Chapter 16 - The Transfer at Dawn
I stared at the report in utter disbelief.
"Disappeared?" I repeated. "He was in a maximum-security federal facility under twenty-four-hour surveillance!"
"At four o'clock yesterday morning," my father explained, "a medical transport van carrying Nathan to a specialist facility in Peoria was ambushed on a quiet stretch of Interstate 55."
"No shots were fired."
"The prison guards were incapacitated with an airborne neurotoxin."
"When the backup units arrived ten minutes later, the van was empty."
I leaned back against my chair, feeling an old, familiar tension creep back into my neck.
"Who had the resources to pull off an extraction like that?" I asked. "Victor Vance is in prison. Celeste is in prison. Their assets were completely liquidated."
My father pulled a second document from the portfolio—a high-resolution satellite printout of a private airstrip near Lake Michigan.
"When we liquidated Ashford Global," my father revealed, "we focused on the maritime contracts and corporate accounts."
"We missed a secret secondary line of credit registered under Nathan's mother's maiden name in Munich."
"A line of credit created thirty years ago."
I looked up into my father's dark gray eyes.
"Nathan's mother died when he was six," I murmured, recalling the few details Nathan had ever shared about his past.
"Her name was Clara Ashford," my father said softly.
May you like
"Except her name wasn't Clara."
"It was Clara Vance."
