Chapter 13 - The Sabotage at Sea
Z
The opening salvo of Sterling Vance’s war did not take place in a courtroom, but at our crown jewel property: the Northstar Grand Reserve in Miami.
Four days after my phone call with Sterling, I was forced to board our private jet to Florida alongside Mara and Nora. At 4:00 AM, a coordinated crisis had struck the oceanfront resort, threatening to plunge our brand back into chaos right as we prepared for the peak winter tourist season.
As our black SUV pulled into the palm-lined driveway of the Miami resort, the scene was pure bedlam. Local news vans were parked along the perimeter, satellite dishes raised, and dozens of angry guests were gathered in the marble lobby, shouting at the front desk staff.
We bypassed the commotion through the service entrance, taking the private elevator straight to the executive management suite. The resort’s general manager, a seasoned hospitality veteran named Marcus Reyes, looked pale and exhausted as he ushered us into the conference room.
"What happened, Marcus?" I asked, taking off my sunglasses and placing them on the mahogany table.
"It was a multi-pronged attack, Claire," Marcus said, his voice trembling. "At three o'clock this morning, our core property management software suffered a massive external breach. Every digital room lock in the five-hundred-room tower was remotely wiped and locked from the outside. Guests were locked out of their suites in their nightwear."
"A ransomware attack?" Mara asked, her tablet already recording the incident parameters.
"No ransom was demanded," Marcus replied grimly. "And it gets worse. Within thirty minutes of the system crash, a prominent Miami news outlet received an anonymous leak claiming that our main kitchen had been hit with a severe salmonella outbreak, complete with forged lab reports bearing our internal Quality Assurance stamp. By six in the morning, three major corporate conferences scheduled for next week canceled their bookings, representing four million dollars in lost revenue."
"And the guest locks?" Nora asked.
"Our IT team bypassed the server after three hours, but the damage was done," Marcus said. "The news crews arrived before we could even explain the glitch to our guests. Someone wanted maximum press coverage of the chaos."
I walked over to the window, looking out over the pristine blue waters of the Biscayne Bay. This wasn't a random glitch or an opportunistic hacker group. This was Sterling Vance’s two-hundred-million-dollar war chest at work—a calculated attempt to destroy Northstar’s operational reputation and trigger debt default covenants with our lenders before our legal fight even reached the discovery phase.
"David," I said, tapping my earbud to connect with David Chen back at New York headquarters. "Are you on the resort’s local server logs?"
"I’m in the mainframe right now, Claire," David’s voice came through clearly. "The breach didn't come from an offshore hacker collective in Eastern Europe. The digital key used to wipe the door locks was an internal master override credential. It was executed from a terminal inside the resort’s physical engineering office at two forty-five AM."
My eyes narrowed. "An inside job."
"Exactly," David continued. "And I’ve already traced the digital footprint of the forged lab reports. The PDF metadata contains an author tag linked to a local PR firm called Apex Communications—a subsidiary registered in Delaware three weeks ago, funded by an offshore wire from Sovereign Crest’s Cayman branch."
"They planted a mole," Mara said, her eyes flashing with anger. "Sterling bought off someone on the local engineering team."
I turned around, my posture rigid, my mind clicking through tactical responses with cold mathematical precision. Sterling thought he could create a panic that would force me to negotiate. He didn't realize that crisis management was where I was at my most lethal.
"Marcus," I instructed the general manager. "First, order the kitchen staff to open our primary dining rooms immediately and serve complimentary gourmet breakfast buffets to every single guest in the hotel. Second, offer a full refund for last night’s stay to every affected guest, plus a five-hundred-dollar credit for any future Northstar property."
"Claire, that will cost us over six hundred thousand dollars in immediate operating cash," Marcus warned.
"I don't care if it costs two million," I replied without hesitation. "We protect our guests first. That is why Northstar is different from the Vances. Now, show me the shift log for the engineering department last night."
Ten minutes later, I stood in the subterranean security office beneath the hotel, watching security camera footage alongside Mara and the Chief of Security. The footage clearly showed a night-shift network technician named Julian Torres entering the server room with a flash drive at 2:42 AM, leaving five minutes later, and walking out to the parking lot with a heavy duffel bag.
"Where is Torres now?" I demanded.
"His shift ended at six," the security chief said. "He turned off his phone."
"He hasn't left the city," Mara said, looking at her tablet. "His credit card was just flagged at an private aviation hanger at Miami Executive Airport. He has a charter flight booked to Nassau at ten o'clock."
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I looked at my watch. It was 8:45 AM.
"Mara, call the FBI Field Office in Miami," I said, a cold, vicious smile spreading across my face. "Tell them we have an active corporate espionage perpetrator fleeing the jurisdiction with stolen proprietary data. And tell them Claire Morgan is on her way to the hanger."
