Chapter 107 - The Safehouse in Portsmouth
By four in the morning, the sleet had turned into a relentless, freezing rain that sheeted across the cracked windshield of the Subaru. I pulled into the rear alley behind a commercial fish-packing plant on the outskirts of Portsmouth, parking beneath the shadow of a rusted shipping container.
My body was shaking violently—partly from the sub-zero chill that had seeped into my marrow, partly from the sheer exhaustion of seventy-two hours of running. But my mind was sharper than it had ever been.
I took out the laminated cryptographic key I had pulled from the ledger. In the pale amber light of the dashboard, I held it beside Arthur's personal pocketbook—the one I had taken from his desk in the farmhouse three days ago.
The micro-polymer insert bore a string of twenty-four alphanumeric characters. It wasn't an account number; it was a digital recovery key for a blind trust managed by Banque Cantonale de Genève. And beneath the serial code, stamped in microscopic blue ink, was a routing destination: *Logistics Terminal 4, Logan International Airport, Boston.*
My burner phone—the cheap prepaid flip phone I had purchased at a gas station outside Conway—vibrated on the passenger seat.
It was an incoming text message from an unknown number with a Boston area code.
*Mom. Please. They won't let us leave the hotel. Tori took the kids' passports. She's meeting someone at Terminal E at six o'clock. I don't know who she works for anymore. Please.*
It was Caleb. Broken, terrified, completely undone.
I stared at the glowing green letters on the tiny screen. For months, I had been furious with him. Furious at his weakness, furious that he had allowed Tori to walk into my house and treat me like unpaid labor while he stared at his shoes. But looking at the text now, I realized the full scope of the trap Arthur had constructed.
Arthur hadn't just faked his death to protect his money. He had placed Tori in Caleb’s path five years ago to keep the Vance lineage tethered to his offshore accounts. Caleb wasn't an accomplice; he was a hostage who had been too stupid to realize his collar had an electric charge.
I dialed the number back. Caleb answered on the first half-ring, his voice cracking with hysterical sobs.
May you like
"Mom? Mom, is that you?"
"Get a grip on yourself, Caleb," I said, my voice cutting through his panic like a scalpel. "Where are the children?"
