Chapter 9 - The Ghost from the Past
I stared at the screen, my blood running instantly cold.
Richard was locked in a maximum-security federal penitentiary two hundred miles away, under twenty-four-hour surveillance and solitary confinement. He couldn't send an encrypted text, let alone deploy an operative to photograph me outside the courthouse.
"Marcus!" I called out sharply, rising from the patio chair with Julian held safely against my chest.
Marcus appeared at the sliding glass door in a split second, his hand instantly resting on the firearm concealed beneath his jacket. "Boss? What is it?"
I handed him the tablet. His eyes scanned the message, and the seasoned security veteran's face drained of color.
"This isn't Richard," Marcus muttered, his thumb swiping across the image metadata. "The proxy routing... this originated from a secure IP address in Zurich. Switzerland."
"Richard didn't act alone," I whispered, the pieces clicking together with terrifying clarity in my mind. "The corporate saboteurs... the foreign conglomerate trying to buy our bio-tech patents. Richard wasn't the mastermind. He was just the pawn."
"Who was backing him?" Marcus asked, his voice tightening.
"Find out who inherited Richard’s off-shore shell accounts the moment his assets were frozen," I ordered, my eyes hardening as maternal instinct morphed into absolute, unyielding predator mode. "Someone funded his lifestyle, his expensive tastes, and his ambition long before he ever married me."
Marcus nodded grimly, already tapping into his comms unit. "I'm mobilizing the tactical team. We're locking down the estate to DEFCON 1."
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As the heavy steel security shutters rolled down across the glass windows of the cliffside mansion, cutting off the ocean view, I looked down at my son.
The game wasn't over. In fact, the real war was just beginning.
