Chapter 7 - The Anonymous WireBack at the Rhodes Capital office in downtown Boston, the high-rise hummed with its usual relentless energy. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows offered a panoramic view of the harbor, where gray waves slapped against the piers under a heavy overcast sky.
I sat at my mahogany desk, the morning’s compliance reports spread out before me, but my mind kept drifting back to the phone call from Weston. Ten minutes after arriving at the office, my desktop communicator chimed. It was the internal wire-transfer division.
"Evelyn, you're going to want to see this," Sarah, our senior treasury analyst, said over the speakerphone, her voice tight with professional curiosity. "We just flagged a massive incoming wire transfer hitting a dormant holding account linked to one of Marcus's old shell entities."
"How massive?" I asked, leaning forward, my fingers hovering over the keyboard.
"Seven figures," Sarah replied. "And it's originating from a numbered Swiss account that was flagged in the federal indictment but never officially frozen."
I frowned, pulling up the routing database. "Trace the intermediary bank. Who authorized the transfer?"
"That's the bizarre part," Sarah said, typing furiously on her end. "The sender's name is masked under a corporate trust, but the metadata signature matches a legal entity registered in the Cayman Islands last Tuesday. Right after Marcus's defense team filed their motion for bail reduction."
My heart skipped a beat. Marcus didn't have access to those funds—the federal freeze orders had locked every known domestic and international asset he controlled. If a million-dollar wire was moving through a freshly minted offshore trust, it meant someone on the outside was still liquidating hidden assets on his behalf. Someone who knew the digital infrastructure of Mercer Logistics just as well as Marcus did.
"Hold the transfer in an escrow holding pool," I commanded, my tone dropping into strict legal mode. "Do not let it clear the clearinghouse. Notify federal prosecutor Vance immediately, and loop Julian into the security alert."
May you like
"Way ahead of you, Evelyn," Sarah said. "The alert just went out."
I clicked off the intercom and stood up, walking over to the glass wall. Chloe Vance had vanished six months ago, disappearing into the wind the moment the credit cards stopped working. But looking at the electronic fingerprint of that Swiss wire, I knew one thing with absolute certainty: Chloe wasn't gone. She was regrouping, and she had just thrown the first punch of a brand-new war.
Related Stories
