Chapter 3 - The Second Problem
Marcus Vance didn't confess immediately. Men who have managed billions of dollars in illicit capital for decades do not break simply because a kid with a mop spots a bad invoice.
By noon, Marcus was locked in the lower security holding room, and Dominic had summoned me back to the main study.
The antique lockbox was still sitting on the mahogany desk, its lid open, revealing the old microfiche cards. Dominic poured two fingers of scotch into a heavy glass, slid it across the desk toward me, and gestured for me to sit in the leather chair opposite him.
I didn't touch the scotch. I wasn't old enough to drink legally, and even if I were, I had too much respect for my nervous system to mix alcohol with Dominic Rossi.
"You found the siphon in the shipping ledger," Dominic said, leaning back and watching me closely. "Marcus has been bleeding three hundred thousand dollars a month out of our logistics arm for over two years. My father trusted him. I trusted him. We thought he was untouchable."
"He wasn't untouchable," I said, resting my hands on my knees. "He was just lazy. When you steal on a grand scale for a long time, you stop hiding the small mistakes because nobody ever questions your authority."
"Which brings us to the real reason I didn't let you go back to mopping floors this morning," Dominic said, his gaze sharpening. "Marcus’s embezzlement is a symptom, kid. Not the disease."
I frowned. "What do you mean?"
Caleb stepped out from the shadows near the bookcase, tossing a thick, encrypted tactical drive onto the desk between us. It was stamped with the red emblem of an international intelligence broker—the kind of hardware used by private military contractors and federal deep-cover operatives.
"When we raided Marcus’s primary terminal in Jersey City an hour ago," Caleb explained, his voice gravelly and low, "we found more than just bank statements. We found a communications log routing through an encrypted satellite relay directly to Boston."
"Boston?" I asked. "The syndicate doesn't have operations in Boston. That’s Vance territory."
"Exactly," Dominic said. "Victor Vance—the head of the New England shipping cartel—has spent the last five years trying to break our monopoly on the eastern seaboard. We thought he was using brute force. Extortion, dock strikes, proxy wars."
Dominic leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk.
"We were wrong. Marcus wasn't just skimming cash to buy real estate in Hoboken. He was selling our entire regional freight schedule, port security overrides, and federal customs contact lists to Vance. The embezzlement was just the financing mechanism for an internal corporate takeover."
I looked at the tactical drive, then up at Dominic. "If Vance has our logistics schedule, he doesn't just know where our shipments are going. He knows every single corrupt official, federal inspector, and union boss we have on our payroll."
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"And that," Dominic said grimly, "is the second problem nobody in my empire could see. Marcus was the leak, but the pipe is already broken. Within forty-eight hours, the federal task force in New York is going to execute a coordinated raid on every single warehouse we own, based on documents Vance is about to hand them."
"Unless," Caleb added, cracking his knuckles, "we feed Vance the wrong information before he hands it to the feds."
