Chapter 13
The man standing in the library above did not look panicked. He adjusted the gold-rimmed glasses resting on his sharp nose, his tailored federal suit immaculate despite the chaos that had consumed the rest of the estate.
"Miss Vance," Deputy Attorney General Robert Sterling said smoothly, his voice carrying clearly up through the ventilation shaft. "I must admit, you are far more persistent than your mother was."
Lyra froze, her fingers wrapped around the frayed copper wires of the emergency junction box. "Sterling. Clara was your daughter."
Robert Sterling smiled—a cold, polite expression that lacked any hint of paternal sorrow. "Clara was a disappointment who let her vanity interfere with long-term strategy. She was supposed to marry Julian to secure the Vance estate legally, not turn it into a public spectacle of petty abuse."
"You watched them torture me for three years," Lyra hissed, her voice vibrating with suppressed fury. "You signed off on every federal protection order that kept Julian out of prison."
"Politics requires sacrifices, Lyra," Robert said, walking slowly over to the shredding machine and feeding another handful of documents into the spinning steel blades. "The Vance fortune was built on illegal mineral concessions and political bribery. I merely intended to redirect those funds into the federal oversight committee's black-budget accounts. Your father's return was... an inconvenient complication."
Arthur’s voice echoed from deep within the ventilation pipe behind Lyra. "You're standing on borrowed time, Robert. The state police have the estate surrounded, and every encrypted file on your black-budget accounts has already been mirrored to an independent server in Geneva."
Robert stopped shredding, his smile faltering for a fraction of a second as he glanced toward the library doors. "Your father always was an overachiever. Unfortunately for both of you, the state police outside take orders from the federal judiciary—which happens to report directly to my office."
Before Robert could reach for his secure satellite phone on the mahogany desk, Lyra jammed the bare copper wires into the terminal's manual override port, bypassing the encryption firewall with the decryption sequence from her mother's cassette tape.
A high-pitched digital whine pierced the air as the library's massive smart-screens suddenly flickered to life, broadcasting Robert Sterling’s voice confessing to the entire embezzlement scheme across every television monitor, radio frequency, and police cruiser radio within a five-mile radius.
May you like
Robert’s face drained of color as he heard his own voice echoing from the courtyard outside. "You little bitch—"
He lunged toward the ventilation shaft, drawing a suppressed automatic pistol from his shoulder holster and leveling the barrel directly at Lyra’s face.
