Chapter 8
The rain had cleared, leaving the evening air sharp and smelling of wet asphalt and blooming jasmine. The town car idled at the curb outside the medical archives, its exhaust curling into the streetlamps like pale ribbons. Arthur sat in the back, scrolling through a tablet displaying real-time financial transactions, when the rear door opened and Elena slid into the leather seat beside him.
She did not speak. She simply placed the surgically altered file on the center console between them.
Arthur glanced down at it, his eyes narrowing instantly as he spotted the frayed blue nylon threading along the spine. He looked up at his daughter, his expression hardening into stone. “Sterling.”
“He was waiting for me,” Elena said, her voice clipped. “He knew I would come looking for the missing incident report. He claims he holds the original police transcript from the night of the crash.”
Arthur reached out, his gloved fingers tracing the mutilated edge of the file. “Sterling is a cleaner. He doesn’t work for Senator Hayes. He works for the syndicate that bought up the western rail corridor twenty years ago—the same syndicate your mother was tracking before her car went over the barrier.”
“He offered a trade,” Elena continued, turning her head toward him. “The original police report in exchange for the encryption keys to the off-site server backups we pulled from the municipal accounts.”
Arthur’s hand froze on the console. The silence in the car grew heavy, suffocating the hum of the engine. “You didn’t agree.”
“I told him I needed twenty-four hours to consider the terms,” Elena replied smoothly. “Which gave our automated proxy scripts enough time to trace the ping of his mobile device back to a private holding corporation registered under your own brother’s name.”
May you like
Arthur stopped breathing for a fraction of a second. The tablet in his hand slipped an inch before he tightened his grip. “My brother died in Geneva twelve years ago.”
“That’s what the obituary claimed,” Elena said, reaching into her blazer pocket and placing a small, encrypted flash drive right on top of the altered file. “But someone accessed the Vance family trust fund from a Swiss IP address thirty minutes before Director Sterling approached me in the archives.”
