Chapter 13 - The Voice from the Past“Play the tape,” I ordered, lowering the gun just an inch, though my finger stayed rigid against the trigger guard.
Sarah’s hands shook as she pressed the play button on the small, battered cassette recorder. A harsh hiss of magnetic tape filled the vault, followed by the muffled, unmistakable sound of two men arguing in a room that sounded identical to the one we were standing in.
“You’re cutting me out, Arthur!” a younger voice shouted—a voice I recognized instantly as my father’s. “You’ve been funneling Moretti shipping revenue into offshore accounts under the table for five years!”
“It’s not just my operation, Frank,” another voice replied—smooth, calculated, and chillingly familiar. “Dominic Rossi and the Federal Syndicate own fifty percent of these docks. If you try to clean the books now, they’ll bury you, your estate, and your son.”
“Then I’ll burn the whole system down. I’m going to the federal prosecutor tomorrow morning.”
“You won’t live to see morning, Frank. And your little boy will inherit a graveyard.”
The tape clicked off.
The silence in the vault was absolute, broken only by the steady, rhythmic drip of water somewhere in the drainage pipes beneath our feet.
“That’s Arthur Vance,” I said quietly, looking straight into Sarah’s eyes. “My father’s business partner. Your father.”
“My father died in that warehouse fire when I was ten years old,” Sarah whispered, a tear finally breaking over her lashes. “Or so my mother told me. But when I accessed the federal internal archive database using the encryption keys from Lily’s flash drive two days ago... I found an active relocation file under witness protection. Dated yesterday.”
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“He’s alive,” I said.
“And he’s the one pulling Dominic Rossi’s strings,” Sarah added, her voice breaking. “He didn't run away from the syndicate twenty years ago, Adrian. He became it.”
