He heard the soft beep of a silenced weapon's safety clicking off. Not on the phone. In the hallway outside his apartment door.

"We rebuild. We tell them it was a hardware failure. RR-4036. Database connection error. Force majeure. We restore from the transaction logs—the ones I have on a private drive."

By 3:15 AM, Marcus was in the data center, the cold air raising goosebumps on his arms. The primary database server—a hulking Dell PowerEdge—was still running. Its fans whirred. Its lights blinked green.