Chapter 4 - The Corporate Retaliation
By Thursday afternoon, the Newport Coast mansion had become an operational command post. The elegant furniture in the living room had been pushed aside to make room for four high-speed server towers brought in by Ethan’s private forensic security team. The house smelled of stale espresso and the ozone heat of hard drives running at maximum capacity.
Vanessa had been arrested on Tuesday evening, but her high-priced legal team had managed to secure a temporary bail release within twenty-four hours under a medical emergency loophole. Meanwhile, Derek Ward had gone completely underground, using his remaining corporate authority to lock Ethan out of the main office building in downtown Los Angeles.
Ethan sat at his conference table, his eyes bloodshot, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. “Where are we on the proxy verification?”
Mara Chen, the external corporate counsel Ethan had retained to manage the crisis, rubbed her temples. “It’s bad, Ethan. Derek filed an emergency motion with the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning. He’s claiming that you are mentally unstable, citing Vanessa’s 'written testimony' about your erratic behavior at home. He’s using that to trigger the key-man disability clause in the company charter.”
“If the SEC grants a temporary freeze, the board won't be allowed to vote on Monday,” Ethan said, his voice tight. “Lattice will default to a neutral corporate trust, which means Derek can buy out the underlying patents for pennies on the dollar through his European shell companies.”
In the corner of the room, sitting quietly at the breakfast nook, was Lily Parker. Her mother, Nora, was nearby, meticulously polishing the silver espresso machine, her eyes constantly shifting to her daughter with a protective, anxious watchfulness. Nora had tried to leave the house on Wednesday morning, feeling that she and Lily were too deeply entangled in Ethan’s dangerous world, but Ethan had refused to let them go.
“You’re safe here, Nora,” he had told her, his voice softer than she had ever heard it. “And right now, Lily is the only witness who can place Vanessa inside this office on the day the hardware was installed.”
Lily looked up from her library book, her serious gray eyes locking onto the massive digital monitor on the wall that showed a map of the company's server nodes.
“Mr. Ethan?” she called out softly.
The tech team didn't look up, but Ethan turned his head instantly. “Yes, Lily?”
“The man with the chocolate,” she said, her small voice cutting through the clicking of keyboards. “Mr. Derek. He came here three times last month when you were on the television news in New York.”
“I know, Lily. He said he was checking on the house security.”
“He didn't check the security,” Lily said, standing up from her stool and walking slowly over to the big screen. She pointed to a specific server location labeled Node 04 - Laguna Hub. “He brought a big black box into the basement garage. He told my mom it was new air filters for the wine cellar, but it had a wire that went into the blue box by the water heater.”
The room went completely silent. The lead forensic engineer, a brilliant developer named Marcus, stopped typing, his fingers hanging in the air.
“The blue box by the water heater is the dedicated fiber drop for the local neighborhood node,” Marcus whispered, his eyes widening as he looked at Ethan. “If Derek tapped the physical fiber line directly before it enters the house’s encrypted router... he’s not just listening to your office, Ethan. He’s running a local man-in-the-middle attack. He’s been mirroring every single keystroke from your local network since last month.”
Ethan stood up, a surge of adrenaline washing away his exhaustion. “Marcus, can we isolate the tap?”
“If we pull the physical tap now, it will trigger a line-disconnect alarm on Derek’s side, and he’ll erase the external server logs before we can secure them as evidence,” Marcus explained, his face grim. “We need to feed him a fake architecture sequence. Something that looks like the real Lattice code but contains a hard-coded digital tracer that will track his storage servers back to their physical location.”
Ethan looked at the little girl standing by the monitor. She was looking at the glowing lines of code as if they were just another puzzle, a wooden maze like the one he had brought her from Boston.
“Nora,” Ethan said, turning to the quiet woman who was staring at him with wide, anxious eyes. “Your daughter has a better technical eye than my entire multi-million-dollar cybersecurity division.”
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Nora straightened her shoulders, a faint, proud smile breaking through her worry. “She just looks at what people do, Mr. Vale. Not what they say.”
“Let’s give Derek something to look at then,” Ethan said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, confident purr. “Marcus, prepare the honeypot file. We’re going to feed my business partner a virus that will burn his entire infrastructure to the ground before Monday morning.”
