Chapter 19 - pale crest
Without waiting for permission, Catherine opened the car door and sprinted down the slippery stone path toward the boathouse. I scrambled out right behind her, my boots skidding across the wet moss as we rushed into the dark sea fog.
We reached the timber deck of the boathouse just as two officers tackled a man in a dark rain slicker to the wooden planks. Inside the structure, industrial floodlights illuminated rows of wooden crates marked with international shipping codes.
Standing near the edge of the dock, held at gunpoint by Detective Vance, was my brother Arthur.
His clothes were disheveled, his face pale and sunken, his hair wild from the sea wind. In his right hand, he held a heavy steel briefcase locked to his wrist with a brass chain.
"Arthur!" I called out, my voice cutting through the roar of the surf below.
Arthur turned his head slowly, his hollow eyes locking onto me, then shifting to Catherine standing right beside me. A strange, bitter laugh escaped his lips—a sound completely devoid of sanity or warmth.
"Clara..." Arthur rasped, his voice trembling violently. "You shouldn't have come here. You don't know what they're capable of."
"Drop the briefcase, Arthur!" Detective Vance ordered, taking a step forward with his gun raised. "It's over! Isabella is in custody, and your accounts have been frozen by federal order!"
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"Isabella was just the front, you fool!" Arthur screamed, his voice rising into a frantic, terrifying shriek over the wind. "She didn't run the syndicate! Her father didn't run it! The Vance-Cross foundation was bought out ten years ago by the syndicate in Geneva!"
He raised his free left hand, holding a small silver remote detonator with a flashing red LED light. "If I don't board that boat in ninety seconds, the encryption key on the Swiss servers auto-destructs, and every record of our family's fortune dissolves forever!"
