Modeled on the Medieval Era, Timur’s entire penthouse reminded him of his earlier livelihood. Every expense had been made to beautify and perfect it with handmade crown moldings, hand sewn curtains, and expertly crafted furniture. Every room was decked out to look like a palace fit for a king.
He stared out at the brilliant orange reflection on the water as the sun continued to rise. It was 7:52 AM, and morning traffic was just beginning to fill the streets below. It wouldn’t be long before someone found Jason’s body, and the police would begin an investigation. Having stepped through his own shadow, he was able to return to his penthouse in an instant. At any moment, his Chief Operations Officer would be arriving with the company’s Daily Brief.
As he sat on his porch, he inserted the thumb drive he had taken from Jason into a small Bluetooth-looking device. The thumb drive was of a peculiar design, with little patches of blue painted on the white background. It was shaped like a trash can with a half-spherical lid and feet sticking out the bottom. Now that he studied it, he realized that it looked like some silly robot from the 1980s.
He attached the small device to his right ear and smoothed out a rolled-up keyboard on the table. After pressing a button on the device, a screen projected onto the far wall. He opened the contents of the thumb drive, and to his relief the drive hadn’t been password protected. There were two files. The first was a surveillance video taken nearly five years ago. Timur watched the scene in horror.
How did he get this?
As he watched the old footage, he recognized himself aiming his gun at the late NSA Agent Michael Thornton.
“But I did everything you asked!” Michael panicked, his hands raised high above his head in surrender. “I presented your blueprints as my own, and they took the bait! We’re in the Beta testing stage now!”
“Yes, you served your purpose well.” Timur watched himself smile as he cocked his gun. “But I can’t take any chances. I’ve worked too hard for this. Letting you live is too much of a risk.”
Michael turned to flee, but it was too late. A gunshot rang out. Michael’s body spun from the force of the bullet and he collapsed in a bloody heap.
Timur stared at the blank screen in shock for several minutes.
Who else has seen this footage?!
He was irate as he opened the second file stored on the thumb drive. As he suspected, they were the blueprints he had drafted many years ago for the Gamma-Frequency Identification (GFID) Nano-chips that the NSA had developed under the guise that Michael Thornton had invented the technology.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
The technology was similar in nature to Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID). However, these Nano-chips had a much greater frequency range and were microscopic in nature. What disturbed him the most was the timestamp from when the file had been pulled. It indicated the author as Timur, and it had been accessed from his company’s primary server last night.
Having developed the world’s largest multinational video game and consumer electronics company with his bare hands, eight years ago CyberBolt Entertainment dominated and monopolized the entire gaming platform industry when they introduced their newest software that implemented a previously considered impossible technology called “Rotating Cleartext Encryption” (RCE). For the past decade, gaming hackers around the world seemed to disappear off the face of the planet. Timur’s RCE code had been labeled ‘unhackable’.
As an unexpected twist, this new RCE technology crippled the directives of the NSA, thus forcing the US Government to adopt CyberBolt as a pseudo security agency. Meanwhile, several public outcries against the NSA’s more recent actions had also put them under heavy scrutiny. As a result, the US Government announced that it would be dismantling the agency. However, Timur’s sources told him that the message to the public had been a lie and that the NSA had instead gone underground both literally and figuratively.
How much does Allan know?
He stood with his cane and approached the railing with a slight limp. Timur Demyan was both insidious and intelligent. After multiple mergers and acquisitions, he had created CyberBolt with hard work, multiple lawyers and a lifetime’s worth of deceit and treachery to rise above corporate America. Now that he was so close to accomplishing his most sinister of plans, nobody was going to stop him. Especially not an insignificant washout like Allan Young.
I can’t let this information get out. I’ve worked far too hard for this. I don’t care how many lives I have to take!
In a different time he was once a very powerful man in Persia where he was revered and feared by thousands. Donned in the most expensive of apparel, his many conquests had caused the deaths of up to seventeen million people. He intended to conquer the whole of China as well, but just before he could make his move he was dragged away to another world.
I won’t let it happen again.
“Master Tamerlane?” his butler called out.
Timur cringed. He had always despised diminutive alterations of names, especially the modern form of his moniker ‘Timur the lame’.
“I thought I told you never to call me that!” he snapped.
“My apologies, Your Holiness.” the butler bowed. “A miss Lily Thatcher is here to see you.”
“Send her in,” he huffed, pressing a button on his earpiece to turn off the projection.
He had hired Lily Thatcher nearly five years ago as a summer intern for his cryptology department. She was young, intelligent, and very attractive. After she had demonstrated her prowess and analytical skills, he offered her full-time employment with the company. She graciously accepted, and had proven herself over the years through multiple promotions. And now with her newest position that he had offered today, she would be by his side every day.
And someday I’ll make her my queen.
----------------------------------------
© Copyright 2022 R.M. Mulder. All rights reserved.