“And their personal vehicles?”
“Richard’s Mercedes and Victoria’s Range Rover are parked at the private marina in Newport,” Arthur replied.
“Both vehicles were registered under Vance Holdings.
Both are included in the seizure order.
Their keys are currently in my briefcase.”
I turned around to face him.
The trembling in my fingers had stopped.
The cold in my chest had hardened into an icy, crystalline diamond of absolute clarity.
“Cancel the SEC holding request,” I said.
Arthur’s eyes narrowed behind his glasses.
“Ms.
Sterling, if we withdraw the criminal referral, Richard Vance will immediately attempt to liquidate his secondary foreign assets to secure private bail and flee the jurisdiction.
We have records indicating he has a residence in Uruguay that cannot be reached by American extradition.”
“I know,” I said.
“Let them leave the wharf.”
“Chloe—”
“Do not call me Chloe, Arthur,” I said, my voice flat, low, carrying an authority that made the older man’s spine stiffen against the back of his chair.
“I am the President of Vantage Capital.
I hold seventy percent of the voting shares.
And as of ten minutes ago, I am the sole surviving trustee of the Sterling Estate.
You will do precisely as I instruct.”
Arthur took a slow breath, set his Montblanc down on the binder, and folded his hands over his lapels.
“What are your orders, Madam President?”
“Release them from the wharf,” I said.
“Let them walk up the hill to the municipal parking lot in Point Judith.
Let them realize their luxury cars have been towed.
Give them back their cell phones—the personal ones, not the corporate accounts.
Ensure that Richard’s private checking account at Sovereign Trust shows a balance of exactly eleven thousand dollars.”
Arthur tilted his head, his sharp legal mind parsing the numbers with surgical speed.
“Eleven thousand?
That is the exact statutory limit for an unmonitored cash withdrawal at an international commercial exchange terminal.”
“Precisely,” I said.
“Richard Vance has spent forty years believing that money is the only armor that matters in this world.
Let him think he has just enough armor left to buy three one-way tickets to Montevideo on the midnight tramp steamer out of New Bedford.”
“And Liam?”
Arthur asked.
“What becomes of the son?”
I looked down at the yellowed newspaper clipping of Clara Sterling—the mother who had died on a rainy highway because she believed the law would protect her from the men who stole her work.
“Tell Liam,” I said, “that I left something for him in the master stateroom of this boat.
Tell him that if he wants to save his family from twenty years in a federal penitentiary in Otisville, he has until midnight to retrieve it.”
***
The fog rolled into Point Judith shortly after ten o’clock, thick and greasy with the stench of dead sea life and wet coal.
The commercial barge had dumped the Vance family onto the greasy wooden dock with all the ceremony of an empty dumpster being emptied into a landfill.
The deckhands hadn’t even lowered the boarding stairs; they had thrown a heavy rubber tire onto the dock and told Richard to jump before the tide pulled them out toward the harbor mouth.
Victoria was sitting on an upturned wooden lobster crate behind the bait shack, her bare feet tucked under her ruined silk skirt, shivering so violently that her teeth chattered like castanets.
Her five-thousand-dollar bag lay in the mud at her side, smeared with fish scales and grease.
“You’re a coward,” she whispered through blue lips, staring at her husband.
“You’re a weak, sniveling, incompetent coward.
You let a twenty-six-year-old girl strip us in front of the entire eastern seaboard.”
Richard stood under the buzzing sodium vapor light of the harbormaster’s shack, his hair plastered to his forehead with salt rain, frantically punching digits into a battered prepaid burner phone he had bought from the night clerk for two hundred dollars in cash.
“Shut up, Victoria,” he rasped, his voice dead, hollowed out by the third consecutive rejection from his offshore legal counsel.
“Just shut your mouth.
The Swiss accounts are locked.
Sovereign Trust filed a global freeze order through the court of arbitration in the Hague.
The London lines are dead.
Everything is gone.
Everything.”
“We have the house in Greenwich!” she shrieked, her voice rising into an hysterical, bird-like cry that made a passing dockworker pause and spit into the water.
“They can’t touch the primary residence!
