Chapter 18 - The Shadowed Ledger
|
The line went dead with a sharp click.
I sat back in my leather chair, my eyes fixed on the phone receiver in my hand.
I immediately called my head of security, who traced the call within ten minutes. It had been routed through a series of untraceable burner servers based overseas.
I opened my laptop and pulled up the original archived files from Rosa’s silver flash drive—the ones we had turned over to federal prosecutors a year ago.
I spent the next three hours re-examining the encrypted system files that we had previously skipped over during Adrian’s prosecution.
Deep inside a hidden partition labeled PROJECT ARCHIVE, I found a series of wire transfer logs dated over the last three years.
Millions of dollars had been funneled through Sterling Tech’s accounts—not from domestic venture capital firms, but from a private offshore holding company registered in Zurich called Vanguard Global Logistics.
Adrian hadn't just been running a struggling software startup.
His firm was actively laundering money for an international corporate syndicate that used shell companies to buy up real estate and influence local politics across the country.
The ethics review my former law partner was supervising hadn't just threatened Adrian’s career. It had threatened to expose a multi-billion-dollar international money-laundering network.
May you like
My engagement to Adrian hadn't been his idea at all.
He had been ordered by his offshore backers to marry into my family trust to give their money laundering operations a permanent, untouchable legal shield in the state.
