Chapter 4: The New Deal

The question hung in the air, thick and heavy with desperation. "What do you want?"

For a moment, Lex Carter simply savored it. He watched the sweat bead on Silas Thorne’s temple, saw the frantic calculations behind the man’s terrified eyes. The king was off his throne, pleading with the peasant he had planned to starve.

Before Lex could answer, Thorne’s survival instincts kicked in, overriding his panic with a fresh surge of impotent fury. He snatched the phone from its cradle, his hand trembling.

“This is extortion! Blackmail!” he snarled, stabbing at the keypad. “You’ll be in a federal prison by morning, Carter! You’ll never see the light of day!” He put the call on speaker, and a crisp, authoritative voice filled the room. “Arthur, it’s Thorne. I have a situation.”

“Silas? It’s past ten-thirty. What is it?” The voice belonged to his high-priced lawyer.

“I have the little coder, Carter, in my office. He’s built some kind of kill switch into my network. He’s trying to hold me to ransom!”

Lex remained motionless, an island of calm. On the other end of the line, Arthur sighed, the sound of a man used to cleaning up messes. “Silas, is the system functional as per the contract?”

“It’s… yes, it’s perfect, but that’s not the point! He’s threatening to shut it down!”

“Is this ‘kill switch’ a malicious virus or an external hacking tool?” the lawyer asked, his tone shifting to one of clinical precision.

“It’s neither,” Lex spoke up, his voice clear and steady, easily carrying over the speakerphone. “It’s a proprietary, integrated security feature. A dynamic authentication key is required for continued operation. Standard procedure for a system of this complexity to prevent unauthorized access.”

There was a pause on the line. “Is this feature detailed in the technical documentation you provided, Mr. Carter?”

“The documentation states that the system requires ongoing maintenance to ensure stability,” Lex replied smoothly. “Providing the daily authentication key falls under that purview.”

Thorne’s face went from pale to a dangerous shade of crimson. “He’s playing with words! Get me Stevens! Now!” he bellowed into his desk intercom.

A moment later, the panicked voice of his head of IT joined the call. “Sir, we’re still trying to isolate the code. It’s… it’s not a script we can just delete. It’s woven into the kernel of every operating system on every server. It’s like trying to remove the rebar from a concrete foundation after it’s set. If we touch it, the whole structure will collapse. The system is designed to fail if tampered with. It’ll brick itself.”

Thorne slammed his hand on the desk. “Then un-brick it! That’s what I pay you for!”

“We can’t!” Stevens’ voice was strained. “He’s the architect. He built the foundation. Without his blueprints, we’re blind. We could spend a year trying to reverse-engineer this and still fail. Sir… respectfully… he’s got us. Completely.”

Another heavy silence descended on the room, broken only by the soft, relentless ticking of the clock on the wall. 10:48 PM. The lawyer, Arthur, cleared his throat.

“Silas,” he said, his voice now low and cautious, stripped of its earlier aggression. “Based on what your own expert is saying… Mr. Carter’s position is… extraordinarily strong. He delivered a functional system. His claim that this is a ‘security feature’ is flimsy, but it would hold up in discovery long enough to be a nightmare. By refusing to pay, you are in breach of contract. He isn’t. Any legal action would bring the nature of this dispute into the public eye, which would be catastrophic for your syndication deal. He’s not blackmailing you, Silas. He’s simply… negotiating the terms of his maintenance contract.”

The fight drained out of Silas Thorne in a single, shuddering exhalation. He slumped in his chair, his expensive suit suddenly looking two sizes too big for him. The bluster, the threats, the lawyers, the tech team—all his weapons had been rendered useless. He was cornered in his own penthouse office, a prisoner of the very system that was supposed to make him richer than God. The power in the room had not just shifted; it had been completely and utterly inverted. He was no longer looking at a broke coder. He was looking at his new master.

He slowly lifted his defeated eyes to Lex. “Tell me what you want.”

Lex took a step forward, his shadow falling across the mahogany desk. He picked up the invoice Thorne had laughed at just minutes before.

“First,” he said, his voice cold and devoid of triumph. It was the voice of a creditor collecting a long-overdue debt. “You will pay this invoice. In full. Not in thirty days. Not tomorrow morning. Right now. You will execute a wire transfer for the full amount to my account. I want to see the confirmation on my phone before this conversation proceeds another second.”

With a trembling hand, Thorne fumbled for his laptop, his fingers clumsily typing in passwords and authentication codes. The furious clicking of the keys was the only sound in the room. A few minutes later, a notification chimed on Lex’s phone. He glanced at it, his expression unchanging, and nodded.

“Good,” he said. “That settles the past. Now let’s talk about the future.”

He leaned forward, his hands resting on the edge of the desk. He was in Thorne’s space now, a violation the mogul was powerless to prevent.

“You have a multi-million-dollar network that requires a key only I can provide. As my lawyer just pointed out,” he gave a slight nod toward the speakerphone, “we need to establish a maintenance contract.”

Thorne stared at him, dread coiling in his gut.

“To ensure the continued, uninterrupted operation of the TCN network, and for the service of providing the daily Kronos Pulse authentication key, TCN will retain my services,” Lex declared. “The fee for this service will be one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Per month.”

Thorne choked. It was a strangled, gagging sound. “One hundred and… that’s insane! That’s robbery!”

“It’s the price of doing business,” Lex countered, his voice like ice. “It is non-negotiable. The contract will be indefinite. You will pay it, on the first of every month, for as long as you wish for your television station to remain on the air. Any missed payment, any attempt to circumvent our new arrangement, and the pulse stops. The contract with your syndication partners dissolves. You are ruined.”

He straightened up, his silhouette framed against the glittering city lights.

“This is the new deal, Mr. Thorne. This is the Thorne Leash. You wanted my full commitment? Now you have it. You are my most important client. And I will be your most expensive one.”

Thorne stared, his mind reeling. The figure was staggering, a parasitic drain designed to slowly bleed him. It was a punishment, a humiliation, delivered with the cold precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. He was being forced to pay a fortune, every single month, to the young man he had tried to swindle, for what amounted to five minutes of work. It was a perpetual monument to his own greed and arrogance.

The clock on the wall read 11:58 PM.

“Do we have an agreement?” Lex asked, his voice soft, yet carrying the weight of an ultimatum.

Thorne could see the abyss yawning before him. Financial ruin, public humiliation, the collapse of his empire. Or this. This slow, bleeding defeat. He squeezed his eyes shut. The booming, dismissive laugh he had aimed at Lex now echoed in his own mind, a mocking ghost.

He opened his eyes, and the last shred of his pride crumbled to dust.

“Yes,” Silas Thorne whispered, the word tasting like ash in his mouth. “We have an agreement.”

Lex pulled out his phone, typed a short string of alphanumeric characters, and hit send. In the core of the TCN network, the small black box received its authorization. The countdown clock for the system’s self-destruction reset from two minutes to twenty-four hours.

Without another word, Lex turned and walked out of the office, leaving the broken mogul to stare at the flawless, gleaming screens of his brand-new, billion-dollar prison.