Chapter 22 - The Return Flight
The extraction from Switzerland was a logistical nightmare. Marcus had to call in every favor he had in the European underground to secure us a private, untraceable flight out of a small airfield in France. We were exhausted, running on adrenaline and cheap airport coffee, but we had the dossier safely secured in a waterproof diplomatic pouch.
I sat in the dim cabin of the Gulfstream jet, staring at the photograph of Charles tied to the chair.
"Arthur Pendelton," I muttered, shaking my head in absolute disbelief. "He was at my mother's funeral. He helped me pick out Leo's first school. How could someone live a lie that deeply for decades?"
"Sociopaths don't feel the weight of a lie," Marcus said quietly, sitting across from me, bandaging a deep cut on his forearm from the vault escape. "To him, your family was just a chess set. He moved the pieces, sacrificed the pawns, and kept himself perfectly insulated as the king. Richard thought he was the mastermind, but Arthur was just letting him take the heat."
I opened the dossier again, studying the background of the medical facility in the photograph holding Charles. It was a sterile, white room with distinct, archaic green tiling on the walls.
"Marcus, look at this tile," I pointed to the edge of the photo. "Have you seen this before?"
Marcus leaned in, his eyes narrowing. "That’s institutional ceramic. Mid-century. Most hospitals tore that out decades ago."
I pulled out my laptop, quickly searching the offline database of properties once owned by Collins Legacy Holdings before the dissolution. I filtered for medical facilities sold or abandoned in the last twenty years.
"St. Jude’s Psychiatric Annex," I read the result aloud, my heart racing. "It was a private asylum funded by my grandfather in the 1970s. It was officially shuttered in 1998, but the property was never sold. It was transferred into a blind trust managed by... Arthur Pendelton’s law firm."
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"That's where he's holding Charles," Marcus said, a dangerous glint in his eye. "It’s isolated, structurally sound, and completely off the grid."
"We land in New York in four hours," I said, closing the laptop with a definitive snap. "Call Grant. Tell him to assemble his tactical team. We aren't negotiating with the Chairman. We are tearing his kingdom down."
