Chapter 43 - The Ghost of Frankfurt
Before I could process the implications of the manifest, my phone buzzed on the table. This time, it wasn't a calendar reminder. It was a direct, incoming satellite call routed through a secure proxy in Germany.
I looked at Ethan. He nodded silently, reaching into his pocket to ready our local frequency counter just in case it was a traced line.
I swiped to answer.
“Avery,” a deep, gravelly voice echoed through the speaker—a voice remarkably similar to David Vance’s, but sharper, harder, edged with the frantic weariness of a man running on borrowed time.
“Who’s this?” I demanded, keeping my voice flat and controlled.
“My name is Marcus Vance,” the caller said without hesitation. “I’m David’s brother. And if you’re reading the Geneva manifest right now, you know I’m the only one left who knows where the syndicate buried the physical paper ledgers before they digitized their operations.”
I stood up from the table, stepping over to the floor-to-ceiling window to watch the sunlight dance across the lake. “Julian Vance’s network is dismantled, Marcus. The tribunal has the primary data logs, and the Aegis core is fried. You don’t need to hide anymore.”
“You don’t understand, Captain,” Marcus interrupted, his voice dropping into an urgent, breathless register. “Julian was just the front man—the political face who managed the Washington contracts. The real power behind the syndicate—the people who funded Project Ironwood before the DOD took it over—are a private conglomerate known as the Meridian Group. And they aren't waiting for a trial.”
“The Meridian Group,” I repeated, turning to look at Ethan, who was already pulling up historical defense contractor databases on his tablet.
“They’ve been operating out of an unlisted corporate campus outside of Frankfurt for twenty years,” Marcus said rapidly. “When they realized you torched the Ironwood facility, they didn't panic. They initiated Phase Two: a complete physical relocation of their primary research archives to a secure maritime vessel currently sitting in the North Sea.”
May you like
“A floating server farm,” Ethan muttered, his fingers flying across his keyboard as he searched global shipping registries. “If they have physical paper ledgers and hard-drive backups that survived the digital purge, they can rebuild the entire syndicate network from international waters.”
“Exactly,” Marcus said on the other end of the line. “And they know I have the master encryption keys to their backup vaults. They’ve been hunting me across Europe for forty-eight hours. If I go down, those vaults stay locked, and the syndicate rises again under a new name within six months.”
