Chapter 19 - THE ULTIMATE CHECKMATETwo days later, in a secure, anonymous safe house located three hundred miles away in an undisclosed mountain town in West Virginia, Caleb and I sat over a glowing laptop screen.
"Mom, are you telling me that Detective Vance—the guy who helped us put Julian away—is actually the head of the entire syndicate?" Caleb asked, his face pale as he stared at the digital copies of my father's journal entries and financial wire receipts that I had managed to upload to a secure cloud server before fleeing.
"Thomas Vance is the apex predator, Caleb," I said firmly, my eyes fixed on the screen. "Julian was just a pawn in his game. But Vance made one fatal mistake."
"What's that?"
"He underestimated what a mother will do to protect her son," I replied coldly. "He thinks he's untouchable because he controls the police department and the federal task force. But he doesn't know about the dead-man switch I programmed into this server."
I pointed to a blinking red icon on the screen.
"If my phone signal stops broadcasting for more than twenty-four hours, or if I manually trigger this button, the entire encrypted file containing every wire transfer, every corrupt police badge number, and every recorded phone call of Thomas Vance's syndicate will automatically be transmitted to every major news outlet, international wire service, and the Interpol cybercrime division simultaneously."
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Caled let out a shaky breath, a mixture of awe and absolute terror in his eyes. "We have him by the throat."
"We do," I said, standing up and walking over to the window to watch the snow falling over the distant mountain peaks. "Thomas Vance thinks he won the war. But the real game has only just begun."
