He reached down and pulled a smaller spare pistol from the center console.

He handed it to me, butt first.

“Do you know how to use this?”

“You showed me at the estate range,” I said, taking the weapon.

The metal was cold and heavy in my hand.

“Keep the safety on unless you have no other choice,” Adrian said.

I nodded, tucking the gun into the deep pocket of my heavy coat.

On the tablet screen, the download progress bar reached ninety-eight percent.

A red warning light suddenly began to flash on the warehouse roof outside.

A low, rhythmic alarm started to sound from the building, muffled by the concrete walls.

“He’s realized the system is copying his files,” Adrian said.

“He’s going to purge the network.”

“Not if I stop him,” I said, pulling the tablet back to my lap.

“I can run a counter-script to loop his command.”

“Do it,” Adrian said.

My fingers flew across the glass, typing out the bypass protocols I had memorized during my years as a corporate analyst.

I targeted the local server gateway and flooded it with empty data packets.