Chapter 71 - The Red Line
The revelation felt like ice water dumped directly into my veins.
Every single memory of Amanda rearranged itself into a pattern of terrifying clarity: the way she had subtly pushed Jason into challenging the will at Thanksgiving dinner; the venomous toasts she had proposed to keep Jason's arrogance burning; the mysterious phone calls she was taking on the terrace while Jason was making a drunken fool of himself in front of the family.
She had never been the vapid social climber Jason flaunted.
She was the syndicate’s inside architect, embedded at the heart of the Harrington family to ensure the assets never slipped through their fingers. And Jason—arrogant, blind, pathetic Jason—had been her puppet the entire time.
"Where is she now?" Emily asked, her voice dangerously quiet, her arms tightening protectively around our sleeping baby boy.
"Her Beacon Hill penthouse is empty," Harris replied, his face pale under the ambulance lights. "Boston PD breached the residence twenty minutes ago. Her closets were cleaned out. The hard drives in her private office were drilled through with thermal charges. She's in the wind."
Suddenly, the encrypted satellite phone inside my jacket pocket began to vibrate with a low, rhythmic pulse.
Miller and Harris instantly froze, their eyes darting to my chest.
"Is it Vance's network?" Miller asked, his hand dropping to the holster at his hip.
I pulled the phone out. The screen didn't display an international country code or an encrypted proxy. It displayed an incoming video transmission originating from a private broadcast link.
I looked at Emily. She nodded, her jaw set, her hand resting over Leo's ears so the sound wouldn't wake him.
I swiped the green icon and held the screen up.
The display flickered through static before resolving into a high-definition video feed. Amanda Harrington sat in the plush leather cabin of a high-speed vessel, the black waters of Massachusetts Bay rushing past the darkened windows behind her. She had shed her designer dresses; she wore a sleek black tactical turtleneck, her hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, her cold green eyes staring straight into the lens with chilling, amused poise.
Beside her, tied to a bolted metal chair, gagged with heavy silver duct tape and bruised within an inch of his life, was my brother Jason.
His eyes were wide with pure, unadulterated terror as tears streamed down his battered cheeks, groveling toward the camera, a shell of the golden boy who had laughed at me across the holiday table.
"Hello, Brian. Hello, Emily," Amanda purred, her voice completely devoid of the whiny, high-society affectation she had maintained for years. "I must congratulate you. Taking down Julian and Uncle Alistair in the same night is quite an impressive resume builder."
"It's over, Amanda," I said through gritted teeth. "The ledger is in federal custody. The marshals have the offshore keys. You have nowhere left to run."
Amanda laughed—a soft, melodic sound that sent a shiver down my spine. She reached out with an ivory-handled combat knife, gently tapping the flat of the cold blade against Jason’s trembling jaw. Jason let out a muffled whimper of absolute horror.
"You really don't understand the rules of the table, do you, little brother?" Amanda smiled, leaning closer to the lens until her cold eyes filled the display. "Uncle Alistair and Julian were expendable relics. The ledger plate you gave to the feds? It wasn't the master key. It was a digital trigger. The moment Harris plugged that plate into the Department of Justice mainframe, it began transferring sixty percent of Marcus's private holdings directly into our blind offshore reserve."
Harris’s face drained of color as his own tactical radio suddenly erupted with frantic, screaming voices from the Boston field office.
"And as for your beloved family..." Amanda tilted the camera down, revealing an illuminated digital timer mounted to the floor of the boat cabin beneath Jason's chair, counting down from zero-four-zero-zero—four minutes remaining.
"You always wanted Jason to pay for how he treated you, didn't you, Brian?" Amanda whispered, her eyes glowing with psychotic amusement. "Now you get to make the choice. The transponder on this boat is broadcasting to only one location: the harbor beacon at Minot's Ledge. You have three minutes to reach him before the scuttle charge detonates and Jason feeds the crabs."
She paused, her smile widening into a razor-sharp crescent.
"Or... you can turn around and look at the control tower behind you."
My heart stopped.
May you like
I spun on the ambulance tailgate, looking across the rain-swept tarmac toward the Hanscom flight control tower two hundred yards away.
On the third-floor observation deck, a single crimson laser dot danced across the wet glass, tracking directly through the window—aimed dead-center at the back of Emily's head.
