Chapter 17
The assassination attempt abruptly shifted our entire strategy. We could no longer afford to operate from my mother’s house in Coyoacán; it was too exposed, a fixed target for Vargas’s hitmen. The next morning, under the cover of early dawn, Marisela arranged for us to move into a highly secure, anonymous corporate apartment located in the bustling center of the financial district. We hired two heavily armed, private security contractors—former military men who owed Marisela their careers—to guard my mother around the clock.
Sitting around the glass table in the safehouse, the atmosphere was incredibly grim. "The cassette tape and the journal are incredibly powerful pieces of evidence, but they are technically circumstantial in a modern court," Marisela explained, pacing the length of the room. "Vargas’s elite defense lawyers will aggressively argue that the tape was doctored or that your father’s journal was the paranoid rambling of a stressed man. To guarantee a federal indictment that bypasses the corrupt local judges, we need an absolute, undeniable money trail. We need to digitally connect Vargas’s current offshore bank accounts directly to the Mendoza cartel's historical shell companies."
"Vargas is entirely too smart to leave his digital fingerprints on a cartel transaction," I argued, running a tired hand through my hair. "He uses proxies. He uses people like Karina to sign the documents so he remains completely insulated."
"Exactly," Valentina interjected, her eyes lighting up with a sudden, brilliant realization. "Karina managed the Mendoza’s entire offshore portfolio during your marriage. When we finalized the divorce and the civil suit, the court confiscated all of her encrypted hard drives. They are currently sitting in police evidence lockers, completely untouched because the local prosecutors claimed they couldn't break the military-grade encryption."
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"If we can legally obtain those drives, and illegally crack the encryption, we can trace the exact flow of the money from Apex Holdings back to Vargas," Marisela nodded slowly, a dangerous smile forming on her lips. "I have a contact. A federal prosecutor in Mexico City who has been trying to nail Vargas for corruption for five years. She is completely clean. If I give her the tapes, she can authorize the release of Karina's hard drives to our custody under the guise of an ongoing civil audit."
It was an incredibly risky, highly illegal maneuver, but it was the only viable path forward. We needed the digital smoking gun to finally, permanently destroy the monster who had terrorized my family for two decades.
