Karvin's escape through the maintenance duct was not graceful. He crawled for what felt like an hour, the tight, grimy confines scraping against his clothes and skin. The noise from the fire alarm he had deliberately short-circuited was a fading, distant scream behind him, replaced by the mechanical groan of the bunker's ventilation turbines. Every muscle ached, not just from the physical exertion, but from the relentless, hyper-focused adrenaline of the past 48 hours.
He finally dropped out of a utility shaft into a subterranean service tunnel—a narrow passage beneath the city, rarely used and undocumented in the primary building schematics. The air here was damp and smelled of concrete dust and ozone, a familiar, comforting scent. He was out. He was free. But he was also stripped bare.
The Iron Hand had won the immediate physical skirmish. Karvin's high-tech fortress was gone, his main servers fried by the EMP blast, and his identity was compromised. He was the most wanted man on Earth, hunted not by governments, but by the one man who controlled more resources than most governments combined. The Billionaire had sacrificed a valuable asset—the Mineral Mining Group—to expose and localize Karvin. That chilling realization was heavier than the dust caking his hair.
He found a temporary sanctuary in a junction box alcove, pulled out a tightly wrapped burner kit he always carried: two prepaid, low-frequency phones, a micro-encryptor, and a single, custom-built USB stick holding only the most vital, basic reconnaissance tools. He had to assume every major Wi-Fi signal, every cellular tower, and every surveillance camera was now dedicated to finding him.
His first check was low-tech and slow. He used one burner phone to piggyback onto the unsecured public network of a nearby coffee shop, running the connection through three layers of public proxies. He didn't check his own files; he checked the world news.
The screen exploded with headlines. The Global Firebreak had worked.
BREAKING: UN Security Council Calls Emergency Session Over Asia Mineral Seizure.
ICSC Issues Immediate Sanctions on Rare Earth Commodities.
Chaos Ensues in Asian Markets Following Political Corruption Scandal.
The articles, thick with geopolitical jargon, confirmed his gambit. The high-resolution satellite images he leaked—the trucks, the armed men, the captive executives—had been immediately verified by the independent watchdogs. The political system, unlike the financial market, could not simply pause. It was reacting exactly as intended: with blinding, painful sanctions that threatened to isolate the entire region, thus neutralizing the Billionaire's physical coup by rendering the seized minerals worthless on the global market.
Karvin allowed himself one deep, weary sigh of victory. He had bought himself time.
But the relief was short-lived. A new, dedicated article caught his eye: a global alert issued not by Interpol, but by a powerful, private security conglomerate with deep ties to the Billionaire's financial sector. The alert offered an unprecedented reward for information leading to the capture of a "rogue financial operative responsible for the recent market volatility." Accompanying the alert was a surprisingly accurate digital sketch of Karvin's face, generated from the EMP-fried data he failed to completely scrub. The Iron Hand hadn't left empty-handed. The 2% of surviving data was enough to betray his appearance.
He immediately killed the burner phone, smashing it beneath his heel. He couldn't risk making contact with anyone, least of all Dara, his primary analyst, who was likely under 24/7 surveillance. He needed a place to think, a place to build a new digital heart, a fortress that existed outside of the surface world.
He spent the next hour moving deeper into the city's forgotten infrastructure. He navigated sewer lines and decommissioned subway tunnels, finally arriving at his destination: an abandoned, pre-digital-age utility junction box sealed beneath a park fountain, a place that hadn't seen maintenance in fifty years. It was small, cold, and utterly invisible to modern network mapping.
After prying open the rusty hatch and settling into the cramped space, Karvin pulled out his second burner phone and the micro-encryptor. He initiated a near-impossible communication routine: a pulsed, encoded transmission sent at an obscure frequency, timed to align with a known gap in the city's atmospheric monitoring grid. The transmission wasn't going to Dara; it was going to Scylla—an associate in Eastern Europe who specialized in low-orbit, deep-spectrum communications and owed Karvin a terrifyingly large favor.
If anyone could see the Billionaire's next move coming through the noise, it would be Scylla.
The connection was established after five agonizing minutes of silence. Scylla's voice was distorted and stressed. "Karvin, you are a ghost. Your signature is being hunted by every private security network on the planet."
"The sanctions are working?" Karvin asked, ignoring the personal threat.
"They're catastrophic. The Asian market is in a freefall. But the Billionaire hasn't even flinched," Scylla reported, her voice dropping. "He didn't need the markets to be stable. He issued a global, public statement five minutes ago: an open letter. He's claiming the sanctions are an act of economic warfare by a rival state, and that he has seized the mineral assets in trust to protect them from falling into hostile foreign hands. He's painting himself as the defender of the world's resources."
The maneuver was breathtakingly arrogant and ruthlessly effective. By publicly seizing the assets and declaring himself a global custodian, the Billionaire had neutralized the moral high ground of the sanctions and turned the geopolitical chaos into a public relations victory.
"He's using the crisis to gain legitimacy," Karvin muttered, clenching his fists. "He needed the sanctions to happen so he could step in as the world's savior."
"What's the play, Karvin? You're out of moves, and the Iron Hand will find you."
"The Iron Hand has my face, but he doesn't have my plan. Scylla, I need you to focus all your deep-spectrum arrays on the one thing the Billionaire can't control: the European power grid. If he's a global defender, he needs global energy control. Find me the digital back door to his power." Karvin stared into the darkness of the utility box. "I need the key to turn off the lights on his whole empire."