Chapter 10 - The Midnight Dock
The cold wind off the municipal harbor whipped my coat around my legs as I stepped out of my car, my boots crunching over the salt-crusted gravel of Pier 8. The distant amber glow of the container cranes cut through the damp night fog, casting long, skeletal shadows across the dark water below.
I kept my hands buried deep in my pockets, gripping my phone tightly as I scanned the empty loading bays for whoever had sent the text message.
"You actually came," a harsh, wheezing voice called out from the shadows near a rusted shipping container.
I spun around, stepping away from the edge of the pier.
A figure stepped out from behind the corrugated steel wall. It was Marcus Vance—my former corporate litigator, looking entirely different from the impeccably tailored attorney who had stood in my dining room earlier that morning. His silk tie was gone, his collar was unbuttoned, and his eyes darted nervously back and forth across the open dock.
"Marcus?" I stepped forward, incredulous. "What are you doing here? I thought you represented the primary equity trust."
"I represented whoever paid the retainer, Julian," Marcus hissed, glancing over his shoulder toward the empty access road. "And right now, that trust is cutting ties with everyone connected to the Vance Holdings liability pool—including me."
"What are you talking about?" I demanded, closing the distance between us. "You helped orchestrate the asset freeze! You knew about Mariana's trust all along!"
Marcus let out a dry, frantic laugh, wiping sweat from his forehead despite the freezing harbor air. "I knew that Mariana held the master keys to the corporate shell accounts, yes. But nobody—not even Arthur Sterling—anticipated how fast the federal prosecutor was going to move on the RICO indictments. Your mother’s counterfeit medical shipments triggered an international compliance flag. The entire syndicate is burning to the ground."
"Then why did you bring me out here?" I asked, my patience wearing dangerously thin.
Marcus reached into his heavy wool coat and pulled out a heavy, secure encrypted flash drive, holding it out toward me like a live grenade.
"Because this drive contains the unredacted digital signatures of every single municipal official, state senator, and defense contractor who accepted kickbacks through your father’s shell companies," Marcus whispered frantically. "Including the officials who protected your mother’s import licenses for the last six years."
I stared at the drive in his hand, my breath pluming in the cold night air. "Why are you giving this to me?"
"Because I'm catching a red-eye flight to Zurich in two hours, and I need a scapegoat to keep the federal marshals looking the wrong way while I clear customs," Marcus said with brutal, unvarnished honesty. "You hand this drive to Agent Hayes before the grand jury convenes at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, and the prosecutor might shave ten years off your federal sentence."
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And before I could wrap my fingers around the titanium casing of the drive, the sharp squeal of tires echoed down the access road behind us.
Two unmarked black SUVs rounded the corner of the warehouse, their high-beam headlights snapping on simultaneously, blinding us with a wall of searing white light that cut straight through the harbor fog.
