Chapter 23 - The Ghost of Hoboken
The rain in New York had turned to sleet by evening, drumming a frantic, metallic rhythm against the hood of Casey's rental car as she drove across the George Washington Bridge toward the deserted industrial waterfront of Hoboken.
She hadn't told Alistair. She hadn't told the university. Following the coordinates Dominic’s letter had hidden within the linguistic markers of the manifest, she parked the car beneath the rusted iron skeleton of the old Lackawanna Terminal train shed, where the Hudson River beat black and greasy against the rotting wooden pilings.
The pier was a ghost town of corrugated tin warehouses and skeletal steel cranes that had stood abandoned since the Carter administration. At the end of Slip 4 sat a small, unlit harbor tugboat bearing the faded name The Mary M.—christened, as she now knew, after her grandmother, who had worked as a seamstress in the same red-brick sweatshop where Dominic’s grandfather had run numbers during the Depression.
The cabin door of the tug was unlocked. It swung open with a dry, complaining groan as Casey pushed it back.
Inside, the cabin was surprisingly warm. A small potbelly stove glowed with red-hot anthracite coal, casting long, dancing shadows across pine-paneled walls lined with old navigational charts and black-and-white photographs of men loading crates onto Liberty ships during World War II.
Sitting on a wooden crate beside the stove was Dominic. He wasn't wearing his tailored Italian suits anymore; he wore a heavy canvas fisherman's sweater, his sleeves rolled up to reveal thick, corded forearms marked by old scars.
"You shouldn't have come to Varick Street, Casey," he said without looking up, turning a small brass sextant over in his palms. "Leo has a big mouth when he's scared."
"Leo told me the truth," Casey said, stepping inside and kicking the heavy steel door shut behind her to keep the freezing wind out. She crossed her arms, shivering not from the cold, but from the sheer audacity of the man sitting before her. "You didn't just help me take down Sterling. You brought me here because you wanted me to see the whole board. Why, Dominic? Why lead me back to where your family started?"
Dominic finally looked up. His dark eyes were tired, framed by deep lines that hadn't been there when they fled the Navesink Riverbank six months ago.
"Because the war isn't over," he said softly. "Sterling may be sitting in an upstate federal penitentiary waiting for his trial, but the network—the financial clearinghouses in Zurich and the shipping brokers in Lisbon—they didn't go down with him. They just found a new manager."
He stood up, walking slowly toward her across the tilted wooden floorboards, stopping just a foot away. The familiar scent of cedar and tobacco was still there, but beneath it was something older—the smell of salt, iron, and final reckonings.
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"And who is managing it now?" Casey asked, her voice dropping to a fierce, steady whisper.
"Your university," Dominic said. "Specifically, the endowment fund committee chaired by Professor Harrison."
