Chapter 3 - Feeding the BeastBy noon the following day, the operation was live.
Chloe returned to her desk outside my corner office at corporate headquarters, wearing a hidden audio transmitter provided by Marcus's security team. The spy lamp had been reassembled and placed back in my home office, but its feed was now routed through an isolated digital sandbox created by our IT team.
For three days, we fed Aegis Holdings a steady diet of meticulously crafted falsehoods.
Every evening at my home desk, I would intentionally leave open fake valuation reports, altered balance sheets, and decoy meeting schedules. According to our feed, Vance Tech was on the verge of pulling out of the Apex merger due to hidden regulatory debts—a move that would plummet our stock price by thirty percent over the weekend.
Inside Aegis Holdings' downtown headquarters, Arthur Sterling took the bait completely.
"He's panicking," Chloe reported via an encrypted headset while sitting in her car during her lunch break. "Sterling just called me from an unlisted line. He saw the 'confidential audit' you left on your desk last night. He thinks you're going to dump twenty million shares at market opening on Friday to cut your losses."
"What’s his play?" I asked from the command van parked two blocks away.
"He's mobilizing every dollar Aegis commands to execute a massive short-position on your stock tomorrow morning," she said, her voice shaking slightly with adrenaline. "He’s borrowing against Aegis’s core assets to double down. If your stock drops as expected, he buys it back cheap, takes control of the board, and forces the liquidation."
"And if the stock doesn't drop?" Marcus asked with a subtle grin.
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"If the stock rises," Victoria chimed in from the back of the van, "Sterling faces a margin call that will wipe Aegis Holdings off the financial map within two hours."
"Get back upstairs, Chloe," I instructed. "Tell Sterling the target is reviewing the final sell-off memo tonight at 9:00 PM. Make sure his team is watching the lamp."
