My Boss Fired Me in Front of Everyone - Nine Minutes Later, Someone Used My Name to Reroute $28 Million in Cargo

I didn't trust Julian. He had held a gun to my head twice in the last forty-eight hours.

But as I stood paralyzed by the door, a faint, sickly-sweet smell of burnt almonds began drifting from the HVAC vents above my kitchen island. Cyanide-based vapor.

I threw the deadbolts open and grabbed Julian by the collar, dragging him inside just long enough to grab my encrypted hard drive and a tactical go-bag.

“Hold your breath!” Julian yelled, tossing me a military-grade respirator mask.

We sprinted out into the hallway just as the fire sprinklers inside my penthouse triggered, reacting to the lethal chemical agent. We didn't take the elevator. We hit the emergency stairwell, taking the concrete steps three at a time.

“Who took my money?!” I shouted through the muffled mask.

“The Montreal Consortium,” Julian panted, checking his pistol as we hit the lobby. “Arthur Harrison and your father were just regional supply managers. The Consortium is the global board of directors. They fund the organ harvesting network. And you didn't just steal their petty cash, Emily. You wiped their primary genetic database.”

We burst out into the freezing Montreal night. Julian’s stolen Audi was idling at the curb.

“I destroyed the database to save those people!” I argued, strapping into the passenger seat.

“You didn't save anyone,” Julian said grimly, slamming the accelerator and tearing onto the highway. “Without that database, the Consortium can't match their billionaires with the specific genetic markers they need. So they activated a contingency protocol.”

“What contingency protocol?”

Julian tossed a classified Interpol dossier onto my lap.

“They are bypassing the matching system,” Julian said, his voice devoid of hope. “They are sending hit squads to kidnap every single person who was ever logged in your father’s initial screening files. Thousands of people, Emily. Including you.”

I opened the dossier. Attached to the first page was a surveillance photo taken ten minutes ago outside an FBI safehouse in Detroit.

It was a picture of a transport van exploding into flames.

“Your sister Chloe made a deal with the FBI to testify against your father,” Julian said softly. “But the FBI couldn't protect her. The Consortium hit the convoy. They took her, Emily. And they left a message behind.”

Julian pointed to the bottom of the photograph.

Painted in blood on the side of the burning FBI van was a single sentence:

BRING US THE CORTEX ALGORITHM, EMILY, OR WE HARVEST HER PIECE BY PIECE.

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