Chapter 7 - THE FLIGHT LOGSThe muffled shot echoed down the carpeted corridor.
The round struck the assassin’s shoulder, spinning him around before he could raise his weapon. He hit the heavy wallpapered wall, leaving a streak of dark blood as he slid to the floor, dropping his weapon.
I advanced down the hall quickly, kicking his gun away before turning to the door of Room 1402.
I knocked hard three times—the code we had established two days ago.
"Dr. Vance! It's Caroline! Open the door!"
A heavy deadbolt slid back, and the door cracked open three inches, held by a brass chain. A pale face with thick glasses appeared in the gap.
"Captain Harrington?" Dr. Vance’s voice trembled. "I heard a noise outside..."
"They found you," I said, pushing the door open as he unhooked the chain. "We have to leave now. The hotel isn't safe."
Dr. Vance, a sixty-year-old former chief systems engineer for Harrington Maritime, was clutching a leather briefcase to his chest like a shield.
"Did you get it?" he asked, his eyes darting to the bleeding man lying in the hallway. "The encrypted drive from your father's vault?"
I reached beneath the cashmere shawl and pulled out the small silver drive. "Right here. But Evan wiped the main servers at the club. This drive is the only remaining copy."
"Then we're dead," Dr. Vance whispered, stepping back into the room. "Without the secondary authorization keys from the main server, this drive cannot be decrypted. It's locked behind a triple-layer military cipher."
My stomach dropped. "What do you mean locked? You told me you had the decryption key!"
"I had half the key!" Vance panicked, running his hands through his thinning grey hair. "The other half was stored on your father's personal network terminal—the one he keeps in his private study at the Harrington Estate!"
I stood in the center of the hotel room as the pieces finally clicked together.
Dad hadn't just built a fail-safe into the physical hardware; he had built a fail-safe into the legal evidence itself. He had split the digital audit trail into two halves. The silver drive in my hand contained the damage logs from the ship, but without the private encryption key sitting on his home server, no court in the country could prove the files were genuine.
They would be dismissed as unverified, tampered data.
"He knew," I muttered, the realization sinking in. "Dad knew I had the silver drive all along. That's why he was so confident at the party. He was waiting for me to reveal myself so he could destroy the second half of the key."
Outside the hotel window, distant police sirens were multiplying, their red and blue lights flashing against the glass.
"What do we do?" Vance asked, his hands shaking so violently he nearly dropped his briefcase. "If your father wipes that home server, we have nothing. We can't prove anything!"
I looked down at the gun in my hand, then at the silver drive.
"We go to the estate," I said.
"Are you insane?!" Vance gasped. "The Harrington Estate is locked down like a fortress! Your father’s security team will kill us before we cross the gate!"
"They won't be expecting me to go back there," I said, my voice tightening with resolve. "They think I'm running for the federal courthouse."
I turned toward the door. "Grab your coat, Doctor. We're going home."
As we stepped into the hallway, the elevator bell at the end of the corridor chimed.
The doors slid open, revealing three armed men wearing black tactical vests bearing the embroidered emblem of Harrington Maritime Systems.
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They didn't hesitate. They raised their weapons.
And the hallway erupted into fire.
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