Chapter 3 - THE HIGH-RISE WAR ROOM
Maya Chen’s office was located on the forty-second floor of a sleek, black-glass tower overlooking the Seattle waterfront. At 10:30 PM, the building was nearly empty, the silent hallways smelling of industrial carpet cleaner and expensive espresso.
When I walked in, Maya didn't offer me a platitude. She didn't gasp at the blood on my lip or the dirt on my knees. She simply stood up, walked to her private cabinet, and pulled out a clean, oversized black sweater and a box of sterile wipes.
"Go wash up," Maya said, her voice sharp and clinical. "The forensic team is already verifying the metadata on the security footage. By midnight, we’ll have a temporary protective order signed by an on-call judge. But the real work begins with the asset freeze."
I went into her private restroom, staring at myself in the mirror. I wiped the blood from my lip. The skin was split, swollen, but the bleeding had stopped. I pulled the wet, muddy coat off and slid into the clean sweater.
When I returned to the main office, Maya had three large monitors active. One showed the corporate registry for Blackwood Manufacturing; the second displayed a flow chart of Daniel’s offshore accounts; the third was a live terminal displaying the balance sheets of the company's primary commercial lender, Pacific Merchants Bank.
"Here’s where we stand," Maya said, pointing to the second screen. "Daniel thinks he owns sixty percent of the voting shares because he forged your signature on the Clara Vance Trust transfer documents last week."
"He didn't just forge it," I said, sitting down and pulling my encrypted laptop from my bag. "He used an outdated notary stamp from a clerk who died three years ago. I let him find the copy of the trust agreement in my study drawer because I wanted him to attempt the transfer. The moment he filed that forged document with the state securities commissioner, he committed a Class B felony."
"And because he used an electronic filing portal, it’s wire fraud," Maya added, her eyes gleaming. "The FBI’s financial crimes unit is going to love him. But we have to move before he realizes the banks have flagged the transaction. If he catches wind of the freeze, he’ll try to wire the remaining pension funds to his personal account in Switzerland."
"He can't," I said, my fingers flying across my keyboard, accessing the private network I had built over the last two years. "I’ve spent the last three hours setting up a secondary routing loop on the Blackwood corporate server. Every time he attempts a wire transfer exceeding fifty thousand dollars, the system triggers an automatic 'verification delay' that routes the authorization request directly to my phone."
"He’s going to try to run, Vivienne," Maya warned, her voice softening just a fraction. "When men like Daniel realize the ground is slipping beneath them, they don't fight fair. They get desperate. And desperate men are dangerous."
"He already proved how dangerous he is tonight," I said, touching the sore spot on my scalp. "But Daniel’s bravado only exists when he has an audience. Without his mother’s approval and his father’s checkbook, he’s nothing but a coward in an expensive suit."
My phone vibrated on the desk.
It was an automated alert from the home automation system.
Front Door Opened: 10:48 PM.
May you like
Daniel’s Phone Connected to Home Wi-Fi.
"He's back in his study," I murmured, watching the data traffic spike on my monitor. "He's logging into the Pacific Merchants portal. He’s trying to move the money."
