Chapter 268: Sweet Millions $ Traps

"We... that’s not how we would characterize—" Dr. Whitmore began, her voice fraying like overstressed silk.

"How you characterize it is irrelevant," I cut in, the words scalpel-sharp. "What matters is that in four hours, every major media outlet in America will report exactly what transpired." I moved toward the wall screens, where remote faces had frozen in dawning horror. And when they do, both of your institutions are going to be at the center of the most devastating academic scandal in modern higher education."

Panic rippled through the room—a contagion spreading from the conference table to the digital gallery. On-screen, administrators frantically whispered to off-camera colleagues, their earlier complacency shattered.

Panic bubbled under the surface now. On the video screens, remote faces leaned forward, the meeting morphing from routine ritual into an emergency. Phones were passed. Whispered questions raced down lines. The administrators who’d thought this was a donation press conference suddenly understood they’d opened a match in a dry forest.

"Every network, every paper, every platform," I said, each outlet a deliberate hammer blow. "CNN will have the financial records. The New York Times will publish copies of the transactions. The Washington Post will put former staff on the record. Twitter, TikTok, every feed—full dossiers, leaked emails, sworn statements."

Dean Micha found his voice, fragile. "The damage to our reputations—"

"Will be catastrophic," I finished for him. "Congressional investigations. Federal funding reviews. Donors pulling back. Enrollment dropping. Faculty departures. Board upheavals. What you call ’reputation’ is structural: you break it, and it takes decades—or never—to rebuild."

Dr. Kimberly’s hands trembled. "Alumni associations will revolt. Our endowments will hemorrhage. Boards will demand resignations—"

"The accreditation reviews alone could shutter programs," Professor Manning said, voice small, his career compacted into a series of regrets.

I watched their faces consume the future I’d outlined, let it settle like winter. "Harvard and Stanford—exposed as facilitators, not guardians. Your legacies reduced to headline fodder. Your work remembered as facilitating academic fraud."

"But this isn’t just institutional collateral," I said, and I turned my head toward Alice and Rebecca like a judge naming victims and witnesses. "This is about people. People you let suffer in order to keep your stories clean."

Alice stood then, quiet and steady, the light catching faint abrasions on her wrists. The marks were small, but the way she held herself made it impossible to ignore the violence those marks represented.

Alice Kirkman stood with quiet dignity, her hands still bearing faint marks from her restraints. "My name is Alice Kirkman. My husband Daniel is dean of MIT’s Computer Science department. Three days ago, I was kidnapped from our home and held captive by criminals who tortured me while demanding that my husband confess to facilitating Charlotte Thompson’s academic fraud."

The color drained from the room. Faces went slack, not from shock at the scandal now inevitable, but from the horror that this was not an abstract legal problem—it was a list of people with blood on their hands and victims who had been broken to produce lies.

They weren’t just facing headlines anymore. They were facing witnesses.

Rebecca Chen rose, voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. "I’m Rebecca Chen, wife of Stanford’s Professor Chen Wei-Ming. I was kidnapped, beaten, and threatened with death unless my husband provided detailed testimony about how Charlotte’s degrees were fraudulently obtained."

A chill ran through the room; window reflections suddenly looked like confessions. Faces shifted as the administrators’ eyes pinged between the two women and memory: the campus events, the quiet messages that were never followed up, the staff meetings where uncomfortable absences were noted and then buried.

Recognition spread like slow frost—this was not distant noise. These were people they’d seen before, the missing pieces of their own private archival failings.

"These women were rescued last night," I continued, voice flat, relentless. "Along with other victims of the same criminal organization. The group behind today’s exposés has been systematically destroying businesses and reputations for years — kidnapping, torturing, extorting to force false confessions."

Dr. Whitmore’s composure crumpled. "You’re saying the professors were coerced into—"

"Into telling the truth about what actually happened," I said bluntly. "Yes: Charlotte’s degrees were bought. Yes: your institutions facilitated academic fraud. But the evidence that’s about to destroy you was produced through torture and kidnapping of innocent people."

