Chapter 4 - The Master Plan
By 2:00 a.m., Leo was stable, his color returning to a healthy, rosy pink as he slept peacefully in my arms. My father and I stood in the clinic’s private conference room, mapping out every single move of our counter-offensive.
“If we go straight to local precinct cops, Ryan’s corporate lawyers will buy their way out before sunrise,” my father warned, pacing the floor. “We need airtight, unassailable federal evidence. We need to trap them with their own hands.”
“I know exactly how to do it,” I said, pulling out my phone.
I opened the messaging app and drafted a carefully worded text to Ryan, making sure my tone sounded frantic, exhausted, and completely unaware of the truth.
“Ryan, where are you? Leo woke up coughing violently in the car. I panicked and rushed him to St. John’s ER in Santa Monica. The doctors are running tests. Please come quickly, I’m terrified.”
Within thirty seconds, my phone rang. I hit speakerphone and handed it to my father, who recorded the audio directly onto his encrypted federal device.
“Mariana! Thank God,” Ryan’s voice burst through the receiver, sounding breathless and frantic. But as I listened closely beneath his panicked exterior, I didn't hear a father worried about his sick child; I heard a conspirator worried that his plan had gone off the rails. “Which ER did you say? St. John’s? Are you sure he’s okay?”
“The doctors are saying it might be an allergic reaction to the tea your mother gave him,” I lied smoothly, throwing out the bait. “They’re running a toxicology screen on his blood right now.”
There was a dead, suffocating silence on the other end of the line. You could practically hear the gears turning in Ryan’s head as he calculated the catastrophic risk of a hospital toxicology report uncovering the synthetic paralytic.
“Listen to me, Mariana,” Ryan said, his voice dropping to a harsh, commanding whisper. “Do not let the doctors run a tox screen. Do you hear me? Tell them it’s just a standard flu and bring him back home immediately. My mother and I are leaving the venue right now. Stay right where you are.”
“Hurry, Ryan,” I whispered back, and hung up.
My father smiled grimly, pulling a small silver recording device from his pocket. “Federal wiretapping authorization secured under exigent circumstances of child endangerment and attempted murder. That phone call alone is enough to warrant a midnight raid.”
“Not yet,” I said, shaking my head. “Let them walk right into the trap.”
We coordinated with a team of federal marshals and local investigators, setting up a sting operation at an abandoned private aviation hangar near the Santa Monica airport—a location Gavin, an old investigator friend, helped us secure under the guise of an emergency VIP medical transport bay.
At 4:15 a.m., the trap snapped shut.
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Ryan and Beatrice’s luxury sedan pulled into the darkened hangar, their headlights cutting through the fog. They stepped out expecting to find a terrified, isolated mother with a sick child.
Instead, they walked into a ring of federal agents with drawn badges and floodlights that turned the night into day.
