Chapter 7 - The Mastermind UnmaskedJust when I believed the nightmare was finally behind us, Marcus called me on a secure line late on a Thursday evening.
"Evelyn, we have a complication," Marcus said, his voice unusually sharp. "The federal prosecutors just ran a deep trace on the primary funding account behind Grant’s syndicate. The money wasn't coming from Vancouver."
I sat up at my desk, pulling a pad of paper toward me. "Where was it coming from?"
" Zurich," Marcus replied. "And the account holder isn't a foreign real estate developer. It’s registered to a holding company called 'Vance International Heritage.'"
My hand stopped over the paper. Vance. My family name.
"That's impossible," I said firmly. "My father was the sole trustee of the Vance Estate until he passed away four years ago. I am the only living heir."
"That’s what the legal records show," Marcus said. "But someone else has been signing off on wire transfers using your father’s secondary estate seal. Evelyn... whoever was funding Grant’s scheme was using your own family’s hidden assets to build the network that tried to destroy you."
A cold realization settled into my stomach. My father had a younger brother—my Uncle Richard—who had disappeared from family life twenty years ago after a bitter dispute over the family trust. The family had declared him legally dead seven years ago when his boat was found abandoned off the coast of Maine.
"Richard," I whispered.
"I ran a comparison on the digital signatures on the Zurich transfers," Marcus confirmed. "They match Richard Vance’s old banking codes. He’s alive, Evelyn. And he wasn't just working with Grant—he was Grant’s silent partner. Grant was the local muscle, but Richard was the architect."
I stood up and walked to the window, looking out over the dark fields surrounding the house. Richard had always hated my father, believing he had been robbed of his fair share of the family fortune. When my father died and left everything to me in an unassailable trust, Richard must have realized he couldn't break the trust legally.
So he found Grant. He groomed Grant, tempted him with easy wealth, and used Grant’s greed to slowly drain the trust from the inside, planning to leave me broke, disgraced, and imprisoned while he reclaimed the family fortune.
"Where is he now?" I asked.
"Our intelligence indicates he landed at a private airfield near Aspen two hours ago," Marcus said. "He knows the federal case against Grant is closing in on his operational accounts. He’s here to extract the remaining liquid assets from your father’s primary vault before fleeing to South America."
"The vault in Aspen," I said, my teeth grinding together. My father had kept a physical vault beneath our mountain chalet in Aspen—a vault containing physical land titles, historical bearer bonds, and rare assets worth tens of millions.
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"Do you want me to send a federal tactical team?" Marcus asked.
"No," I replied, my voice dropping an octave into pure, lethal focus. "This is a family matter. Coordinate with state police to lock down the local airspace. I’m going to Aspen."
