Chapter 67 - The Hidden Compartment
The words struck me like a bucket of freezing ocean water.
*The woman who packed his bags.*
For thirty-five years, Arthur had traveled back and forth across the Atlantic. And every single time, without exception, I was the one who prepared his leather traveling kit.
I stood up and reached for my carry-on bag, pulling it onto the low coffee table between us. It was the same vintage Hartmann leather suitcase Arthur had bought in Boston in 1982—the heavy, reinforced canvas model with the double-stitched brass corners. When Arthur passed away five years ago, I had kept it simply because it was durable and familiar.
"He never bought another bag," I murmured, my fingers tracing the worn seams along the reinforced bottom.
"Roland searched Arthur’s office in Keene three times," Lind said, leaning forward with sudden intensity. "He ransacked the firm’s archives in Boston. He even sent Julian to harass you under the guise of family debt and inheritance disputes. But none of them realized Arthur was a traditionalist."
I flipped the suitcase upside down. The base of the bag was reinforced with four heavy brass studs and a protective skid plate made of hardened vulcanized fiber.
Lind disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a heavy utility knife and a thin steel probe. "May I?"
I nodded.
Lind worked with practiced, surgical precision. He pried up the corner of the inner satin lining, revealing the dense layer of compressed board beneath. Using the blade, he sliced through the original horsehair stitching that bound the baseboard to the leather shell.
Inside a hollowed-out channel, no thicker than a tongue depressor, lay a flat, wax-sealed lead foil packet.
Lind set the probe down on the table, his breath catching in his throat. "Good God. He actually did it."
He used the knife tip to slice open the wax. Inside the foil was a strip of translucent film, barely four inches long, inscribed with thousands of tiny, microscopic alphanumeric sequences, and a heavy, tarnished silver coin—an old Swiss five-franc piece from 1968.
"The alphanumeric strings are the account numbers and routing hashes," Lind whispered, examining the film under the lamplight. "And the coin?"
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"That’s Arthur’s pocket piece," I said, my voice barely audible. "He carried it on the sailboat every summer. He told me it brought good luck whenever the fog rolled in off the bay."
"It’s not just a pocket piece," Lind said, tapping the edge of the coin against the table. The coin produced a dull, muffled thud instead of a metallic ring. "It’s hollowed out. Inside is the cryptographic cipher wheel. With this, Roland Vance’s entire empire in Zurich can be dissolved by federal prosecutors in an afternoon."
