Chapter 7 - The Intercept
I leaped off the aluminum bench and pressed my palms flat against the cold glass, my eyes locked on Marcus through the transparent barrier. He held up a second handwritten sheet, pressing it against the partition so I could read every word.
Transit logs show her EZ-Pass crossed the George Washington Bridge heading west, not north. She bypassed Greenwich entirely.
My breath caught in my throat. I grabbed the heavy plastic telephone receiver bolted to the outside of my side of the booth and punched the talk button. Marcus did the same on his end.
“West?” I hissed into the receiver, my voice trembling. “What’s west of Manhattan on the Turnpike? Pennsylvania? Ohio? Marcus, what is she doing?”
“I don't know yet,” Marcus’s voice crackled through the tiny speaker, tight and strained. “My private investigator on the retainer tracked her toll transponder thirty minutes ago. She rented a black SUV under an LLC out of Delaware—the same shell company she used to siphon those initial legal retainers three months ago. She’s moving fast, Julian, and she’s not alone.”
“What do you mean, not alone?” My stomach plunged into a bottomless pit. “Who is with her?”
“That’s the part that just crossed my desk from a contact at the Port Authority,” Marcus said, lowering his voice. “She didn't clear out that house in Greenwich by herself at four a.m. Yesterday morning, a private medical transport van—registered to a specialized pediatric respiratory facility in Philadelphia—was parked two blocks from your residence for over an hour.”
A cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck. “A medical transport? Noah is healthy. He had his three-month checkup last week, he was fine—”
“Julian, listen to me,” Marcus interrupted, his tone cutting through my panic with razor-sharp urgency. “What do you really know about Claire’s medical background before she worked at Deloitte?”
“She was a systems architect,” I stammered. “She did network security and data encryption—”
“That was her cover story when she was recruited out of Johns Hopkins graduate school,” Marcus snapped quietly. “Before corporate IT consulting, her specialization was pediatric molecular biology and genetic anomaly research. She spent three years working on advanced chromosomal therapies in a private research lab before she ever set foot in your office building.”
The receiver slipped slightly in my sweaty palm. The room seemed to tilt sideways.
“Are you telling me...” I choked out, the horror dawning on me like a creeping shadow. “Are you telling me my wife isn't just an accountant or a jilted corporate spouse?”
“I’m telling you that the woman who raised your child for three months, the woman who designed your home network, and the woman who just dismantled your entire life in federal court didn't just stumble into a revenge plot,” Marcus said, every word landing like a hammer blow. “She engineered a biological and legal masterpiece. And right now, she’s taking your son to a facility that doesn't exist on public maps.”
Before I could process the terrifying weight of his words, a heavy hand dropped onto my shoulder from behind.
May you like
“Call’s over, counselor. Inmate back to transport processing,” a federal guard announced, prying the phone out of my hand and cutting the line with a sharp click.
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