The clock was Karvin's enemy. A small, secondary timer flashed an aggressive crimson in the corner of his screen: 16:45. Seventeen minutes was all Jean-Luc had bought him on the European satellite network—less time than it takes to brew a cup of coffee to capture evidence of a physical coup d'état thousands of miles away.
"Jean-Luc, talk to me. What are you seeing?" Karvin commanded, his voice tight. He was focused entirely on the live feed from the low-orbit satellite, which now rendered the Asian mining valley in brutal, crystalline high-definition. The images were chillingly clear: the armored convoy, personnel in paramilitary gear, and the stark faces of the Mineral Mining Group executives being escorted away at gunpoint.
"The aperture is holding, Karvin, but I'm getting noise from the network's internal monitoring—they know I'm burning through the bandwidth. I can't hold this angle for long," Jean-Luc warned from Brussels. "We need specific shots, not a documentary."
"Target the vehicles. I need proof of origin, serial numbers, anything that links them to the Billionaire's known shell companies," Karvin instructed. "Focus the thermal imaging on the control building. See if they're installing new hardware or destroying existing data."
The satellite, a brilliant, silent spy, obeyed. The screen zoomed, its optics cutting through the valley's thin atmosphere. They captured high-resolution close-ups of the black sedan and its entourage. Then, the damning thermal signature: inside the mine's primary server room, figures were dismantling sensitive environmental monitoring stations—the very reports Karvin had identified as the political vulnerability. They weren't just seizing the mine; they were erasing the political trigger that would have allowed for an audit.
"Got it," Karvin breathed, initiating a high-speed capture. He secured dozens of full-spectrum images and the corresponding GPS and time-stamped metadata. This wasn't just a video; it was legally admissible proof of an act of industrial and political warfare.
12:10.
"Jean-Luc, thank you. You have to cut the feed immediately and scrub every log of this access. Make it look like a cascading hardware failure in the telemetry array. They must not trace this back to the Satellite Infrastructure Group."
"I'm already on it, Karvin. Now, what are you going to do with it? This is too hot for any major news desk. They will sit on it, verify it, and the Billionaire will cover his tracks before tomorrow morning."
Karvin knew he was right. Traditional media required caution, patience, and multiple sources—luxuries he could not afford. He needed an explosion that would trigger political and economic sanctions in the next six hours. He needed to hit the system where its controls were weakest: raw, unverified global political exposure.
He opened three parallel, deep-web connections using three separate, high-speed, military-grade VPN arrays. He wasn't leaking to a journalist; he was leaking to the decentralized network of global political watchdogs, activist groups, and specialized trade organizations whose only purpose was to monitor supply chain ethics and resource monopolies.
"We don't leak it to the media, Jean-Luc. We leak it to the source of the sanctions: the Global Resource Ethics Coalition (GREC) and the Inter-Continental Sanctions Committee (ICSC) liaison channels," Karvin explained, his fingers flying in a blur of encryption and data fragmentation. "They have automated systems that scan for this exact type of evidence. Once their filters confirm the metadata, they bypass standard bureaucracy and issue immediate high-level alerts to the UN Security Council and the European Union."
He carefully packaged the thermal images, the executive kidnapping footage, and the irrefutable satellite metadata. He fragmented the data into a dozen small packets and launched them through the untraceable deep-web connections simultaneously.
"The packets are launched. The data is untraceable. Within thirty minutes, every major political capital will have independent verification of a physical, hostile seizure of critical rare earth minerals orchestrated by a party unknown," Karvin said, wiping sweat from his brow. "That is our firebreak. The resulting international outcry will force the local government to stop the Iron Hand or risk total isolation."
For a brief, exhausted moment, he felt a flicker of triumph. He had turned the Billionaire's distraction (the HFT market) into a stabilizing factor, and he had turned the third vulnerability (the Satellite Infrastructure) into a global weapon.
Then, the secondary terminal—the one that had received the initial message from the Billionaire—flashed again. This time, it wasn't a text message. It was a live system alert, bypassing all firewalls.
ALERT: SATELLITE TELEMETRY DIVERSION INITIATED. BRUSSELS, EUROPEAN NODE 4 OFFLINE.
Karvin's blood ran cold. The Billionaire had already been monitoring the use of the European Satellite network. Jean-Luc hadn't been fast enough.
"Jean-Luc! Did you make it out?" Karvin yelled into his headset.
Silence. Then, a distorted, synthesized voice, smooth and chilling, came over the encrypted line—not Jean-Luc's, but the voice of the Hidden Billionaire himself.
"A commendable pivot, Karvin. You bought the market 48 hours of artificial calm. But you traded your life for it, and now, you've cost me a very valuable contact in Brussels. The satellite access wasn't the weapon, Karvin. It was the bait. Your desperation has confirmed your location and your vulnerability. Look down."
Karvin's eyes darted to the windowless wall of his office, then back to the screen. The monitor showing the coordinates of the Asian mining valley abruptly flickered. The coordinates were replaced by new ones: The GPS location of his own office building.
A new countdown timer appeared on the screen, far more aggressive than the market freeze timer. It showed only five minutes. Beneath it, a single line of text:
"The Iron Hand is closer than Asia."