Beneath the Billionaire Mask - Chapter 62: Chapter 62

Remote Safehouse – French Borderlands – 9:48 AM
The quiet didn’t feel like peace.
It felt like a pause before something bigger.
Adrian stood at the edge of the terrace, looking out over the mist-covered hills. A warm cup of untouched black coffee rested in his palm, steam curling into the morning air. He hadn’t slept. Not since Elena opened her eyes.
She was stable. Awake. But… different.
Not broken.
Not lost.
Just processing.
Liana stepped out beside him, eyes still bruised with exhaustion, tablet clutched in one hand.
“We intercepted something,” she said, voice low.
Adrian turned. “What kind of something?”
She handed over the screen.
A flashing transmission ID.
Source: A.R.M.O.R.-001 Server
Timestamp: 4:03 AM – exactly five minutes after the APEX purge.
Subject line: HADES PROTOCOL – INITIATED
Encrypted Signature: J.K.
Adrian’s jaw tightened.
“Julia,” he muttered. “She had a failsafe.”
Liana nodded grimly. “I think APEX wasn’t the whole system. It was just the bait. The real core… we’ve never seen it.”
Adrian stared at the name of the protocol.
HADES.
It wasn’t just a kill switch.
It was resurrection.
Interior – Elena’s Room – 10:12 AM
Elena sat up slowly, the sheets pulled around her legs, her father’s badge still resting on the bedside table like a sacred relic. The fog in her mind was starting to clear — not all at once, but in scattered images.
Her hand trembled as she scrolled through the old files Julia never intended her to see.
Childhood surveillance photos.
Blackwood’s sealed testimony.
Cruz Sr.’s final classified journal.
She’d been hunted her entire life and never knew it.
A soft knock on the door.
“It’s me,” Adrian said.
She looked up as he entered. He saw her holding the badge, eyes unreadable.
“Do you remember… before the vault?” he asked.
She nodded faintly.
“Some things. But not everything.”
Adrian hesitated, then held up the tablet.
“Then you need to see this.”
She read the subject line.
HADES PROTOCOL.
“What is it?” she asked.
Liana stepped in behind Adrian. “A ghost system. A backup Julia embedded into her darkest network—the one your father feared most.”
Elena’s pulse kicked.
“So APEX… wasn’t the end?”
Adrian shook his head.
“No. It was the opening act.”
Classified Transmission – Unknown Location – 10:47 AM
Somewhere deep in the Carpathian Mountains, under layers of encryption, the first test of HADES was underway.
A black chamber flickered to life. Dozens of consciousness storage drives—illegal tech buried under seven countries’ regulations started pulsing.
Inside one of them?
Subject: G.Cruz
Status: Contained
Status: Rewriting memory core… 17%
Projected Outcome: Phase II Host
A shadowed voice whispered from the darkness:
“Let’s bring the old ghosts back… and give them new faces.”
Remote Safehouse – Situation Room – 11:23 AM
The walls were lined with outdated tech—intentionally analog to avoid surveillance. Wires ran like veins through dusty monitors and satellite rigs. Liana sat cross-legged on the floor, tracing the digital footprints left by HADES.
Elena stood behind her, still pale, still shaken, but steady.
“Every time I think it’s over,” she whispered, “something worse shows up.”
Liana didn’t look up. “That’s what makes it real. Peace isn’t the end. It’s the pause between storms.”
She pointed to the screen.
“HADES isn’t a surveillance protocol like APEX. It’s worse. It’s reconstruction. Using memory backups from every high-value figure who ever passed through the system. Politicians. CEOs. Operatives. Ghosts.”
Elena leaned closer, mouth dry.
“Are you saying… she’s building digital copies of the dead?”
“No,” Adrian said from the doorway. “She’s not copying them. She’s reviving them.”
He stepped in, holding a flash drive labeled C.R.I.S.
“This showed up at one of my dead drops this morning. I didn’t put it there.”
Elena took it, eyes narrowing.
“Julia?”
He shook his head. “Someone else. Someone inside HADES. Someone who wants us to see what’s coming.”
