Chapter 6
Upstairs in the guest bedroom, the air was cool and smelled of fresh lavender linen. Rebecca placed the tablet on the mahogany desk, her fingers hovering over the glass screen like a pianist preparing for a complex movement. The room was illuminated only by the pale glow of the moon filtering through the lace curtains and the harsh, bright rectangle of the tablet interface.
Arthur stood behind her, his hands resting heavily on the back of the wooden chair, acting as a physical anchor against the rising tide of her anxiety. "Are you sure the sync completed before he smashed the phone?"
"Positive," Rebecca whispered, tapping the screen to open the encrypted drive. A folder labeled Project Apex materialized on the display. She tapped it, and a cascading list of PDF documents, scanned wire transfers, and audio recordings popped up in rapid succession. "It’s all here, Dad. Every bribe, every shell company, every corrupted municipal official."
She clicked on a random audio file. A progress bar appeared, and she pressed play, turning the volume down low. Julian’s cold, clipped voice filled the quiet bedroom, speaking to someone named Henderson about rezoning a protected wetland area for industrial warehousing in exchange for a fifty-thousand-dollar kickback routed through a Cayman Islands account.
Arthur closed his eyes for a second, listening to his son-in-law trade away the integrity of the city he had helped design thirty years prior. When the audio clip ended, the silence in the room felt suffocating.
"He’s deeply entrenched," Arthur said, his voice hard as flint. "Henderson is the deputy director of city planning. If Julian has him in his pocket, half the municipal board is compromised."
"That’s why he panicked," Rebecca said, exporting the entire folder to an encrypted external flash drive she kept hidden in her travel pouch. "If I go to the police with this, Julian’s entire network goes down with him. He couldn't risk letting me walk out that front door with the phone, but he underestimated me."
"He always underestimates people who care about things other than power and money," Arthur replied, pulling a small leather-bound notebook from his shirt pocket. "We need to bypass the local precinct. If Julian has municipal influence, a local report could easily find its way to his desk before the ink is dry. We need federal contact."
Rebecca paused, looking up at her father with wide eyes. "The FBI field office downtown?"
May you like
"Yes," Arthur nodded firmly. "An old colleague of mine from the civil engineering commission retired into federal oversight two years ago. Agent Miller. He’s clean, he’s thorough, and he hates municipal corruption with a passion."
Before Rebecca could answer, the screen of the tablet flickered. A notification banner dropped down from the top of the display, chilling the blood in her veins: New sign-in detected on Julian’s master account from a secondary IP address.
