Chapter 4 - The Rat in the Corner
The boardroom collapsed into chaos.
Within ten minutes, five of the seven board members voted to immediately strip Marcus of all executive powers, reinstate Richard Hale as Chairman, and freeze every corporate credit card assigned to Vivian and her son.
Marcus and Vivian were escorted out of the Hale Tower by private security guards while local news crews—whom Arthur Vance had strategically alerted—filmed their disgraced exit on the front steps.
By 2:00 PM, the story was headline news across the state: HALE CONSTRUCTION FOUNDER SURVIVES COUP; STEP-SON ACCUSED OF MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR EMBEZZLEMENT AND STRUCTURAL FRAUD.
We returned to my father’s estate that evening. The mansion was quiet now, stripped of Vivian’s oppressive perfume and tacky gold decorations. I had hired a team of professional cleaners to scrub every inch of the marble floors where my father had been forced to crawl.
My father sat in his library, sipping warm tea, watching the fire crackle in the hearth.
"We won the first battle, Bella," Arthur Vance said, sitting across from us with a tablet showing the plunging stock price of Vivian’s shell companies. "But Vivian is a cornered rat. She still has access to the primary offshore account through a joint signature clause your father signed four years ago. There’s nearly twenty million dollars in that account."
"She can't withdraw it without court authorization now that the freeze is in place," I said, looking out the window into the dark rain.
"She can't withdraw it legally," Arthur corrected me. "But Marcus owes sixteen million dollars to a private cartel of un-regulated lenders in Miami. They funded his gambling debts and his failed real estate ventures. If he doesn't pay them by Friday, those men won't care about court injunctions. They will come for blood."
Right on cue, my phone chimed with an encrypted text message from an unknown number.
It was a video file.
I opened it. The video showed low-resolution footage of my father’s private clinic, taken from a car parked across the street. The camera zoomed in on my father’s window, showing him sitting inside.
Below the video was a single text line: Tell your father to sign the offshore release form by midnight, or we won't bother with court orders. We'll finish what the car crash started on the canyon road.
My heart stopped for a second, then kicked into a heavy, rhythmic pulse of adrenaline.
"The car crash," I whispered, showing the screen to Arthur. "It wasn't an accident. They tried to kill him two months ago, and now they're threatening to do it again."
My father looked at the phone screen, his hands steady as he set his tea down. "They think they can scare us, Bella. They think because I'm old, I'm afraid to die."
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"You aren't going to die, Dad," I said, taking my coat off the hook. "Because Vivian just made her final, fatal mistake. She used an unregistered satellite network to send an extortion threat across state lines. That's a federal offense."
I looked at Arthur. "Call the FBI Field Office in Chicago. Tell Special Agent Miller that the shark has taken the bait."