Flash Drive Contents – 11:31 AM
A video began to play—grainy and low-resolution.
A dimly lit facility. Surgical tables. Data streams pulsing across cold screens. Then—
A man.
Bound to the chair, metal bands around his skull. His face was bruised, but unmistakable.
Guillermo Cruz. Elena’s father.
But the file date was three days ago.
“That’s impossible,” she breathed.
“It’s not,” Liana said. “They didn’t save his body, Elena. They saved his pattern. His cognition. His voiceprint. They’re rebuilding him digitally.”
Elena’s hands curled into fists. Her heart pounded.
“He’s not alive. That’s not him.”
Adrian said nothing.
Because he didn’t know how to disagree.
Black Site – HADES Chamber – 12:02 PM
Julia stood before the screen as Subject G.Cruz began to stabilize.
“You were the first one to betray me,” she whispered, touching the glass.
“So now… you’ll help me fix the world.”
The man behind the glass twitched—eyes blank, lips forming words that weren’t his own.
“Phase II. Activated.”
Safehouse – Satellite Trace – 12:29 PM
Adrian slammed his fist against the table.
“They’re using him.”
Elena stared at the paused screen—her father’s face, twisted in artificial awareness.
“Not him,” she said, trembling. “Just… his ghost.”
Liana turned from the console. “Then we hunt ghosts.”
She tapped a new location—highlighted in red.
“They’re assembling the second unit. Ten digital operatives. The perfect black-ops force. No conscience. No allegiance. All running on memories of the past.”
Adrian looked at Elena.
“We stop this now… or the past rewrites the future.”
Elena nodded slowly.
“Then we go dark.”
Safehouse Bunker – Private Comms Room – 1:04 PM
The light from the screen flickered against Adrian’s face as he decoded the final line of the Lazarus transmission.
A signature blinked in the corner of the file.
Not Julia’s.
Someone else.
A cipher Adrian hadn’t seen in years:
NV-06.
He leaned forward slowly, whispering.
“Noah Vale…”
Liana looked up sharply. “That can’t be. He’s dead. Officially, legally—twice.”
Adrian didn’t answer. He just stared at the blinking tag.
Noah Vale. Marcus’s brother. The prodigy who supposedly disappeared in the early Blackwood Foundation years. The one they buried without a body.
And the only person who had once written a line of code Adrian couldn’t crack.
Elena’s Quarters – 1:17 PM
Elena ran her fingertips over her father’s badge, watching the encrypted feed looping from the flash drive again.
His voice haunted her.
“If you’re seeing this, then I failed to outrun the shadows. But they’re not done with you yet.”
Even in reconstruction, the voice had warmth. The cadence was exact. The pattern of breath.
Too real.
“They took his choices,” she murmured. “Rewrote him into something programmable.”
She looked up as Adrian entered.
“This isn’t about ghosts. It’s about control. If they can reconstruct someone like my father… what’s stopping them from doing it to anyone?”
Adrian’s expression was grave. “Nothing. That’s the point.”
A long silence passed between them.
“You think this is what Julia always planned?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“No. I think even she didn’t know who she was working with.”
Unknown Location – Control Room – 2:02 PM
A wall of screens. Ten figures standing in glass pods, hooked into neural relays.
Voices in the shadows.
One man stood at the center, watching. Smiling.
“The test subjects are stable. One anomaly,” a technician said.
The man didn’t flinch.
“Let it play out. We need to know if memory breeds loyalty.”
He turned toward the pod marked Subject 06 — its biometric tag matching that of an old CIA ghost. One of Adrian’s original operatives.
“Let them hunt the ones who built them.”
A cold smile curled his lips.
“Let them hunt Blackwood.”
Safehouse – Armory Room – 2:46 PM
Adrian tossed down his gear onto the steel bench.
“We hit one of their replication sites. Tonight.”
Liana looked up. “They’ll know it’s us.”
“Good.”
Elena stepped in behind them, pulling on her coat.
“If they’re reviving the worst of the past,” she said, voice low, “then we give them a future they can’t predict.”
Adrian glanced at her.
“You sure you’re ready for this?”
