Chapter 8 - The Fall of Marcus
Captain Vance stepped forward, pulling a pair of heavy steel handcuffs from his tactical belt.
"Marcus Sterling," Captain Vance announced loudly. "You are under arrest for attempted premeditated murder, conspiracy to commit murder, corporate fraud, and kidnapping."
"Get away from me!" Marcus shrieked.
In a fit of mad desperation, Marcus grabbed a heavy bronze award trophy from the side table and swung it wildly at Captain Vance, striking the officer’s shoulder and rushing toward the boardroom’s private executive elevator.
He punched the keycode into the elevator panel, the doors opening instantly. Marcus dove inside, pressing the door-close button frantically as he laughed like a maniac.
"You'll never catch me!" Marcus screamed through the narrowing gap between the doors. "I have five million in offshore bearer bonds! You can't hold me!"
Ding.
The elevator doors closed, and the elevator began its high-speed descent toward the basement parking garage fifty floors below.
Mark looked at me, a cold, calm smile touching the corners of his lips. He pressed a button on his personal smartwatch.
"Arthur," Mark spoke into his watch mic. "Lock down the executive elevator. Freeze floor twenty."
On the boardroom monitor displaying the building’s real-time elevator tracking system, the red elevator icon descending down the shaft suddenly halted violently at the twentieth floor.
The automated building security system immediately engaged the pneumatic emergency brakes, locking the cab between floors, cutting the power, and sealing the airflow dampers to minimum ventilation.
Marcus was trapped in a three-by-three steel box, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, with no escape.
Down in the lobby, two SWAT teams stormed the elevator control room, overriding the manual release.
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When they finally manually lowered the cab to the ground floor forty-five minutes later and pried the steel doors open, Marcus was found curled up on the floor, weeping in absolute terror, utterly broken by his own panic.
As the police dragged him out through the front lobby in front of dozens of news cameras, the entire world witnessed the final, humiliating collapse of the man who had tried to steal his brother’s life.