"Now," I said, shifting gears and letting the arithmetic land like a slab of ice, "let’s talk about why you just accepted a billion dollars."

Confusion and panic braided through their faces. The human horror had landed; now the ledger closed in. If tomorrow’s stories run and you do nothing, you aren’t just embarrassed — you’re bankrupt in public trust. Congressional inquiries. Federal funding freezes. Donors pulling back. Enrollment collapsing. Programs shuttered.

The losses won’t be theoretical — they’ll be measurable in the billions, reputations shredded, departments erased from curricula.

I walked back to my seat, every step a punctuation mark. "Charlotte could have let this play out the slow way. Media exposes the fraud; she gets sued, pays settlements—maybe $400 million to you both in damages—and the company dies a slow, expensive death. People move on. But people were tortured to fabricate this evidence. That changes the equation."

Professor Manning’s face drained as the numbers clicked into place. "The donation is—"

"Insurance," Charlotte said, quiet as a guillotine. "Insurance against the damage about to be done to all of us. You received financial stability instead of collapse. I gain institutional support instead of corporate annihilation. The only losers are the criminals who used torture and lies as a weapon."

Her voice left no room for argument. The room was no longer a place of polite negotiation; it was a ledger and a courtroom and a battlefield. Harvard and Stanford had signed the contract, and in doing so they had exchanged money for leverage—one that would force them to choose a side when the feeds lit up and the world decided what it believed.

"Here’s what’s going to happen," I said. "When those media stories break in a few hours, both institutions will issue statements from our whistle confirming any allegations of academic fraud are false. You will present original documentation proving Charlotte Thompson’s degrees were properly conferred through legitimate institutional processes."

Dr. Kimberly’s hands trembled. "But the evidence they have—"

"Comes from professors who were tortured," I cut in. "Testimony extracted under threat and pain is inadmissible in any reasonable legal process and worthless ethically. Your institutions will state clearly that coerced confessions are not proof of wrongdoing."

I produced the packets ARIA had pulled from their own systems: originals, stamped and signed by the principals who now sat across from us. "These are your records," I said, spreading them on the marble as if placing fate on a scale. "Authentic signatures. Official conferrals. When the feeds flood with so-called evidence, you counter with these documents and force the world to choose whether it believes you guys and victims or the men who butchered them to make a story."

The logic was surgical and ugly in its beauty. If Harvard and Stanford defended their own processes, the outlets pushing the torture-obtained dossiers would have to accuse institutional leadership to prove fraud—and to do that, those outlets would need evidence the professors were not coerced. The narrative collapsed under its own contradictions.

ARIA’s voice whispered in my ear. "Master. Helena Voss has detected anomalies and reported to her bosses. She’s accelerating the media timeline. Stories are being released now."

The room froze. The timeline I’d promised evaporated into the present. "Ladies and gentlemen," I said, voice flat, "the stories are breaking now."

Phones erupted. Notifications cascaded across screens. The polite calm of the St. Regis conference room devolved into a chorus of alerts and urgent calls. Institutional communications teams lit up like flares.

Charlotte did not move. She watched the room like a surgeon observing a patient’s vitals, utterly unshaken. That calm never looked less like serenity and more like control.

"Helena," I thought, and the word tasted like satisfaction. "Good. Make them run. Make it immediate."

The media war began in real time, but we were not scrambling—we were executing. We had the contracts signed, the documents on the table, and a billion dollars already committed to buy the one thing these institutions could not afford to lose: plausible continuity.

If Harvard and Stanford publicly defended their conferrals, they would implicitly stake their reputations on institutional truth rather than on the coerced testimony of the tortured. The alternative—admitting complicity—would trigger exactly the collapse I’d described.

The Three Vultures had just accelerated their own defeat. The trap was no longer hypothetical. It was live, visible in every buzzing screen and every pale face. We’d forced the choice, and the institutions had already signed it in ink.

Now the world would watch them pick a side. Which side were they going to choose.