“Sir, what happened—?”
“Where is my wife?!” Marcus snarled, grabbing Collins by the lapel of his blazer, his knuckles whitening as he dragged the security chief toward the bed:
“Pull the footage! Which vehicle did she take?! Who authorized her departure?!”
Collins swallowed, his eyes darting to the floor:
“Sir… there is no footage.”
“What do you mean there's no footage?!” Marcus screamed, his face contorting into an apoplectic mask of purple rage:
“This property has forty-eight thousand square feet of continuous high-definition optical surveillance! We have thermal sensors on the perimeter fence!”
“The entire security architecture was severed at eleven-zero-six P.M., Mr. Hale,” Collins whispered:
“The cameras, the motion arrays, the gate telemetry. Someone entered the primary core room and executed a Level-Zero root administrative purge.”
Marcus froze, his grip loosening on the fabric of Collins’s coat:
“That’s impossible. Level-Zero root access requires my personal biometric authorization. Only two people in the world hold those credentials.”
