network running perfectly across her broken screen. "Who the hell are you?"