The sun had just begun its slow descent behind the steel-gray skyline of San Francisco when the gss doors to Elliot Voss’s office parted with a whisper.
Graham “Grim” Thorne—Voss’s head of security—stepped in, dressed in a bck suit that somehow made him look more dangerous than any combat gear ever could. His presence didn’t disturb the air so much as silence it.
Voss didn’t look up from his tablet.“Evening, Grim. What’s on your mind?”
Graham stopped three paces from the desk, hands at his sides.“We have a problem, sir. Chicago. AeonCell.”
That got Voss’s attention. He set the tablet down and gestured to the seat across from him, but Graham remained standing.
“Trevor Gant,” Graham continued. “Head of Regutory Affairs. He’s been pushing for clinical trials on their regenerative compound. Hard. For two years. Keeps getting stonewalled, of course. We have no intention of releasing it as a solution.”
Graham paused for moment, waiting for his boss to catch up.“Two nights ago, he accessed three separate secured files from both AeonCell and CleanGene, cross-referenced them, and printed physical copies. Maps. Trial data. Molecur profiles.”
Voss leaned back in his chair, the tension already creeping into his spine. “And how do we know this?”
“I have a source on the inside, as I do in all of our companies, sir. Clean. Trusted. She fgged the pattern—midnight logins, secure print requests, disposal logs missing pages. Enough to get my attention, so I dug deeper.”
He tapped a tablet of his own, swiped once, and turned it toward Voss.
“One of our passive sweeps caught something unusual. Trevor’s work terminal synced a message to his cloud account at 2:17 AM st night. Saved in his Drafts folder. It wasn’t sent — but it was enough.”
The screen showed the ominous message:
SUBJECT: You Have 48 Hours...
I know what you’re hiding.
The trials. The synthetic rebuilders. The recovery rates that shouldn’t be possible. Don’t bother pretending I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen the files.
You think you can keep this locked away while people die? My mother could have been saved, but you let her die, just like everyone else, when you know you have the solution.
So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to transfer twenty million to the crypto wallet address below within 48 hours. Untraceable. No questions. No contact.
Or I go public. I’ve already drafted the press releases, preloaded the documents, mapped the email chains. One click and this blows wide open – FDA, SEC, WHO, every journalist with a pulse.
Your move, you bastard. Your move.
Voss stared at it for a long moment, then sighed. “He thinks he has the whole picture. He’s not even close.”
Grim nodded once. “It’s true, he has no idea. Looks like he’s only pieced together like a third of what Rejuvenex does. No idea how it fits into a greater whole. No clue what it all leads to.”
Elliot Voss looked up at his head of security. “Have you checked into his mother?”
“Of course, sir. His mother had Alzheimer’s and passed away two months ago. She was seventy-two. He didn’t sign the email of course, given the anonymous crypto wallet, but saving it in the Drafts folder of his work email? Rookie move.”
Voss folded his hands. “And what’s your recommendation?”
“Brick’s already on a bird to Chicago. I’ll follow right away. We’ll lift him clean. No noise. No mess. He’ll wake up in Montana, safe, isoted, and very confused.”
Voss raised an eyebrow. “And after that?”
“We question him. Monitor him. He will be uncomfortable, but safe. Once integration begins, he’ll receive both doses like everyone else, and The System will sort out whether he’s worth saving, or if he will never leave the basement of the safe house in Montana.”
Voss: “No harm to him or any others?”
Grim shook his head. “None. Just containment. I know the rules.”
“All right, Grim. Go get him. And thank you.”
Grim turned without a word, already pulling out his encrypted phone as he disappeared silently down the hallway.
—
<
The skyline shimmered in the rain, city lights diffused through misted gss. Thirty-nine stories above the streets of Chicago, the penthouse apartment in the West Loop was silent—except for the soft hum of electronics and the low thump of a passing CTA train in the distance.
Inside a bck SUV parked down the block, Mason 'Brick' Briggs double-checked the tablet on his p. His tablet was connected to sensors all over Gant’s apartment 39 floors up from where they sat quietly in the dark. Thermal overys. Perimeter feeds. One confirmed occupant.
“Guy sleeps like a rock,” Brick muttered, chewing the st bite of an energy bar. “Hasn’t moved a muscle since midnight. Must be deep in his REM cycle now. Perfect time to grab him.”
Across from him in the passenger seat, Graham 'Grim' Thorne was tightening the suppressor on his sidearm—not because he pnned to use it—but because pns had a way of going sideways. Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. Words of wisdom from his old SEAL team commander, those.
“Let’s make sure it stays that way,” Grim replied, his voice like gravel dragged through silk.
Brick grinned as he got his own gear ready. “You ever miss it? Running night ops in Kandahar, sweating bullets while we wait for some HVT to take a piss before we breach?”
Grim smirked. “I don’t miss the sand. And I don’t miss the special kind of sweaty balls you get in the fucking desert, either.”
They both chucked in agreement with that sentiment.Few more minutes, and it was time to go.
They moved together—no wasted steps, no more words—into the building’s service stairwell. No arms. No cameras. Brick had hacked in and looped the lobby feeds ten minutes ago. He carried a small bck case slung over his back, marked simply with a small green triangle—gear for extraction, not elimination.
At floor 39, Grim slid a handheld scanner across the keypad. The door blinked green. Inside, the penthouse was full of brushed steel and midnight marble. A pale pendant of lights shone over the isnd in the gourmet-appointed kitchen. Silence and moonlight reigned throughout the rest of the pce.
Brick took the left sweep, clearing the kitchen and office, grabbing any devices and folders he could find. Grim moved right, past a wall of minimalist bookshelves to the primary bedroom suite.
Trevor Gant was asleep, face sck, one arm flopped over the edge of the king-sized mattress. As Grim stepped into the bedroom, Trevor stirred once—just a breath. Grim paused mid-step, his hand on the tranq gun on his left side, rather than the lethal sidearm on his right. He stood stock still, watching, his pulse ft. After a few seconds, Gant’s sleep rhythm resumed, and Grim continued forward.
A stack of printed documents rested on the nightstand—Rejuvenex trial summaries, dosage protocols, risk assessments. Red CONFIDENTIAL tags lined the top of every page—all documents forbidden to be removed from the office. His mobile phone was there on top of the pile.
Grim stood over Gant for a full beat as Brick arrived from the hallway to the other side of the bed. Grim nodded once.
Brick moved in behind Gant, the green triangle case already open. He removed two hypo-syringes and a pre-loaded IV sedation line. Within thirty seconds, Trevor Gant was unconscious—safely, deeply, and cleanly.
Brick looked down at Trevor Gant’s unconscious form, his jaw tightening. He’d buried dozens of people in Afghanistan for far less than this kind of betrayal.
Grim opened Trevor’s phone using his fingerprint and checked the outgoing emails one st time. The troubling message was still in the Drafts folder, and there were no outgoing calls after 4pm. He deleted the message and any trace of it, tucked the papers into a slim bck folder and wiped down the nightstand with a solvent cloth. No fingerprints. No fibers. No trace left behind.
Brick let out a low whistle. “Guy had no idea how close he was to starting a world war.”
Grim’s voice was quiet. “Yeah, no shit. That’s why we got here first.”
They wrapped Trevor in a travel bnket, secured him on a foldaway gurney they had in their bag, and vanished down the service corridor before the building’s night guard had even completed his next rotation.