The alerts had come in scrambled, most of them incomplete or redacted by the time they reached Jack's private feed. Surveillance blackout in the Lennox estate's east wing. Subject Eight's collar signal is gone. Internal timestamps didn't line up.
Jack had assumed it was a false flag at first, some rogue AI loop or firewall clash. They'd seen similar anomalies before. But this one didn't reset. It grew.
And now, two days later, the pieces were starting to fall into place.
The war room's atmosphere pressed against him like a living thing, thick with the metallic taste of recycled air and the incessant hum of overtaxed processors. Red alert lights strobed across the curved walls, casting everything in bloody intervals of visibility and shadow. The main display flickered with corrupted surveillance feeds, static where there should have been faces, timestamps that jumped backward, and audio that cut to white noise mid-sentence.
Jack stormed through the reinforced doors, his footsteps echoing against the polished concrete. The fractured report waited on his console like an accusation, its holographic display stuttering with each new data packet that managed to crawl through their compromised network.
ALERT 1: Subject Eight's collar was forcefully disabled.
ALERT 2: Unauthorized breach at the Lennox estate, multiple unknowns.
ALERT 3: Internal comm blackouts. Several surveillance nodes were wiped. Tampering detected.
His fingers flew across the haptic interface, pulling up encrypted files that should have been impossible to access. The decryption algorithms churned, spitting out fragments of footage and partial logs.
A flash of Gene's face in thermal imaging, her heat signature blazing against the estate's cold walls. Igor's hulking silhouette was moving through corridors that should have been empty.
"Everything's on fire," Jack muttered, his voice carrying the particular venom he reserved for personal betrayals. Not just literal failure, but mutiny. The word tasted like copper in his mouth.
He pulled up Gene's psychological profile; her vitals from the past week displayed in neat graphs that told a story of escalating stress responses.
Her heart rate spikes. The micro-expressions that their facial recognition software had flagged as "deceptive" or "non-compliant." All the signs he'd chosen to ignore because...
Because she was supposed to be his. Because in his twisted calculus of control and possession, Gene's rebellion felt less like a tactical failure and more like a rejection. The thought made his jaw clench.
Another alert chimed. More footage fragments. Gene's hand reaches for something off-camera. A door is closing. Shadows moving where shadows shouldn't be.
Jack's reflection stared back at him from the dark surface of his console, pale, sharp-featured, with eyes that had learned to find satisfaction in others' fear. But beneath the familiar mask of cold calculation, something else flickered. Something that felt dangerously close to... hurt.
He crushed the feeling immediately. Whatever game Gene thought she was playing, whatever alliance she'd formed with Igor and whoever else, it would end the same way all challenges to his authority ended.
The only question was whether he'd make it quick or savor it.
Jack's fingers hovered over the console, ready to initiate a full estate lockdown. But he paused. Part of him, the part that had been watching Gene for years, cataloging her expressions, memorizing the way she moved through his world, wanted to understand why she'd chosen this path.
The larger part wanted to burn everything down and start over.
"Run facial recognition on all compromised footage," he commanded the AI. "Cross-reference with known associates. And pull up the Lennox estate's architectural plans. If Gene wants to play hide and seek..."
He let the threat hang in the air, swallowed by the red-lit darkness of his war room. Outside, his empire might be crumbling. But in here, surrounded by the tools of surveillance and control, Jack felt the familiar rush of the hunt beginning.
This time, it was personal.
A secure transmission finally broke through the firewall grid, blinking red across Jack's primary console. The encryption was old: emergency tier, reserved for total blackout conditions. The kind of protocol that meant someone, somewhere, was dead or dying.
Jack opened it with a sigh like a curse.
"Field report: Lennox estate. Primary subject Harry Lennox, missing. No confirmed visual since 0600 hours, two days ago. Blood identified on-scene, human, high-volume loss. No body recovered."
Jack's jaw tightened, the muscle jumping beneath pale skin. "Why am I only hearing about this now?"
