Chapter 43
The flight back to Chicago was a suffocating descent into paranoia. Clara did not sleep. She sat in the dim cabin of the Vance private jet, her fingers flying across the glowing keyboard of her encrypted terminal. The Phantom’s absence in Geneva proved he had known it was a trap. For an operative in Europe to anticipate the movements of the Vance syndicate's inner circle, there was only one impossible, terrifying conclusion.
"We have a mole," Clara said, her voice echoing in the quiet cabin.
Silas stood leaning against the bulkhead, a glass of bourbon in his hand, his eyes burning with a lethal fire. "Marco vetted the personal guard detail twice. No one has made unauthorized communications. No one has the clearance to know the specifics of the Geneva operation."
"It isn't a foot soldier, Silas," Clara muttered, lines of code reflecting in her dark eyes as she bypassed their own internal firewalls. "It is someone with high-level access to our liquid capital routing. Someone who used our own resources to feed information to the Phantom in exchange for a percentage of the European routes."
For six hours, Clara ran a custom algorithm she had designed herself, hunting for digital anomalies in their offshore ledgers. Finally, the screen flashed green, tracing a highly sophisticated money-laundering sequence through a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands.
Clara looked up, her expression turning to stone. "It’s Dominic."
Silas froze. Dominic was one of the three Western regional commanders, a man who had sworn loyalty to Silas in blood a decade ago. Without a single word, Silas set his glass down.
Three hours after landing in Chicago, Silas and Marco led a silent breach into Dominic’s lavish downtown penthouse. There was no negotiation. Silas kicked the heavy double doors off their hinges, marching into the living room and grabbing Dominic by the throat. He hurled the traitor across the room, sending him crashing through a glass coffee table.
"Silas, please!" Dominic sobbed, crawling backward over the shattered glass, blood pouring from his face. "The Phantom threatened my family! He said he would kill my children if I didn't give him the Geneva itinerary!"
Silas drew his pistol, his face a mask of absolute, unforgiving death. "The mercy of the Vance family died with Graham Hart."
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"Wait! I can tell you where he is striking next!" Dominic shrieked, holding up his bleeding hands.
"I already know," Silas said coldly, and pulled the trigger. The gunshot echoed through the penthouse, a brutal, definitive message to the entire underworld: treason would be met with instant, unrelenting death.
