Chapter 28 - The Class Clasp
Vane didn't cut the ties immediately. He stared at me for three agonizing seconds, weighing twenty-five years of federal procedure against the primal terror in my eyes.
"If you move an inch out of line," Vane whispered, drawing a tactical combat knife and slicing the thick plastic binding my wrists, "I will put two rounds through your femoral artery. Do you understand me?"
"Give me a weapon," I demanded, rubbing the raw, bleeding skin of my wrists.
"Not a chance in hell. Move!"
We hit the highway in a convoy of three unmarked black Suburbans, sirens screaming silently through the pre-dawn fog rolling off the Hudson. The rain had slowed to a freezing, needle-like drizzle that coated the asphalt in a slick sheen of black ice.
In the back of the lead Suburban, the female agent—whose name was Miller—slapped an encrypted tactical tablet onto my lap.
"We pulled the telemetry from Noah’s wristband bypass," Miller said, typing rapidly on her keyboard. "It wasn't a standard flash drive. It was a military-grade transceiver node manufactured by a private defense firm in Switzerland. It’s broadcasting a high-frequency handshake protocol to an offshore vessel anchored three miles off the Long Island Sound."
"What vessel?" I asked, watching the pulsing red dot on the satellite map crawl closer to the jagged coastline of Pier 9.
"A Panamanian-flagged container ship named *The Sea Phantom*," Agent Vane answered from the front passenger seat, racking the slide of his SIG Sauer. "Officially, it’s carrying industrial machinery from Rotterdam. Unofficially, it’s owned by a shell corporation controlled by *The Obsidian Group*."
"Noah thinks he’s saving his mother," I said, nausea twisting my gut into knots. "He heard her voice on that transponder. He thinks she’s waiting for him at the pier."
"And who’s actually waiting for him?" Miller asked quietly.
I stared at the tablet screen, at the coordinates blinking in crimson.
"The person who wore the titanium wire in her back," I said. "The woman we thought died fourteen months ago."
"You said the autopsy proved the body wasn't Claire," Vane countered, turning his head. "If the dead woman had the titanium spine, then Claire is alive."
"No," I whispered, the final, horrific piece of the puzzle locking violently into place. "You have it backward. The woman on the table *was* Claire. The medical records were altered *after* she died to make it look like someone else was in that grave! They wanted me to dig up that folder! They wanted me to think Claire was alive in Montreal!"
Vane frowned, his eyes narrowing into slits. "Why the hell would anyone want you to believe a dead woman is still alive?"
"Because," I said, my voice shaking with cold fury, "as long as the feds think Claire Carter is an active fugitive who stole thirty million dollars, they don't look for the real thief. They hunt a ghost. While the real mastermind walks out of the country using my name, my face, and my architectural credentials."
"Your twin," Miller whispered, her eyes wide.
May you like
"I don't have a twin," I said, staring at the dark industrial warehouses looming out of the coastal fog ahead. "I have a half-brother. A brother my father had with his first wife in Zurich—a brother who vanished from European records twenty years ago after serving five years for high-seas maritime fraud."
Julian.
