CHAPTER 22: Dawn Plan in Room 305Colter Burke stared at the screen of Duncan Briggs’s portable satellite briefcase on the vanity table of Room 305 with an increasing sense of dread. The digital graphic lines on the monitor flashed a deep, piercing red, displaying a simulated coordinate radius of a blast zone that was slowly closing in on their apartment building’s exact location. The tracking signal broadcasted from the silver flash drive still chained to Tamsin Cole’s right wrist had accidentally opened a remote scanning pathway for the faction’s heavy artillery units outside.On the bed, Tamsin Cole lay with shallow, ragged breaths, while Ines Mercer deftly pressed down on the torn wound on her left abdomen using rolls of sterile gauze to stem a bleeding that hadn't completely stopped. The sharp scent of antiseptic mingled with the smell of concrete dust from the hallway, creating a suffocating atmosphere inside the newly unsealed room."Linus, how much time do we have before they

CHAPTER 24: The Living Ledger Linus Floyd froze his fingers over his keyboard the moment the name surfaced at the top of Duncan Briggs’s satellite briefcase screen. The young hacker’s face went completely pale, even more so than when his room had been compromised by The Ghost’s white theater mask hours ago. "This... this is impossible, Colt," Linus whispered, his eyes widening as he read the lines of encrypted text slowly translated by the automated system. "This name... he is the one who approved our apartment’s entire protective asylum funding budget for the past five years." Colter didn't answer. He enlarged the digital file using his finger on the touchscreen interface. The name printed there was Mr. Arthur Pendleton, the tenant of Room 303 who was originally scheduled to occupy the room before Harlan Montgomery arrived by faking his own death. According to Tamsin Cole’s intelligence led

CHAPTER 26: Confrontation at the Furnace BedArthur Pendleton did not shift an inch from his folding iron chair. The fingers of his left hand, adorned with an antique gold signet ring, rested calmly on the edge of his laptop, while his right hand slowly slid open the portable workbench drawer to retrieve a slender cigar. Beneath the glow of the monitor reflecting green data transmission graphs, his hollow face looked like a wax mask devoid of all emotion."You look at me as if you are seeing a ghost, Colter," Pendleton said in his raspy baritone, then lit a silver lighter with a small click that cut through the basement's silence. "In truth, your grandfather knew exactly that I have been down here for the past three hundred and sixty-five days. The Henderson law firm merely acted as a courier delivering my logistical needs through Duncan Briggs."Colter Burke stepped forward two paces, positioning himself in the middle of the narrow room with his right hand rema

CHAPTER 28: Counter-Strike from Floor FourThe portable satellite briefcase taken from Duncan Briggs hummed constantly as it received the diverted cyber feed from Linus Floyd’s laptop. Inside the ruined space of Room 302, Colter Burke stood guard over the bench with Ines Mercer, while Linus deployed a sequence of secondary decryption commands across his keyboard with incredible speed.The briefcase screen that originally displayed the list of corrupted officials shifted into a localized digital topography map of the metropolitan area. A blue signal line shot outward from their apartment suaka’s coordinates, looping back through the local relay towers, and locked dead onto a square red boundary zone within the old harbor warehouse sector on the western edge of the city."Coordinates locked, Colt!" Linus called out, his breaths heavy but his fingers never ceasing their cyber executions. "Warehouse number 12 in the northern harbor sector. The Ghost’s video call feed originates from insid

CHAPTER 30: The Emergency Locked Gate Colter Burke shoved Linus Floyd ahead of him through the small iron gate in the corner of the western corridor that led into Floor 4’s vertical ventilation pipe line. The tactical backpack housing Linus’s portable laptops shifted violently on his shoulders as the young hacker climbed the iron rungs in a frantic rush, driven by the terror of incoming mortar strikes. Behind Linus, Ines Mercer followed, once again supporting Tamsin Cole’s limp form, which was growing visibly weaker as secondary internal bleeding began to attack her vital organs. Colter stood at the rear before the steel opening of the shaft, his eyes scanning the central third-floor hall where Harlan Montgomery’s body lay still upon the cooling red pool. From the ground floor lobby below, the heavy thuds of the faction's first mortar rounds began to vibrate violently through the third-floor concr