Chapter 3 - THE $900 TRAP — THE WALLET WAS NEVER LOSTNathaniel grabbed his heavy winter coat and grabbed a sleek black briefcase from behind his desk. He reached down, scooped Ruby into his arms, and headed straight for the private helipad on the roof.
"Mr. Graves!" Ruby cried out, holding onto his suit jacket. "Why were those bad men at my house? Why did you lose your wallet under that bench?"
As they burst onto the windy rooftop where a black twin-engine helicopter was already spinning its rotors, Nathaniel looked down at the little girl in his arms.
"I didn't lose that wallet, Ruby," Nathaniel revealed, his voice competing with the roar of the helicopter blades. "I dropped it on purpose."
Ruby’s eyes widened in confusion. "What?"
"For twelve years, I've been searching for the traitor inside my company—the man who orchestrated the explosion that took my wife," Nathaniel explained as he strapped her into a leather seat inside the aircraft. "Two days ago, I received an anonymous encrypted message telling me that if I left a wallet containing nine hundred dollars and my personal business card at the bus stop on Aldridge Street, the person who possessed the lost truth of Graves Energy would find it."
"My mom sent you that message?" Ruby asked.
"No," Nathaniel said grimly as the helicopter lifted into the gray sky. "Your mother didn't send it. The man who tried to kill her twelve years ago sent it. The $900 wasn't money, Ruby. It was a bait."
Nathaniel opened his wallet and pulled out the crisp hundred-dollar bills Ruby had counted so carefully earlier that afternoon. He held the top bill up to a special ultraviolet light built into his watch.
Invisible under normal light, complex lines of fluorescent green code immediately appeared across the surface of the currency.
"This is an encrypted ledger," Nathaniel said. "It contains the access keys to an offshore account holding three billion dollars—the stolen assets of Graves Energy. The person who planted this wallet knew that whoever found it would either keep the money out of desperation or return it to me."
"If I had kept the money..." Ruby gasped.
"If you had kept it, you and your mother would have been tracked down and eliminated quietly by the men in those SUVs," Nathaniel said, his voice cold as steel. "By bringing it directly to my lobby, you broke their trap. You brought the truth straight to my doorstep."
Suddenly, the helicopter banked hard to the left as a loud crack echoed through the sky.
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A red laser sight danced across the cockpit window.
"Mayday! Mayday!" the pilot shouted over the comms. "We have ground-to-air missile lock! Repeating, ground-to-air missile lock!"