The voice on the comm stuttered for a moment, crackling with interference. "Surveillance feeds were scrubbed. Local police were flagged to investigate, but the call was overridden by someone with internal authority. The footage was corrupted before it reached the data vault."
"Corrupted," Jack echoed bitterly, his fingers dancing across the haptic interface. "Or deleted."
He turned to the looping data cluster in the corner of the room, the collar ping from Subject Eight, the scrambled security logs, and the east wing breach alert. Each piece of evidence cycling through his displays like accusations written in code.
Again, it was Gene. It lined up with everything that had been happening before. It didn't take a detective to figure that out. She had left the White Angels high and dry, stealing a black-barred communications unit.
But as Jack studied the data more carefully, inconsistencies emerged. Gene was competent with systems, yes, but this level of surgical precision in the digital carnage suggested expertise beyond her skill set. She had been on the Lennox estate. She had access to Angel-grade data scramblers.
She had a motive, loyalty to the girl, maybe even to Subject Eight. But the sophistication of the hack job, the clean surgical removal of specific files while leaving others untouched as decoys, this wasn't Gene's work alone.
Someone with much higher clearance had been involved.
But the Lennox mansion's firewall was military-grade, custom-built with layers of encryption that even seasoned White Angels hackers struggled to penetrate. Jack had overseen its installation himself, quantum-encrypted channels, biometric locks, and neural-pattern recognition.
Gene had basic systems training, nothing more. This wasn't some corporate database or government server. This was fortress-level security designed to keep out exactly the kind of intrusion someone had somehow managed to pull off.
The work was too clean, too professional. Gene might have been the face of the operation, but she'd had help from someone with administrator-level access.
She would've known exactly what to erase and what to leave behind. The question was: how had she gotten past defenses that should have been impenetrable?
Unless she hadn't done it alone. The thought gnawed at him. Gene had basic technical skills, but this level of systematic infiltration required someone with deep system knowledge and high-level access. And then there was Subject Eight's disappearance, the circumstances of which remained frustratingly unclear.
Someone with extraordinary capabilities and insider knowledge had been pulling the strings, someone who made Jack's carefully constructed control systems look like paper walls.
Jack tapped a finger against the edge of the screen, his eyes burning with cold calculation. The rhythm was methodical, almost meditative. "She's cleaning up someone else's mess."
Jack didn't mourn. He calculated. Harry Lennox had been a useful asset, nothing more. A well-placed puppet with government connections and a taste for expensive secrets.
But more than that, Harry had possessed a rare setup, a specialized computer system that could hack into the neural chips implanted in people's brains, allowing him to alter memories with surgical precision.
While the White Angels could easily access and modify Alucards' neural chips, given they were created by Selene Marrow, the organization's true leader, Harry's particular talent lay in crafting seamless memory alterations.
His edits were smooth, natural, and indistinguishable from real memories.
Harry's death wasn't just inconvenient; it was the loss of a master craftsman whose work could fool even the most sophisticated detection systems.
He'd been particularly skilled with Alucards, beings whose enhanced cognitive abilities and modified neural chips made them normally resistant to digital manipulation.
Harry's death wasn't just inconvenient; it was the loss of a very specific and valuable technological capability.
What wasn't replaceable was trust. And Gene had shattered his so thoroughly that even the fragments were cut.
Jack pulled up Gene's personnel file, her photograph staring back at him from the holographic display.
Those eyes that had never quite looked at him the way he'd wanted them to. The mouth that had never said his name with anything warmer than professional courtesy.
He viewed her not as a traitor, but as a cancer. One that must be cut out before she spreads.
But even as he began drafting the termination order, part of him, the part that had watched her work with something approaching admiration, the part that had imagined what it would be like to possess that brilliant, dangerous mind, hesitated.
Maybe there was still a way to bring her back. To make her understand that she belonged with him, not against him.
The thought was quickly buried beneath layers of pragmatic cruelty. Gene had made her choice. Now he would make his.
"Initiate Scorched Earth Protocol," Jack commanded the AI. "Full asset recovery. Priority One target: Gene Vance. Bring her in alive."