Chapter 10 - The Cryptic Coordinates
The taxi rattled through the downtown traffic, weaving between delivery trucks and yellow cabs as the afternoon shadows lengthened across the concrete canyons of the city. In the back seat, Claire stared down at her smartphone screen. The audio file from the flash drive played on a continuous loop, the mechanical hum of the background noise in the recording giving way to a clear, distinct set of geographic coordinates followed by a string of numbers.
"If anything ever happens to me, the vault beneath the St. Jude Parish archive holds the primary deeds," Julian’s voice in the recording said to an unknown listener. "The church leadership thinks it’s just old diocesan paperwork from the nineteen-sixties. They have no idea our firm acquired the structural rights to the basement sub-level twenty years ago."
Marcus leaned over, reading the numbers off the screen. "St. Jude Parish? That’s the historic stone church on the corner of Fourth and Elm. It’s been designated a historical landmark for over a decade."
"Which means it's heavily protected from unauthorized structural modifications, but it also means no one ever goes down into the sub-basement archives unless they have explicit clearance from the diocese," Claire said, her voice entirely calm. "Julian used the church as a blind trust to hide physical bearer bonds and original land deeds that prove the firm was built on embezzled trust funds from the very beginning."
"If we go down there without a federal warrant, we're trespassing on church property," Marcus warned, though his tone suggested he was already calculating the logistics of breaking in. "And if Julian's outside associates realize where we're heading, they'll beat us there."
"We aren't going to break in, Marcus," Claire replied, slipping the flash drive into her blazer pocket. "We're going to walk right through the front door with an ecclesiastical preservation order signed by the senior archivist of the federal district court."
Marcus blinked in surprise. "You managed to get a preservation order issued while we were in the taxi?"
"I filed the paperwork electronically using Arthur Sterling’s notarized affidavit before we even left the courtroom," Claire said simply. "The federal judiciary moves very quickly when you hand them proof of systemic institutional fraud involving a historic landmark used for money laundering."
The taxi pulled up to the heavy oak doors of St. Jude Parish, a towering Gothic Revival structure built of dark gray stone that stood defiantly against the gleaming glass skyscrapers surrounding it. The stone gargoyles overhead seemed to watch them with stony indifference as Claire and Marcus stepped out onto the damp pavement.
May you like
As they walked up the wide stone steps toward the heavy wooden doors, a black sedan pulled up across the street, idling with its headlights off. Claire didn't turn around, but she felt the cold prickle of awareness at the back of her neck. Someone was watching them.
---
