Chapter 6 - The Paperwork of Treason
By 2:00 AM, my private conference room in the financial district was fully operational. Three forensic accountants from an independent auditing firm were working alongside Dante’s digital forensics team, parsing through twenty gigabytes of unencrypted server files recovered from Victor Salazar’s coastal hotel suite.
The glass walls were covered in dry-erase markers tracing corporate family trees, offshore holding entities, and international wire routings.
Arthur Vance had not simply been a passive observer; he had been the architect.
"Look at this transaction layer," Sarah Lin, my lead forensic auditor, pointed her laser pen at a complex flow chart projected on the central screen. "Arthur created a blind testamentary sub-trust inside your late father's estate documents five years ago. It sat completely dormant until thirty days ago, when Genevieve signed the marital proxy agreement."
"What does the sub-trust do?" I asked, sipping black coffee that tasted of burnt ash.
"It activates an automatic liquidation trigger if the primary trustee—that’s you, James—is declared legally incapacitated, or if you enter a binding marriage with a co-trustee who initiates a restructuring petition," Sarah explained. "Julian Vance’s group in Luxembourg was prepared to file that petition forty-eight hours after your wedding vows were registered. They had already pre-sold your logistics fleet to an Asian maritime conglomerate for six hundred million dollars."
Six hundred million.
The scope of the operation was staggering. Genevieve was never intended to walk away with half of my estate in an ordinary divorce. She was a biological key, inserted into my life to unlock a financial guillotine that Arthur and Julian Vance had constructed years earlier, waiting for the right moment to execute it.
"And Genevieve’s cut?" I asked.
Dante pulled up a secondary document on his tablet. "Ten million flat. Deposited into an anonymous bearer account in Panama upon successful execution of the restructuring petition. She wasn't an equal partner in the syndicate, James. She was an expensive, highly trained mercenary."
I stared at the screen, at the numbers, at the signatures. My own signature sat alongside hers on three separate documents—agreements I had skimmed over because she had kissed me on the cheek, because she had brought me coffee in bed, because she had looked at me with those wide, deceitful eyes and told me she didn't care about money.
*“The man is pathetically romantic.”*
Her voice echoed through my mind again, but the pain was gone now. In its place was something cold, clinical, and deadly.
"Where is Arthur heading?" I asked Dante.
"There's a private airstrip in Mendocino County," Dante replied, zooming in on a satellite map on his screen. "A twin-engine turboprop registered to a charter company owned by the Valmont Group is scheduled to depart at 4:30 AM for Vancouver, with a connecting flight to Zurich."
I checked the wall clock. 2:24 AM.
"How far is Mendocino by helicopter?"
Dante looked up from his tablet, his eyes meeting mine. A faint, dangerous shadow crossed his face. "Thirty-five minutes from the downtown helipad. We have two bird charters on standby."
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"Get the team ready," I ordered, pushing my chair back from the mahogany table. "Arthur Vance has been handling my family's affairs for twenty years. Before he boards that plane to Europe, he’s going to explain every single line of this treason to my face."
***
