Chapter 12 - Ghosts of the PastForty-eight hours later, my private jet touched down at a secluded airfield near the Adirondacks.
I didn't tell Mara the full extent of the call. I only told her I needed to handle a final piece of corporate housekeeping regarding my grandfather’s old estate in upstate New York—the ancestral home that had been boarded up and abandoned decades before I was born.
The estate, known locally as Blackwood Manor, stood at the end of an overgrown, winding gravel road choked with dense pine trees and wild briars. It was a sprawling, gothic stone mansion that looked like it had been plucked straight out of a Victorian nightmare.
I parked my rented SUV near the decaying iron gates and stepped out into the damp, earthy mist. Armed with a heavy-duty flashlight and a steel shovel from the back of the vehicle, I navigated the ruined boxwood labyrinth toward the western garden, exactly where the voice on the phone had directed.
According to family lore, my grandfather had buried his most sensitive ledgers here during the turbulent corporate restructuring of the 1970s. But nobody had mentioned a Swiss bank key.
I found the spot: an old stone sundial half-swallowed by creeping ivy.
I jammed the shovel into the damp soil, throwing my weight onto the blade. Clang.
The metal hit something hard beneath the roots. My heart hammered against my ribs. I dropped to my knees, clawing at the dirt with my bare hands until I uncovered a heavy, rusted iron lockbox stamped with the crest of a Zurich banking institution.
I forced the rusted latch open with the edge of the shovel.
Inside sat a single leather-bound journal and a heavy, ornate silver key. I flipped open the journal, shining my flashlight across the faded, handwritten ink of my grandfather’s diary entries.
The entry from June 14, 1984, stopped my breath:
“The acquisition of the Whitaker empire was made possible only through the absolute compliance of our silent partner, Viktor Vance. If Vance ever decides to pull the financing, our entire legacy—and every cent belonging to our heirs—vanishes into thin air. May God forgive us for the collateral damage.”
Viktor Vance.
A name I hadn't heard whispered since I was a child. A phantom in New York high-society history, known as a ruthless European financier who supposedly died in a mysterious yacht explosion in the Mediterranean thirty years ago.
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Except, according to the phone call two nights ago, Viktor Vance wasn't dead.
And he was coming to collect his debt.
