Chapter 6 - THE SAFE HOUSE
The car didn't take me back to my cramped studio apartment in Queens.
Instead, it pulled into the underground garage of a high-rise glass tower in Tribeca. Private elevators, biometric scanners, absolute silence. When the doors slid open on the forty-second floor, I stepped into a vast, minimalist penthouse overlooking the glittering expanse of Manhattan.
"Make yourself comfortable," Elias said, tossing his suit jacket onto an Italian leather sofa. He loosened his silk tie with one hand. "You're not going back to your apartment tonight."
"Excuse me?" I bristled, my survival instincts instantly firing. "Look, Mr. Voss, I appreciate you exposing Lila, but you don't get to kidnap me. I have a life. I have a shift at the coffee shop at six tomorrow morning."
"You don't work at the coffee shop anymore," Elias said calmly, walking over to a marble kitchen island and pouring two glasses of scotch. He slid one toward me. "And you can't go back to your apartment because two men in a dark sedan have been parked across the street from your building since noon today."
I froze halfway across the room. "What?"
"Lila is an idiot, Maya. She’s vain, greedy, and wildly incompetent," Elias said, taking a sip of his drink. "She thought she was stealing a clever piece of code to get a promotion and an eighty-thousand-dollar bonus. What she didn't realize is that Voss Fintech isn't the only entity monitoring that specific cryptographic hash."
He walked over to a massive floor-to-ceiling glass window, looking out over the Hudson River.
"When she uploaded that code to our internal staging server, it pinged an automated surveillance protocol owned by Meridian Global."
The name hit me like a physical blow.
*Meridian Global.*
The private equity firm that had funded Dr. Bennett’s university lab. The firm that had aggressively tried to buy out his research weeks before his death. The firm whose representatives had shown up at Bennett’s funeral, offering to "support" his graduate students in exchange for access to his private server backups.
I had refused to sign their non-disclosure agreement. Three weeks later, my scholarship was revoked for "administrative discrepancies," my apartment was burgled and ransacked, and I was forced to drop out.
"They found the repository?" I whispered, my throat parched.
"They flagged it," Elias replied. "And Lila, in her infinite brilliance, tried to monetize it outside of Voss Fintech. That four hundred thousand dollars I mentioned at the wedding? It wasn't embezzled from my accounts."
I stared at him, confused. "You told the entire room she stole it from Voss."
"I told the room what was necessary to shut her down and pull you out of there cleanly," Elias said, turning back to face me. "That four hundred thousand dollars came from a wire transfer originating from a Meridian shell company. Lila sold them an access key. She thought she was doing a little insider trading on the side."
"An access key to what?"
May you like
"To the encrypted drive Andrew gave you the night he died," Elias said, his voice dropping into a deadly whisper. "The drive she stole from your apartment last month."
***
