Chapter 4 - The Counter-Strike
Victoria gasped, her hand flying to her throat as four hundred sheets of heavy legal stock separated with a clean, violent tear. I didn't stop there. I grabbed the torn halves, aligned the edges, and ripped them across the middle, tossing the quartered wreckage onto the center of the petrified oak table like a pile of autumn leaves.
"Your ten million is poison, Julian," I said, rising smoothly from my chair.
I didn't rush. I buttoned the single center button of my cheap suit jacket, picked up my briefcase, and slung the leather strap over my shoulder.
"And your three phone calls won't work anymore," I added, looking down at him from my full height. "Because the Great Lakes venture syndicate isn't the only game in town."
Julian didn't stand up. He sat frozen in his high-backed leather chair, his jaw set in a hard, dangerous line, his hazel eyes tracking my every movement. A slow, condescending smirk tried to fight its way back onto his face, though it was hollow at the edges.
"Is that right, Nathan?" Julian asked, his voice dripping with venomous amusement. "Who else is going to write an eight-figure seed check for an unproven neural network with zero clinical validations? Kleiner Perkins? Sequoia? They don't take meetings with founders who wear off-the-rack polyester and have dirt under their fingernails."
"They don't," I agreed, walking toward the heavy mahogany doors. I paused, resting my hand on the cold brass lever handle.
I turned back to look at them. Victoria was frantically typing on her phone, her manicured fingers trembling as she attempted to verify what had just happened.
"But Dr. Alistair Sterling does," I said.
The name dropped into the boardroom like an artillery shell.
Victoria’s phone slipped from her hands, hitting the polished wood with a dull, heavy clack.
Julian’s face didn't just lose color; it turned an ashen, sickly gray. His hands flew to the edge of the table, his posture jerking forward as if he had been physically struck.
"Sterling?" Julian’s voice cracked, the aristocratic polish completely incinerating. "Alistair Sterling is in Geneva. He hasn't touched early-stage medical tech in five years!"
"He landed at O'Hare forty-five minutes ago," I said calmly, glancing at my wrist where a twelve-dollar digital watch ticked past 11:14 AM. "His private Gulfstream touched down at the signature flight terminal. We have lunch scheduled at the Chicago Club at twelve-thirty."
In my previous life, Dr. Alistair Sterling had been the man who tried to warn me. He was the founder of Sterling Bio-Systems—the eighty-year-old titan who had built modern surgical robotics before Julian Cross forced him into an involuntary corporate retirement through the same Cayman shell company maneuvers. In that forgotten past, Sterling had reached out to me two months after I signed the Apex deal, offering to buy out Julian's predatory stake. By then, the trap was already sprung; Section 14 had locked me in, and I had dismissed the old man as a bitter former competitor.
Not this time.
Yesterday morning, before the loop pulled me back into this day, I had sent an encrypted email to Sterling's private academic server in Zurich. I didn't send a marketing deck. I sent the raw source code of the ARES-7 neural compression framework, along with a complete digital audit of Horizon Cayman Ltd.’s corporate registry filings from 2021—filings that contained the exact signatures Julian had used to rob Sterling of his patents.
"You're lying," Julian hissed, standing up so violently that his chair crashed back into the mahogany wall credenza, rattling the crystal scotch decanters. "Sterling wouldn't take a meeting with you! He doesn't know who the hell you are!"
"He knows I have the forensic server logs from the Minneapolis acquisition, Julian," I replied, my voice smooth, quiet, and lethal. "The ones you thought your IT contractors scrubbed from the offshore drives before the federal bankruptcy hearings."
Julian took two steps around the table, his fists clenched, his breathing ragged and uneven. For the first time, I saw the beast behind the billionaire—the cornered, vicious animal that would do anything to protect his empire of sand.
"You walk out of that door, Mercer," Julian whispered, his eyes wild with suppressed violence, "and I swear to God you will never work in this sector again. I will bury you under four dozen patent infringement lawsuits before your lunch with Sterling finishes appetizers. You'll spend the next ten years in federal depositions until you don't have enough money to buy bread."
I smiled. It was the first genuine smile that had crossed my face since the elevator doors opened at 10:00 AM.
May you like
"Sue me, Julian," I whispered back. "Discovery works both ways."
I pulled the brass handle down, pushed the heavy oak door open, and stepped out into the bright, marble-clad corridor, leaving the predator staring at the shredded remains of his own net.
