Chapter 10 - The Terminal Truth
The 24-hour internet cafe on Adams Street smelled of stale bleach and cheap machine coffee. At 2:15 AM, the only other occupant was a bored clerk asleep behind the front counter.
Olivia sat at a back corner terminal, her heart pounding as she inserted the miniature USB drive into the front USB port of the desktop computer.
A command prompt window immediately popped up on the screen, blinking a cursor.
ENTER SECURITY PASSCODE:
She remembered the text message. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, typing in the four digits: 7719.
The screen flashed black for a second, then a massive, decrypted video file began to play automatically on the monitor.
Olivia leaned in close, pulling Ethan and Mason safely beside her so they couldn't see the screen if it got too graphic, though her eyes locked onto the moving images with hypnotic horror.
It was a security camera feed from a high-rise corporate office suite in downtown Chicago, dated four years ago—the exact week Jonathan’s parents had died in a "tragic" yacht fire off the coast of Lake Michigan.
On the screen, Victoria Reed sat behind a massive glass desk, clinking glasses with a man Olivia recognized instantly from financial news channels: Arthur Sterling, the billionaire founder of Vanguard Capital.
The audio was crisp, pulled directly from an internal conference system.
“The accident report is cleared,” Arthur Sterling said, laughing lightly. “Jonathan’s father refused to sign over the riverfront land deeds to Vanguard. Now that he’s gone, the entire portfolio rolls into the family trust managed by Victoria.”
“And what about Jonathan?” Victoria asked on the recording, sipping her champagne. “He knows his father’s death was engineered.”
“He doesn't care,” Arthur replied smoothly. “As long as we finance his real estate developments and give him a cut of the profits, he’ll do whatever we say. He’s a weak link, but he’s useful. Just keep him married to that emotional wreck of a wife so he looks like a stable family man.”
Olivia stared at the screen, the entire architecture of her marriage, her suffering, and her children's trauma collapsing into dust. She wasn't just fighting a bitter divorce. She was standing in the crosshairs of a multi-billion-dollar criminal conspiracy that had murdered her father-in-law and tried to frame her for madness.
Before she could close the video file, the computer screen flickered again. The video minimized, and a new text document opened up automatically, typing words onto the screen in real-time as if someone was typing from a remote terminal.
“You now have everything you need to destroy them, Mrs. Carter. But publishing this file will trigger an automatic federal red flag. They are coming for you right now. Look out the window.”
May you like
Olivia whipped her head around toward the front window of the internet cafe.
Pulling up sharply to the curb outside, cutting its headlights in the dark street, was a sleek, black unmarked SUV with tinted windows. The rear door began to open.