She nodded once.
“I was born in someone else’s shadow. I think it’s time I step out of it.”
Swiss Border – Moving Train – 4:19 PM
The train cut through the alps like a silver blade. Inside, Adrian sat in a private cabin across from Elena and Liana. A portable secure drive lay on the table, humming faintly with energy.
“We traced the Lazarus code,” Liana said, eyes locked on the flickering screen. “It didn’t originate from Julia. Or Marcus.”
She tapped a series of coordinates.
“It came from someone calling himself NV06.”
Elena stilled. “Who is that?”
Adrian’s face darkened. “Someone we thought was dead. My original architect. The one who designed the Black Archive’s neural backbone. Noah Vale.”
Liana added, “And possibly… the real father of HADES.”
Elena blinked. “You’re saying HADES wasn’t created by Julia?”
“No. She used it,” Adrian said. “But someone else built the framework.”
“For what?” Elena asked, heart racing.
“Immortality,” Adrian answered flatly. “Not in body. In control. If HADES completes itself, no secret stays buried. No identity stays safe. Everyone becomes programmable.”
Encrypted Broadcast – HADES Relay Station, Romania – 4:57 PM
A figure stood in front of the pod marked Subject 01. His back to the camera. His voice calm.
Clean. Robotic.
“She thinks she won. He thinks he healed. They forget — memory isn’t a record. It’s a weapon.”
The screen glitched, then cleared.
Noah Vale turned to face the monitor.
Eyes artificial. But smiling.
“Hello, Adrian.”
Train Cabin – 5:03 PM
The screen went black.
Adrian didn’t move. Neither did Liana or Elena.
“It’s a message,” Elena said slowly. “He wanted you to see him.”
Adrian nodded. “He always liked theatrics.”
“What now?” Liana asked.
Adrian leaned forward, eyes hard as steel.
“Now we remind him what happens when ghosts come for the living.”
Safehouse – Surveillance Hub – 6:42 PM
Liana’s fingers flew over the keyboard, decrypting the last fragments of data from the Lazarus flash drive. Each line revealed another layer — and another buried truth.
Behind her, Elena stood frozen, eyes glued to the screen. The replay of her father’s face flickered again, the same message echoing like a ghost in the room:
“If you’re seeing this… they’ve taken more than my name. They’ve taken my soul.”
“This isn’t just about what’s next,” Elena murmured. “It’s about what they’ve already done.”
Adrian’s voice was low and distant. “We thought we stopped the program at Blackwood Tower. But HADES was never about files. It was about replication. Legacy. Control.”
Liana turned around, pale. “This isn’t the only instance. There are more. Other subjects. Other stolen identities. Stored. Modified. Weaponized.”
She tapped the screen. A list scrolled down — ten names.
Some redacted.
Some not.
But one stood out in bold:
Adrian Blackwood.
The room dropped into dead silence.
Elena stared at him. “They copied you?”
“Not just copied,” Adrian said grimly. “They’re trying to overwrite me.”
Black Site – Geneva Containment Vault – 7:03 PM
A tech in a sterile suit stood beside a pod labeled:
Subject: BLACKWOOD-V2
Inside: a man.
His face — a perfect match to Adrian.
His vitals — enhanced. Cognition rate: 148%. Combat simulation: 99.6%.
The AI monitoring system blinked green:
Stabilization complete.
The figure inside stirred, eyelids fluttering.
Then opened — cold and calculating.
The assistant leaned forward to confirm the sync process—
But the pod cracked open before she could react.
The Blackwood replica stepped out barefoot, took her wrist—gently.
“Where is Elena Cruz?” he asked calmly.
She didn’t answer fast enough.
He broke her arm.
Safehouse – Briefing Table – 7:34 PM
Adrian gripped the tablet, his own face staring back at him from the surveillance still. Eyes like his. Movements like his. But off. Too perfect. Too rehearsed.
“This… isn’t possible,” Elena whispered. “They didn’t just make a clone. They made a better version of you.”
Adrian stared at the image, jaw tight.
“Then we have to remind them why perfection breaks faster than pain ever did.”