Chapter 48 - The Unwritten Ledger
I stared at the glowing screen of the phone, the cryptic words freezing the calm atmosphere we had just fought so hard to secure.
“Ethan,” I called out quietly, my eyes never leaving the screen. “Come look at this.”
Ethan walked over from the kitchen, his brow furrowing as he read the message over my shoulder. “Coordinates? Let me run a geographic trace.” His fingers flew across his portable tactical pad, cross-referencing the digital string with topographical maps of the Tahoe basin. “That’s not Geneva. That’s not Washington. That’s less than three miles from our current position—an old private dock on the northern shelf of the lake, registered under an alias from Michael Vance’s early estate holdings.”
Sarah stepped into the study, sensing the sudden shift in our demeanor. “What is it? Did one of the Aegis cells survive the purge?”
“Not Aegis,” I said, picking up my Sig Sauer from the desk and checking the magazine with practiced, fluid motion. “Or at least, not the corporate wing. This smells like something much older—something Michael kept buried even from his own inner circle.”
Within ten minutes, we were back in the high-speed interceptor boat, sliding silently out of the subterranean boathouse slip. The lake was glassy and undisturbed, reflecting the brilliant blue of the morning sky as we throttled up softly, hugging the shadowed shoreline of the northern shelf.
As we rounded a rocky cove hidden beneath dense pine overhangs, a weathered wooden boathouse came into view. Tied securely to its private pier was a small, unmarked wooden skiff—and sitting alone on the edge of the dock, waiting patiently with a steaming thermos of coffee, was a man whose face I never expected to see again.
May you like
Director Hayes? No. Viktor Petrov? He was in a federal holding facility.
As we drifted closer, cutting the engines to a quiet idle, the man stood up and turned toward us. It was David Vance—Michael’s estranged younger brother, whom intelligence briefings had presumed dead following a botched offshore extraction in the Mediterranean four years ago.
