Chapter 8 - The Emergency Broadcast
Agent Vance stood up so abruptly her metal chair scraped harshly against the floor.
"What happened?" Leo asked, springing to his feet alongside her.
"The private charter," Agent Vance said, her voice dropping to a tense whisper that barely reached Clara across the table. "It never made it to the runway. The control tower lost radar contact three minutes after taxiing."
Clara froze, the cold weight of the room pressing down on her chest. "Lost contact? What does that mean? Did they crash?"
"We don't know yet," Agent Vance said, turning sharply toward the door. "Lock her down in holding unit four. No phone calls, no visitors, and double the perimeter guard."
"Wait!" Clara cried out, standing up as the officers moved in to escort her out. "If David’s plane is missing, then the money—the trust—where does that leave me?"
"It leaves you as the prime suspect in an ongoing federal investigation involving a missing aircraft and fifty million dollars in embezzled corporate funds," Leo answered, his eyes filled with a complicated mix of suspicion and pity as he gently guided her toward the reinforced exit.
The holding cell was small, windowless, and painted a depressing shade of institutional beige.
Clara sat on the edge of the thin foam mattress, staring at her own reflection in the dark, reinforced glass of the narrow observation slit in the heavy steel door.
Hours seemed to bleed into one another in total silence, broken only by the distant, rhythmic ticking of a clock somewhere down the corridor.
Then, without warning, the small wall-mounted television in the upper corner of the cell flickered to life, broadcasting a breaking news alert with bold red graphics flashing across the screen: “SEARCH AND RESCUE INITIATED FOR PRIVATE JET OFF COAST.”
Clara stood up and pressed her face close to the screen as the news anchor began reading the passenger manifest recovered from the hangar.
"We repeat, the sole passenger registered on the manifest at the time of departure was not David Vance," the anchor announced, flashing a photograph of a smiling, unfamiliar man across the screen. "Authorities have identified the passenger as Marcus Thorne—a known corporate liquidator wanted for federal tax evasion."
Clara staggered backward, her mind reeling as the terrifying truth slammed into her with the force of a physical blow.
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Marcus wasn't just a random man in an identical SUV; he was the person David had been working with all along—and David hadn't been on that plane at all.
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