Chapter 125 - The Voice in the Receiver
The satellite phone clicked, hissed through three layers of digital encryption, and finally emitted the slow, hollow ring of an overseas transatlantic connection.
It was mid-morning in Sicily, which meant it was barely dawn in Massachusetts. Caleb answered on the fourth ring. His voice sounded raw, thick with bourbon and exhaustion, the rasp of a man who hadn't slept in a bed without checking the locks three times.
"Hello? Who is this? If this is the state police, I told your detective everything I know about the storage units—"
"Shut your mouth, Caleb," I said, cutting him off before he could build his barricade of lies.
A dead silence hung on the satellite frequency. In the background, three thousand miles away, I could hear the faint, shrill hum of a refrigerator and the muffled clink of a glass.
"Mom?" His voice cracked like dry kindling. "Where are you? Jesus Christ, Mom, you have to come back. The FBI visited the house in Portsmouth yesterday. They took all the records from the marina. They're talking about wire fraud, foreign bank accounts—they say Dad had offshore accounts that go back to the eighties—"
"I know what Arthur had," I interrupted, keeping my voice level, rhythmic, and freezing cold. "And I know what you did in Zurich. You gave Rossi’s people the transit numbers from Eleanor’s private correspondence, didn't you?"
Caleb began to babble, the pathetic panic of a weak man caught between two fires. "I had to, Mom! They came to the townhouse in Brookline! Two guys with Marseille accents—they showed me pictures of the kids! They had pictures of Jamie and Leo at soccer practice in Andover! They said if I didn't give them Eleanor’s European contact, they'd burn the house down with everyone inside!"
"And Tori?" I asked, my grip tightening on the steering wheel until the knuckles went paper-white. "Where was Tori while you were giving away your mother’s life to Corsican gangsters?"
"Tori took the kids to her sister’s place in Vermont," Caleb sobbed, completely unspooling. "She won't talk to me. She called me a coward, packed the SUV, and left yesterday afternoon. She said this was all my fault—that if I hadn't pushed you to take the kids that morning, none of these old files would have surfaced. Mom, please... they said they only wanted the money back. They said Arthur stole sixty million from their grandfather and they just wanted their money."
"They don't want the money, Caleb," I said, glancing in the rearview mirror at Clara, who sat watching me with an expression of stoic pity. "They want the paper. The paper that proves the Rossi family bought off the entire maritime board of Boston and Portland from 1978 to 1994. As long as those documents exist, Marc Rossi is looking at a life sentence in a French maximum-security prison."
"What... what documents?" Caleb stuttered.
"The documents your grandmother died trying to hide from your father," I replied. "Listen to me very carefully, Caleb. If you contact Rossi’s people again, if you give them one more shred of information about my location or Sarah’s location, I will personally fax every page of Arthur’s double-entry ledgers to the United States Attorney for the District of Maine. Your inheritance won't just be gone—you will spend the next fifteen years in a federal penitentiary for receiving stolen syndicate funds."
"Mom, no, please—"
"Goodbye, Caleb. Grow a backbone before they put you in an orange jumpsuit."
I hit the red disconnect button, severed the satellite signal, and tossed the handset onto the floorboards.
Patrice watched me from the passenger seat, his expression neutral, but his eyes carried an unmistakable trace of respect. "That was harsh, Martha."
"It was necessary," I said, shifting down into third gear as the Defender emerged from the sulfur quarry into the bright, blinding glare of the Alcantara valley. "Caleb is a pendulum. He swings toward whoever scares him the most. For thirty years, Arthur made sure Caleb was terrified of poverty. Now, he needs to understand that crossing me is far more dangerous than crossing a Corsican smuggler."
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"Look ahead," Julien suddenly said, pointing his calloused index finger through the windscreen.
At the bottom of the gravel spur, where the quarry trail met the provincial road leading toward Taormina, an unmarked white delivery van was parked sideways across the tarmac. Two men in windbreakers were leaning against the front bumper, holding automatic carbines beneath their open jackets.
