Chapter 17 - Return to New York
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The flight back to New York was entirely different from the anxious journey to Geneva. The mood in the cabin was electric. Leo sat across the aisle, reviewing the digital confirmation that fifty million dollars had been successfully repatriated to the Sterling Enterprises main treasury.
"You did it, Maya," Leo beamed, holding up his tablet. "The funds are secured. The board is going to worship the ground you walk on when they see this injection of capital."
Maya sat by the window, staring out into the dark night sky. She held a glass of sparkling water, but she hadn't taken a sip in over an hour. The name printed on Hoffman’s paper burned in her mind.
"Silas Thorne," Maya murmured, her voice laced with a mixture of disbelief and deep-seated anger.
"Your father’s old partner, right?" Leo asked, setting his tablet down. "I thought Silas retired to a private estate in the Hamptons five years ago."
"He didn't retire," Maya corrected him bitterly. "He went into the shadows. Silas and my father built this company together thirty years ago. But they had a massive falling out over ethical practices. My father bought him out and forced him off the board. Silas swore he would take back the company one day."
"So, Silas recruited Victoria?"
"Exactly," Maya nodded, her eyes hardening. "Victoria was ambitious and greedy, but she wasn't a strategic mastermind. Silas was the architect. He used Victoria to poison my father, orchestrate the hostile takeover, and bleed the company dry to fund his own private ventures. Victoria was just his puppet."
"Maya, if Silas Thorne is behind this, you need to go to the FBI immediately. The man is a billionaire with limitless resources and absolutely no moral compass."
"If I go to the FBI now, Silas will just hire an army of lawyers and tie this up in court for a decade," Maya said, crushing the plastic water cup in her hand. "He will hide behind layers of plausible deniability. We need a confession. We need to catch him red-handed, just like we did with Victoria."
May you like
"How? The man is a ghost. He never appears in public."
"He will appear for me," Maya said, a dangerous, calculating light in her eyes. "He thinks I am just a lucky kid who got the drop on a sloppy stepmother. He doesn't respect me. And I am going to use his arrogance to destroy him."
