CHAPTER SEVEN

Disclaimer in Chapter One

It had been thirty-seven hours since he had gotten any sleep.  A blackout here and there, but Derek had been chugging away on his computer.  Searching for that one glimmer of hope that would give him what he wanted.

Chloe was always the mastermind behind their missions.  And when Lex entered the inner circle, he shared that position with her.

But Derek.  Derek was the sidekick.  'Call me Robin' he joked to himself, though at this point, he felt useless.  For days, he had gone over the clippings before and after Lex's supposed death, and he had tried to hack into the LuthorCorp mainframe to find some data that could possibly help him.

He had even checked in the deeper pockets where Chloe had indicated as possible hot spots for Lionel's secrets.  None so far.

Two more data chambers left to dig through.  "If nothing comes up, I'm officially screwed," he told himself.

A couple of taps on his keyboards combined with some clicks on his wireless mouse opened the first chamber.  While the jargon might be foreign to inexperienced eyes, Derek expertly read through the binary sequences of LuthorCorp files.

Invoices were all he could find.  Invoices of shipping transactions, payroll data.. 

"Oh, hello," Derek greeted at the file well-embedded within these invoices.  Moving to the computer system to his right, he copied the data for safekeeping and ran his translator.

"Abernathy, you're a bleeding genius," he complimented himself as he realized that he just opened a memo from Lionel to some of his top henchmen that their search for Lex was to be extended past the funeral.

'He wanted confirmation of Lex's death.'

Derek nearly fell over as he rushed back to the system where the LuthorCorp mainframe waited for his next move.

He quickly typed in the code to enter the final chamber.  Quickly skimming through the files, he finally found the file he was looking for.

After he copied and translated the file into his system, he took a moment before opening the translated file.

Finally finding the guts to continue, he read the contents.  Normally an eloquent guy, he found that he couldn't say anything else other than "holy shit".

 "Holy shit, Lex," Derek practically yelled at him through the CB radio.  "Do something!"

"I can't!" he responded.  "Even if I wanted to, Chloe would kill me if I blow our cover."

"Yeah, that's something to be worried about," Derek retorted sarcastically.

"Shit!" Lex screamed.

"What?  What happened?" Chloe's best friend asked, his concern intensifying by the second.  "Lex?" he called out one more time before realizing that no one was on the other line.

Lex sprinted from his car parked at the other end of dam instantly after he saw Ian knocked Chloe to the ground.  She appeared unconscious right when he exited the car, and it was confirmed when the clone closest to her picked her up and threw her off the bridge. 

"No," Lex screamed.  "Chloe!"

"Chloe!" he screamed again as he jumped from his lying position.  Adrenaline pumping and heart beating furiously, he was trying to catch his breath after realizing that it was only a dream.

"Chloe," he uttered once more in a whisper as Lex Luthor fell back into his tropical bed of leaves.