Chapter 4 - The Ambush at the Top
Director Richard Vance was a towering, imposing figure in his mid-fifties, with iron-gray hair, a permanent scowl, and a reputation for firing people before they even finished explaining themselves. He looked at Toby standing over my desk, trembling and red-faced, and then at me, sitting calm and collected in my chair.
"What in God's name is going on in here?" Richard barked, his voice booming across the glass office. "Toby called me ten minutes ago saying the Sector B vault was cleaned out and that Julian's badge was used for the override. Why is everyone screaming?"
Toby spun around, tears streaming down his face, playing the desperate, cornered victim to absolute perfection.
"Uncle Richard! Thank God!" Toby sobbed, pointing a shaking finger at me. "Julian has gone completely insane! Look at him! He stole the inventory, he hacked the server records to frame me, and now he's threatening me in his office! You have to fire him! You have to call the police!"
In my first life, this was the moment Director Vance would have nodded grimly, ordered security to slap the cuffs on me, and escorted me out of the building without letting me say a single word in my defense.
Today, I didn't flinch. I didn't raise my voice.
I picked up the matte-black tablet from my desk, stood up slowly, and walked around the wooden barrier.
"Director Vance," I said, my tone smooth, professional, and chillingly polite. "Toby is right about one thing: the Sector B vault was cleaned out last night. Fifty enterprise servers are missing."
Richard Vance’s scowl deepened into a thunderous glare. He looked at Toby, then back to me. "And the override logs? Security protocols show your master badge was used to pop the locks, Julian. I hope you have a damn good explanation for that, or you're walking out of here in handcuffs."
"My master badge was cloned, Director," I replied, holding out the tablet screen toward him. "Which is remarkably easy to do when someone has unsupervised access to the IT master keycard programmer for twenty minutes on Friday afternoon—access that Toby requested under the guise of updating employee badge permissions."
Richard paused, his eyes shifting from my face down to the tablet screen where the high-definition infrared video was paused on the crisp, undeniable profile of Toby Miller loading stolen server crates into an unmarked white delivery van.
The color drained from Director Vance’s face. He wasn't just a ruthless executive; he was a smart executive who understood hard digital evidence when it stared him in the face.
He stared at the screen for ten agonizing seconds, watching Toby’s face illuminated by the dashboard lights of the getaway van.
"Toby..." Richard whispered, the blood pressure throbbing in his neck visible beneath his collar. "What is this?"
Toby stumbled backward, hitting the glass wall of the office, his knees buckling. "It's fake! It's AI-generated deepfake technology! Julian is a genius programmer, he made it up to frame me! You can't believe him!"
"AI-generated infrared security footage with matching physical warehouse motion telemetry and dock-door magnetic sensor logs, Toby?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. "That's a pretty sophisticated deepfake for a guy who couldn't figure out how to format an Excel pivot table last Tuesday."
Richard Vance slowly turned his head away from the tablet. He looked at his nephew—the golden boy he had personally vouched for, the kid whose college debts he had been secretly paying off through corporate slush funds.
The betrayal hit the director like a physical blow. His face hardened from anger into cold, unmitigated fury.
"Security," Richard said, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper that made the two guards step forward instantly.
"Director, wait—!" Toby shrieked, scrambling across the floor.
"Escort Mr. Miller down to the security holding room," Richard commanded, not even looking at his nephew as the guards grabbed Toby by both arms, hoisting him off the floor. "Confiscate his personal phone, lock down his apartment access, and call the local police department. Tell them we have an internal theft suspect caught on camera sliding fifty thousand dollars' worth of enterprise stock into an unregistered van."
"No! Uncle Richard, please! Julian ruined me! He framed me!" Toby screamed hysterically as the guards dragged him kicking and screaming out of the glass office, down the mezzanine stairs, and out of sight.
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The office door clicked shut, leaving Director Vance and me standing alone in the quiet glass cube.
Richard stood there for a long moment, breathing heavily, staring down at the polished wooden floor as if the earth had just opened up beneath his feet.
