Read Chapter 24: The Double Cross

The alarm on Camille's phone cut through the predawn silence of the AlgoSens office. 6:47 AM. The demo was in ninety minutes. She'd been here since four, running the final checks on the stripped-down Sentio build, and her eyes ached from staring at the screen. Antoine was asleep in the corner, head thrown back, laptop still lit on his chest. She left him there.

In the testing bay, Théo was already at the demo laptop, shoulders hunched, fingers moving too fast across the keyboard.

"Early bird," she said, crossing the room.

He startled, snapping the lid of the laptop half-closed. "Couldn't sleep. Nerves."

"Same." She set down her coffee on the workbench, watching him. "Everything solid?"

"Solid as it gets," he said, but his smile didn't reach his eyes. She'd seen that smile before—the one that meant he was keeping something behind his teeth.

She walked over to a neighboring terminal, pulling up the deployment log, forcing herself to look busy while her peripheral vision tracked him. There it was again—that flicker of movement. He was typing, but his left hand kept hovering near the USB port.

The demo laptop's screen was angled away from her. She couldn't see what he was doing.

"Hey," she said, not turning. "Can you pull the last build's checksum? Sarah wants verification documents."

"Sure." A pause. "Give me ten minutes."

*Ten minutes.* The demo started in eighty-five. The health client would be in the boardroom in sixty.

Camille turned and walked out to the hallway, hands shaking slightly as she filled the electric kettle. She had to pee. She had a headache. But she couldn't leave him alone in there, so she forced herself back into the testing bay.

Théo was gone.

The demo laptop was on the bench, screen dark.

Camille moved fast. She opened the laptop, and the login screen glowed in the dim light. The admin profile she'd set up yesterday was already open in another session—she could see its settings in the taskbar. She pulled up the process monitor. Nothing unusual.

Then she noticed it. A tiny icon in the tray, blinking at odd intervals. It shouldn't be there. She right-clicked. *Backdoor client v.2.3 — running.*

Her heart stopped.

She pressed her fingers to the trackpad, opening the file details. The script was small, precise, and devious. It would run in the background during the live demo, collecting data rather than disrupting it. But its true payload was set to activate ninety seconds into the Sentio presentation—when she'd demonstrate the adaptive data stream from the fake patient records. The script would inject corrupted response curves into the live feed, making her product look dangerously unstable to the health client. It was sabotage timed to maximize damage.

Théo had played them perfectly—flipping sides long enough to hand them a poisoned laptop.

Camille looked around the empty bay, breath ragged. Her first instinct was to scream, to run after him, to tear the laptop from his hands if she found him. But the clock on the wall said 7:31. In forty minutes, the client would be in the boardroom.

Antoine appeared in the doorway, rubbing his eyes. "What's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"He set us up." The words came out flat, cold. "Théo. He loaded a backdoor client on the demo laptop. It's rigged to sabotage the live feed mid-presentation."

Antoine's face went slack. "He—"

"We don't have time for shock. I need a clean unit. Now."

They worked in eleven minutes of controlled panic. Antoine dragged a spare laptop from the hardware shelf, wiping it clean and flashing the same build image they'd certified yesterday. Camille copied over the demo environment, syncing the fake patient dataset onto the new machine, triple-checking that the network broadcast settings were identical to the previous unit.

The old laptop sat on the bench, its dangerous icon still blinking. She couldn't leave it running. But she couldn't just shut it down either—if Théo had some kind of phone-home trigger, the kill might alert him that his plan had been discovered. She was aiming for maximum confusion, not a head start.

She looked at it for a long second. Then she unplugged the charger, stripped the SSD, and snapped it in half with a clean, dry crack that echoed in the empty bay.

"Help me with the table," she said.

In the boardroom, the client—a sharp-eyed woman named Dr. Mireille Fontaine, who oversaw digital health procurement for three of France's largest private hospital chains—was already seated with her team. Camille's assistant, Nina, was pouring coffee. The projector screen showed the final AlgoSens logo. Antoine hovered near the door, jaw tight.

Camille scanned the room. Five client reps, two AlgoSens engineers, and a bouquet of pastries that someone had decided was appropriate for a make-or-break demo. No Théo. No Lucas. Just the silence of a room where one wrong move would doom them all.

She was about to begin when she saw the laptop she'd cleaned—the *clean* one—on the table, and beside it, the real demo machine that was supposed to be in the testing bay. How the hell had it gotten here? Then the back of her neck prickled. Théo was here. In the building.

She scanned the room again. There he was—behind the standing plant near the back wall, watching, phone in hand, mouth almost moving as if he was narrating in his head.

He planned to watch her fail.

Camille exhaled once, slow and controlled. Then she did the only thing she could think of.

"Mireille, sorry one second." She turned to pour herself a coffee, but her hand "slipped," sending the entire mug over the edge of the table in a brown cascade directly into the space where the demo laptop sat. A collective gasp. Mireille's assistant jumped up, dabbing at her jacket.

"I'm so sorry—oh God—" Camille seized the nearest napkin pile, uselessly brushing liquid, letting the chaos ripple for six full seconds while her other hand slid beneath the table and switched the power cable from one laptop to the other, unplugging the sabotaged unit entirely.

"Use mine," Antoine said smoothly, sliding the clean laptop into the exact spot the spilled coffee had missed.

The client's team grumbled but settled. Camille placed her note cards beside the clean machine, glanced at the serving tray, and began.

Ninety seconds into her demonstration, the clean unit performed flawlessly. The fake patient data streamed across the screen in smooth, rhythmic curves, the adaptive model adjusting in real time. Mireille Fontaine's face shifted from wary to curious to—Camille dared to hope—impressed.

Twenty minutes later, the contract was signed.

The boardroom erupted in applause. Antoine shook Mireille's hand with a smile he'd clearly rehearsed. Nina was already texting the press release. Camille allowed herself a moment of exultation, breath catching in her throat as she watched the ink dry on the page. They had saved the company.

Then she looked toward the back wall and saw that the plant had moved.

Théo was gone.

*It doesn't matter,* she told herself, as the room buzzed and hands were shaken. *We won. He's gone.*

But as she stepped out into the hallway to catch her breath, Antoine was waiting with his phone held out, face gone tight and gray.

"What?" she said.

"It's live."

On the screen was a headline from a technology trade publication. The byline, she recognized: Sarah Moreau had not written this—it was a rival columnist. The article was titled, in bold letters: *AlgoSens Product Lead Fabricated Key Metrics: Sources.*

"He beat us to it," Camille whispered. "Lucas planted the story with another journalist."

She scrolled down numbly, not reading the words, feeling the floor tilt beneath her. The health contract still sat warm on the table behind them. The story would be printed by the ministry review board before the day was done. The product may have saved the company's future—but her past was about to burn it to the ground.

"Camille?" Antoine's voice was low. "We still have the server logs. We have Maxime's letter. We have a story to tell."

"Not before they tell theirs." She looked up at him, eyes clear and sharp despite the cold, spreading dread in her chest. "I've got forty minutes until Thursday's deadline to resign. That was the deal Lucas offered. That is the only deal he'll make."