Chapter 7 - The Encrypted Ping
By midnight, after Grace had finally fallen asleep clutching her stuffed reindeer under the glow of the Christmas tree lights, I sat back down at the home office desk. The house was dead silent, save for the faint hum of the refrigerator.
I pulled my laptop forward, opened a secure, encrypted terminal window, and ran a back-trace query on the alert packet that had flashed on my phone earlier.
The data stream was dense, layered behind multiple proxy servers, but my clearance level as a senior forensic investigator cut through the digital static like a scalpel. The IP address attempting to wire emergency funds to the Grand Islander in Honolulu wasn't originating from a resort lobby or a bank terminal in the Caymans.
It was pinging from a private server suite located less than six miles away, right in downtown Chicago—inside the corporate tower owned by Northern Lake Capital.
My breath hitched.
Arthur wasn't hiding on a tropical beach. He was right here in the city, operating behind the very financial machinery that Jamal Price and my father had been using to launder millions.
Before I could dive deeper into the server logs, a sharp, urgent notification popped up on the bottom corner of my screen. It wasn't an email. It was a direct, encrypted peer-to-peer text message routed through my secure work terminal.
“Elena,” the message read. “I know you’re looking at the ledger. Don't make a move until we talk. Your father didn't just borrow money from Sterling; he traded your future to keep his syndicate afloat. Meet me at the 31st Street dry docks in one hour, or the entire truth about why I had to leave six years ago dies with me.”
The sender profile was locked behind a blank alphanumeric hash, but the formatting of the text—the precise spacing, the specific punctuation style—was a signature I would recognize anywhere.
May you like
It was Arthur.
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