Chapter 33 - The Ghost of Corsica
Within sixty seconds, Leo stood beside Sophia in the archive bunker, fully dressed in dark tactical gear, his Beretta resting securely in its shoulder holster. His face was a mask of cold, unyielding stone as he stared at the crimson terminal screen where the mysterious ping had originated.
"It’s not a random hack," Sophia said, pulling up the decrypted metadata logs. "The encryption key embedded in the packet header matches the exact cryptographic signature used by the old Sicilian banking guild—the one Dante tried to exploit before we seized his network."
"Dante’s assets were completely dismantled, and he’s locked away in Montenegro," Leo said, his voice dropping into a dangerous register. "And Valentina’s plane went down into three thousand feet of open water. Nothing survives that depth."
"Unless the crash was staged," a cold, sharp voice interrupted from the doorway.
Rocco Moretti walked into the bunker, leaning heavily on his cane, but his posture was rigid, his eyes burning with the intensity of a man who realized an old enemy had crawled out of a shallow grave.
"What are you saying, Father?" Leo asked, turning sharply toward him.
"I'm saying Valentina was many things, but she was never stupid," Rocco said, stepping up to the console. "She spent twenty years building shadow accounts and buying loyalty from people you and I never even knew existed. If she wanted to disappear and let the world believe she died in a fireball, all she needed was a decoy body and a compromised flight recorder."
Sophia's fingers danced across the keyboard, cross-referencing the Corsican maritime coordinates with historical shipping registries from eighteen years ago. "There was a salvage vessel operating in that exact sector forty-eight hours after the reported crash. Registered under a shell company in Malta... the same shell company Dante used to fund his operations."
May you like
Leo’s jaw tightened until his muscles corded. "They didn't just survive. They've been waiting for us to lower our guard, believing the dynasty was safe."
"They don't want the estate, Leo," Sophia whispered, staring at a newly uncovered sub-file that had just unzipped itself from the ping packet. "Look at the target destination of this data stream. It’s not pointing at our bank accounts. It’s pointing at the regional municipal water and power grid feeding the entire province of Sicily."
