Chapter 7 - The Ledger of the Dead
The office was surprisingly tidy. A mahogany desk sat beneath a large framed map of international shipping routes, its surface clear except for a heavy, old-fashioned brass safe built directly into the wall behind the chair.
Nora didn’t waste time searching for a combination. She pulled a small, high-frequency thermal charge from her tactical pouch, slapped it against the electronic keypad of the safe, and stepped back behind the reinforced door frame.
Fzzzt—Boom.
The micro-charge blew the locking mechanism with a sharp, muffled pop rather than a loud explosion, sending a puff of white smoke into the air. Nora kicked the heavy steel door open.
Inside sat a single item: a thick, leather-bound ledger with pages yellowed by age and filled with dense, handwritten columns of numbers and names.
She pulled it out, her gloved fingers trembling slightly as she flipped it open to the first page.
The handwriting was meticulous. Dates, routing codes, offshore account numbers in the Caymans and Zurich. And right there, neatly underlined in red ink under the header Operation Desert Ghost – 2020, was a list of call signs and coordinates.
And beside them, the name of the broker who had sold the intelligence.
Nora’s breath caught in her throat. The name wasn't Cal Vale. Cal Vale was just the money man, the front.
The name written in the ledger belonged to someone much closer to home. Someone who currently sat in the mayor’s office downtown, orchestrating the city’s entire criminal and political landscape from behind a veil of absolute respectability.
“Well, well, well,” a voice echoed from the doorway behind her. “Looks like you found my little reading diary.”
Nora spun around, her pistol raised and leveled instantly at the threshold.
May you like
Standing in the doorway, casually leaning against the doorframe with a smoking cigarette between his fingers, was not Cal Vale.
It was Dominic Arlen.
