Chapter 8 - AMONG THE STEEL MONSTERS
The rain fell heavily against the rusted iron sides of the freight trains, creating a deafening roar that drowned out the sound of footsteps.
Daniel led Maya deeper into the labyrinth of parked train cars, ducking beneath steel hitches and climbing over wet wooden ties.
They stopped inside an open wooden boxcar, hidden deep within the shadows.
Maya collapsed against the wooden wall, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her green dress soaked and stained with grease. She looked at Daniel, who was kneeling near the door, watching the tracks with a cold, focused intensity.
"You're bleeding," Maya whispered, pointing to his arm.
Daniel glanced down at his sleeve. A bullet had grazed his forearm, tearing the expensive wool fabric and leaving a line of dark crimson.
"It's nothing," Daniel said flatly.
Maya tore a strip of fabric from the hem of her silk dress, stepped closer to him, and gently wrapped it around his arm, tying a tight knot.
Daniel looked up at her, his dark eyes fixing on hers. For a moment, the dangerous mafia boss vanished, replaced by a man genuinely stunned by the quiet courage of the woman standing before him.
"You were a doctor," Daniel murmured softly.
"I still am," Maya said quietly, her hazel eyes holding his. "I spent my whole life trying to heal people. And now I'm watching people die because of a file in my pocket."
"Those men aren't people, Dr. Lin," Daniel said softly, reaching out his gloved hand to gently wipe a drop of rain from her cheek. "They are predators. And the only way to stop a predator is to destroy it."
Footsteps crunched over the wet gravel outside the boxcar.
"Check inside the cars!" a voice shouted from thirty feet away.
Daniel reached into his suit jacket, pulling out a small, encrypted tablet device he had taken from the SUV. "Give me the hard drive."
Maya handed him the metallic drive.
Daniel connected the drive to the tablet using a high-speed transfer cable. "I'm routing the raw data files directly to my private server network in Zurich. In two minutes, sixty gigabytes of Gregory Vance's illegal transactions will be permanently stored on an offshore cloud server."
"And then?" Maya asked.
"And then," Daniel smiled—a dark, lethal smile that made her heart skip a beat—"we send a copy directly to the Department of Justice, the FBI, and every major news network in North America."
The screen bar flickered: TRANSFER COMPLETE — 100%.
Daniel hit SEND.
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At the exact same second, the wooden doors of the boxcar were kicked open with a violent crash!
Gregory Vance stood in the doorway, holding a silver handgun, surrounded by four heavily armed mercenaries!
