Chapter 7 - The Audit of Victor Reyes
By Tuesday night, the counter-offensive had begun. Dominic did not go to the police about the Latin School incident; he didn't use the state’s legal system because he owned a system that was faster, quieter, and infinitely more destructive.
He sat in the private server room on the forty-sixth floor of Reyes Tower, the ambient temperature hovering near sixty degrees to keep the high-density mainframe units cool. The room hummed with a low, blue-lit energy. Felix stood behind him, his fingers moving across a secondary control console.
"We tracked the encryption tokens from the Nautilus trust dissolution," Dominic said, his eyes tracking the lines of forensic financial data scrolling down the main display. "Elena didn't just hide the port title in the trust, Felix. She mapped every single transaction Victor Reyes made through our offshore shipping lanes for the last seven years."
"What did she find, Boss?"
"Victor has been taking a five percent kickback from the Valetti family to clear their unregistered container shipments through our western terminal," Dominic said, his voice like cold steel slicing through paper. "He wasn't just trying to protect the IPO, Felix. He was trying to prevent me from realizing that he’s been leasing our infrastructure to our primary competitors."
He tapped a single command into the enterprise keyboard. The screen flickered, displaying a series of verified wire transfers from a bank in Panama to a shell company registered under Victor’s wife’s maiden name.
"Is it enough to remove him from the board?" Felix asked.
"It’s enough to remove him from the state," Dominic said. "Send these files directly to the federal grand jury clerk in the Northern District of Illinois. Mark them as a compliance update from the Reyes Group executive committee. I want Victor’s asset block frozen by midnight."
The door to the server room clicked open, and Sophia walked in, her yellow rain boots missing—she had replaced them with a pair of small, white leather sneakers Felix had bought her, though she was still wearing her green dinosaur dress. She was dragging her purple suitcase, the wheels making a high, rhythmic whirring sound against the raised steel floor tiles.
She walked straight to Dominic’s chair, leaning her chin against his arm as she looked at the cascading blue data on the screen. "That looks like the ocean," she said.
"It’s data, Sophia," Dominic said, not removing his arm. "It’s how we find the variances."
"What's a variance?"
"It’s a mistake someone thought they hid where no one would look," Dominic explained, his eyes never leaving the screen.
"Like the red truck?" Sophia asked.
Dominic froze. He slowly turned his chair around to face her. "What red truck, Sophia?"
"The one Uncle Victor promised to give me if I let him have the manila folder from Mama’s desk," Sophia said, her small fingers opening her purple suitcase to pull out a small, crumpled piece of paper. "He came to the house before Mama went to the hospital. He told me that if I gave him the paper with the silver seal, he’d buy me a real red truck that I could drive myself."
Dominic took the crumpled paper from her hand. It was a business card for Victor Reyes, with a phone number written on the back in thick, aggressive red marker.
Dominic’s eyes turned into two slits of pure, emerald ice. Victor hadn't just leaked the information to Valetti; he had gone to Elena’s house while she was dying, trying to rob a five-year-old child of the legal title to her own future.
"Felix," Dominic said, his voice dropping into a register that made the server room’s cooling fans sound loud.
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"Yes, Boss?"
"Cancel the grand jury filing," Dominic commanded. "We aren't going to let the federal government handle Victor. I want him in the boardroom at six o'clock tomorrow morning. Tell him if he isn't there, I’ll close the western terminal by seven."
