Chapter 23 - The Ghost of Richard Sterling
We gathered around the kitchen island under emergency red lanterns while Marcus bound the surviving mercenary in the basement.
Claire sat holding Sam close, her fingers trembling as she inspected a small silver locket hanging around his neck—an heirloom handed down from her late mother. I carefully pried open the locket with a pocketknife. Tucked behind a faded photograph of Claire as a baby was a micro-engraved optical drive no larger than a fingernail.
"My father gave this to my mother right before he died," Claire whispered, tears glistening in her eyes. "He told her to give it to my firstborn child when they turned ten. I never knew what was inside."
Marcus inserted the micro-drive into a field scanner. The screen flickered to life, rendering a high-definition video recording timestamped nine years ago—the exact night of Richard Sterling's alleged fatal car accident.
On the screen stood a younger Richard Sterling, his face bruised and bloodied, sitting in a stark concrete cell. Behind him stood Margaret Whitmore and Lord Alistair Vance.
"If you refuse to grant us the master decryption key, Richard, you will rot in this facility forever," Margaret’s voice echoed from the speaker.
"You can kill me, Margaret," Richard Sterling replied on the video, his eyes burning with defiance. "But the master key is encoded into my family's bloodline. You will never have Aegis-X."
Claire covered her mouth, a sharp, choked gasp escaping her throat. "He... he didn't die in the car crash."
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"He was taken," Marcus said, pulling up geolocation metadata embedded in the video file. "Margaret staged the accident to clear his legal existence. Richard Sterling was transported to an off-grid underground medical facility in the Swiss Alps—a private facility owned directly by Lord Alistair Vance."
Claire looked up at me, her face pale, her eyes filled with an overwhelming mixture of grief and wild hope. "Ethan... my father is still alive."
