Chapter 6 - A Shadow on the Cameras
“Apex Maritime is Julian’s fund,” I whispered, staring at the green felt of my desk blotter. “He used his own shell company to pull medical stationary from my son’s doctor.”
“Michael, listen to me,” Dr. Harrison’s voice urged over the speaker. “If someone put a 100-microgram patch on Noah, they weren't trying to sedate him. That dose shuts down the respiratory center in an adult within twenty minutes. In an infant, it’s an execution.”
“Thank you, David,” I said, cutting the call before my voice broke completely.
The silence returned to the study, heavy and lethal.
Margaret Collins sat trembling in the leather chair, her face buried in her hands as she realized the true nature of the package she had accepted.
“I didn’t know,” she wept hysterically. “Michael, I swear on my mother’s grave, I thought it was colic medicine! He told me Noah was crying too much and needed rest!”
“Frank, take her down to the security holding cell in the basement,” I commanded coldly. “Strip her of any electronics and lock the heavy gate. If she breathes a word, make sure she regrets it.”
“Please, Michael! No!” Margaret screamed as Frank gripped her arm with iron fingers, dragging her out of the study and down the wood-paneled hallway.
Emily stood by the fire, her eyes tracking Margaret’s departure before turning back to me. “Mr. Carter, if your brother is in the guest house, he knows the helicopter landed.”
“He knows,” I agreed, walking over to the gun cabinet concealed behind the bookshelf.
I unlocked the reinforced steel safe with my thumbprint and pulled out a sleek, black Kimber .45 semi-automatic pistol, checking the magazine with practiced efficiency.
“You can’t just shoot him, sir,” Emily said, her tone steady despite the weapon in my hands.
I turned around, the steel cold against my palm. “He tried to murder my son, Emily. He tried to snuff out a six-month-old baby for money.”
“And if you kill him right now, you go to Walpole State Prison for life,” Emily countered, not backing down an inch. “Who protects Noah then? Who raises your son if you’re locked in a cage?”
Her words hit me like a splash of freezing seawater, forcing my rage back into a cold, calculating box.
The study door opened, and Frank stepped back inside, wiping a smudge of grease from his cuff. “Margaret is secured. Two guards are stationed outside her cell.”
“Where is Julian right now?” I asked, sliding the pistol into the waistband of my trousers beneath my suit jacket.
“He’s sitting in the drawing room of the west guest house,” Frank answered, pulling up the estate’s interior surveillance feed on his tablet. “He’s drinking scotch by himself. He hasn’t come up to the main house once since the ambulance arrived.”
“A normal uncle would have been running across the lawn the second he heard twelve sirens,” Emily observed quietly.
“Bring up the perimeter footage from five o'clock,” I ordered Frank. “Let’s see how that courier got in.”
Frank swiped across the tablet, pulling up the high-definition security camera overlooking the west service gate.
At precisely 5:10 PM, a sleek black motorcycle with no license plate pulled up to the gate intercom.
The rider wore a dark helmet with a tinted visor and a generic yellow courier vest over a leather jacket.
On the screen, the rider didn’t buzz the intercom or wait for a guard; he reached out a gloved hand and punched a six-digit sequence directly into the keypad.
The heavy wrought-iron gate swung open smoothly, allowing the motorcycle to glide into the courtyard without triggering a single perimeter alarm.
“Look at the camera feed in the upper left corner,” Emily said, pointing at the tablet screen.
Frank zoomed in on the timecode. At 5:11 PM, the timestamp flickered, skipping from 5:11:02 to 5:11:06 in an unnatural jump.
“A digital loop,” Frank muttered, his eyes narrowing. “Someone spliced a four-second ghost feed into the primary security server to mask the rider’s face.”
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“Only three people have administrative access to splice that server, Frank,” I said, locking eyes with my enforcer. “Me, you, and the head of our corporate tech infrastructure.”
“And Julian chairs the corporate tech committee,” Frank concluded, his voice dead and grim. “He had the root password.”
