The footsteps were halfway down the stairs now. Slow. Deliberate. “Livia,” Viktor said, slamming the phone down. He looked around the tiny office. There was no other exit. No windows. “They cannot let me finish that call. If the board doesn’t get the verbal authorization code in the next five minutes, the freeze doesn’t happen.” “The code?” Livia asked. “It’s a secondary verification. I need to call the automated vault.” He reached for the phone again, but the light was suddenly blocked by a large shadow. The door to the office was kicked open. It was not Pendleton. It was the lawyer, and one of the granite-faced bodyguards who had been waiting outside earlier. The lawyer, whose name was actually Simon Vane, was not looking at Viktor. He was looking at the phone.
“Give it a rest, Viktor,” Vane said, his voice devoid of its earlier professional sheen. He pulled a small silver device from his pocket, a signal jammer, and flipped a switch. The dial tone on the desk phone turned into a high-pitched whine of static. “You’re done. The board is already sitting down.” “You’re trespassing,” Livia said, stepping in front of the desk. Her voice was thin, but she did not move. Vane looked at her with utter contempt. “And you’re out of your league, sweetheart. Move aside, or this gets physical. This is a billion-dollar merger. You’re just a girl who brings the wrong kind of water.” “She’s the only person in this building with an ounce of integrity,” Viktor growled, rising from the chair. He looked at the bodyguard. “You think you can stop me?” “We don’t have to stop you for long,” Vane smiled, checking his watch. “Six minutes. After that, the digital signatures go live, and you can tell your story to the bankruptcy courts.”
The bodyguard stepped forward, his hand reaching for the phone cord to rip it out of the wall. Livia saw the heavy glass paperweight on Preston’s desk, a souvenir of the London skyline. Without thinking, she grabbed it. “Stay back,” she yelled. The bodyguard laughed. It was a dry, hollow sound. He moved to shove her aside, but Livia did not aim for the bodyguard. She threw the paperweight with every ounce of strength she had, straight at the overhead sprinkler head. The impact was perfect. The red glass bulb in the sprinkler shattered. A split second of silence was followed by a roar of pressurized water. It was not a gentle mist. It was a torrential, oily flood of black, stagnant water that had been sitting in the pipes for years. The fire alarm began to wail, a piercing, rhythmic shriek that echoed off the concrete walls.
“What are you doing?” Vane screamed, shielding his face as the freezing water drenched his expensive suit. “The emergency protocol,” Livia shouted over the alarm. “In a fire alarm, the building’s external communications reset. The jammers won’t work against the hardline emergency override.” It was a gamble. She had remembered Preston complaining about the old fire system during a safety briefing, how it cut power to the unnecessary basement tech to prioritize the alarm. The bodyguard lunged for Viktor, but the floor was instantly slick with black water and old grease. He slipped, his massive frame slamming into the metal filing cabinet with a deafening clang.