Chapter 10 - The Living Ghost
Inside the steel vault lay no bones, no decay, no evidence of murder.
Instead, the interior was lined with soft velvet, containing a portable satellite communications rig, six brick-sized stacks of unmarked hundred-dollar bills, and a live video monitor connected to a local closed-circuit feed.
On the monitor screen was a real-time, low-resolution video transmission from a small motel room forty miles away in Worcester.
Sitting at a small wooden desk inside that motel room was Sarah Sterling.
David choked back a sob, his hand flying to his mouth as tears spilled over his eyes. "Sarah..."
"She's alive," Marcus whispered, staring at the screen in disbelief. "She was never in the cellar."
"Look at the feed, Detective," David said, his voice shaking violently as he pointed at the monitor.
Sarah was not sitting in that room as a hostage. She was wearing a dark jumpsuit, working meticulously on a laptop computer connected to a series of hard drives. Beside her on the desk lay a pair of forged passports, a silenced 9mm pistol, and an exact duplicate of the black leather handbag David had taken from Evelyn two hours earlier.
On the laptop screen, thousands of lines of encrypted code were executing, rapidly liquidating the offshore accounts of the Sterling Trust and transferring the capital into an un-traceable Swiss ledger.
Sarah lifted her head on the monitor screen, as if sensing the camera.
She looked directly into the lens. A cold, terrifyingly calm smile spread across her face—a smile that was an exact, mirror image of the cruel grin Evelyn had worn in the bedroom upstairs.
She reached out a finger and pressed a key on her laptop.
Inside the steel vault in the cellar, a small digital timer on the satellite rig began to count down from sixty seconds.
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00:59... 00:58... 00:57...
"Out!" Marcus screamed, grabbing David by the jacket collar and pulling him backward toward the stairs. "It's an incendiary charge! Get out of the cellar!"
