Now.”
Miriam leaned forward, punched a four-digit code into a concealed panel beneath the glove box, and slapped a red rocker switch.
The hum in my teeth vanished.
On the screen of my phone, the signal bars shot from zero to full LTE.
The phone immediately exploded with three missed calls, five voicemail alerts, and a single, newly delivered text message from an unlisted Boston number.
I didn’t open the voicemail.
I opened the text message.
It contained a high-resolution photograph of Kendall Vance standing on the front steps of the Beacon Hill brownstone, her arms pinned behind her back by two armed federal marshals, her designer sunglasses lying cracked on the limestone sidewalk.
Beneath the photograph ran three sentences:
*Target One secured at the residence.
Target Two (Gregory Vance) intercepted at Logan Terminal E attempting to board a flight to Lisbon.
Waiting for your signal on the transport vehicle.
Confirm delivery of the primary asset.*
I looked at the message.
Then I looked at Miriam.
Her hand was still extended, waiting for the USB drive.
“What is that?”
Miriam asked, her eyes narrowing as she saw the blue light reflecting off my face.
“Who is texting you?”
I didn’t answer.
I pressed the phone to my ear.
The call connected on half a ring.
“Agent Miller,” I said, my voice steady, resonant, and entirely stripped of the Boston waitress drawl I had practiced in speech therapy mirrors for four long years.
“This is Undercover Operative 884-Bravo.
The primary target has initiated flight protocols.
Asset is secured in the vehicle.
Intercept the Cessna at Bay 4 immediately.”
***
The town car screeched to a halt so violently that Miriam was thrown against the front partition, her leather folio spilling papers and blue legal briefs across the floorboards.
Outside, three unmarked black Chevy Suburbans roared across the tarmac from behind the Signature Flight Support hangar, their blue and red strobes flashing through the gray drizzle, boxing in the Cessna Citation before its nose gear could cross the taxiway line.
Doors flew open.
A dozen agents in tactical body armor and federal windbreakers spilled out onto the concrete, submachine guns raised, swarming the private jet.
Behind the wheel of our town car, the driver lunged toward his waistband.
“Don’t do it, Thomas,” I said, leaning forward through the open partition.
In my right hand was no longer the brass key or the scuffed catering flats.
It was a compact, matte-black Glock 43 that had been magnetically holstered beneath the false plinth of Russell’s walnut box for three years—the gun Russell Vance had kept in his private desk drawer, which I had quietly transferred into the heirloom box the night before his ‘death.’
The driver froze, his hands hovering three inches above his belt.
He slowly raised them and placed them flat against the steering wheel.
Miriam sat frozen on the floor of the cabin, staring at me as if the laws of physics had just collapsed around her head.
“You…” she breathed, the color draining from her face until she looked like a marble statue in an abandoned garden.
“You’re… you’re not Evelyn Laurent.
You’re not a waitress from Fall River.”
“My name is Evelyn Cross,” I said, keeping the barrel trained on Thomas’s neck while my eyes locked onto Miriam.
“Special Agent Evelyn Cross, Department of Justice, Organized Crime and Racketeering Section.
Margaret Vance was my mother’s youngest sister.”
Miriam let out a jagged, suffocating gasp.
“Margaret…”
“When my aunt was poisoned in that private sanitarium twelve years ago, my family knew what Russell had done,” I said, every word landing like a lead weight in the quiet car.
“We knew Kendall helped him.
We knew Gregory covered the bank trails.
But Russell had five former governors on his board of directors and the entire maritime union in his pocket.
A direct federal subpoena would have been killed by the deputy attorney general before the ink was dry.”
I reached down, pulled my badge out of the interior lining of the catering shoe where it had been sewn beneath the rubber insole, and let the gold shield catch the tarmac light.
“We knew Russell’s ego,” I continued.
