Chapter 850:

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Anson didn’t resist as Shields and another guard grabbed his arms. He stumbled as they dragged him from the room, his eyes wide and vacant with the horror of his own stupidity. He had been played, utterly and completely.

Eliza looked down at the hard drive still in her hand. The bait.

“He’s a fool,” Dallas growled, pacing the room like a caged tiger. “But he’s a dangerous one.”

“He’s not the danger,” Eliza said, placing the hard drive on the desk. “He’s a distraction. While we were dealing with him, what was Gideon really doing?”

As if in answer, her own phone vibrated. It was a single, encrypted message from the Solomon Protocol. It contained no words, just a string of coordinates.

𝗥o𝗺𝘢𝗻c𝗲 𝗻𝘰𝘃𝗲𝗅𝘴 𝗼𝗇 𝗀a𝗹𝘯𝘰𝘃𝖾ls.cоm

A location in the Swiss Alps. A private, heavily fortified medical facility.

And a name: Savannah.

The pieces slammed together in her mind. Mateo’s slip in the hospital. In Geneva, I spent millions preparing for you… I even…

Gideon hadn’t just been preparing for a corporate takeover. He had been preparing a replacement: a surgically altered ghost to take her place after he had broken her. The cold in Eliza’s stomach intensified. This wasn’t a war for money or power. It was a war for her very identity, and Gideon had been planning it for years.

Dawn broke gray and bruised over Manhattan, and the snow-choked streets slowly came to life. Inside a blacked-out war room deep within Koch Tower, the only light came from a wall of glowing screens. The New York Stock Exchange was about to open.

Dallas stood at the head of a long carbon-fiber table, surrounded by his top quantitative analysts and legal strategists. The air was cold and smelled of ozone and coffee. He wore a simple black sweater, but he radiated an aura of command more potent than any suit.

“Report,” he said, his voice calm.

A young analyst, his eyes red-rimmed from a night of staring at code, spoke up. “Sir, the pre-market is a bloodbath. Sterling-backed funds have initiated a coordinated short-selling attack across every sector where we have holdings. They are leveraging dark pools and flooding the market with sell orders. They’re not just trying to drive down the price. They’re trying to trigger a panic. A complete loss of confidence.”

“They want a run on the bank,” Dallas stated. “Force our institutional investors to dump their shares and create a death spiral.”

“Exactly, sir. Their algorithms are brutal. They’re targeting our weakest divisions first to create the impression of systemic failure.”

Dallas looked at the main screen, where the ticker for Koch Industries (KCI) flashed a dizzying shade of red. The projected opening was down fifteen percent. Billions of dollars in value were set to evaporate in seconds.

He felt nothing. No fear, no panic. Just a cold, clear, lethal focus.

“Good,” he said. The word was so unexpected that half the room flinched.

He turned to his lead legal counsel. “The SEC filings are prepared?”

“Yes, sir. As per your instructions last night. The moment the market opens, we file for a massive, accelerated share buyback program. We’re using the emergency liquidity funds you authorized.”

“And the PR team?”

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