Chapter 16: The Federal Iron Curtain
Chapter 16: The Federal Iron Curtain
The flight back from Geneva to New York felt like the calm before a devastating storm. While Julian worked the phones from the jet's satellite line, coordinating directly with the Southern District of New York and the FBI's white-collar crime division, I sat with my laptop, tracing the digital crumbs Matthew’s associates had left behind.
They were sloppy. Desperation breeds mistakes, and Matthew was drowning.
"They used a shell company registered in Panama called 'Aegis Holdings' to purchase the historic debt block," I said, showing the screen to Julian as he hung up his call. "They managed to acquire 8% of our legacy bonds from an old investor who needed quick liquidity. If they hit 10%, they can legally demand an emergency audit of NexusCore’s internal source code."
Julian took a sip of his black coffee, his expression carved from pure ice. "They won't hit nine. The FBI just tracked the burner phone inside Sing Sing. The corrupt guard who smuggled it in was arrested an hour ago at his home in Queens. He's already singing to save his pension."
When our private jet touched down at JFK, Henderson was waiting on the tarmac with a fleet of black SUVs. But he wasn't alone. Two federal prosecutors from the Department of Justice were with him.
"Miss Sterling," the lead prosecutor said, flashing his badge. "Thanks to the digital forensics your team provided, we’ve frozen the five million dollars inside Aegis Holdings. Because the funds were sourced from undisclosed criminal assets linked to Matthew Hayes’s original embezzlement, this is now a matter of federal asset forfeiture. The 8% debt block they purchased is officially null and void."
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I took a deep, steady breath, feeling the final, lingering weight of Matthew's ghost lift off my shoulders.
"He thought he could play the game from a cell," Julian murmured beside me, his arm wrapping supportively around my waist. "But he forgot that when you control the board, the only move left for the king is to fall."
