Chapter 4 - The Friend Who Carried the Coffin
Gideon let the phone ring three times.
Daniel stared at the screen.
“Answer it.”
“I intend to.”
“Speaker.”
Gideon accepted the call.
“Sebastian.”
A familiar voice came through.
Warm.
Measured.
Concerned.
The same voice Gideon had heard across conference tables, hospital waiting rooms, funerals and whiskey glasses for nineteen years.
“Thank God,” Sebastian said. “I heard about the attack at your house.”
Gideon looked at Ivy.
She stood beside Daniel, clutching his sleeve because Albert was gone.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Security called me.”
“Which security?”
A pause.
Tiny.
Almost invisible.
“Corporate.”
“Interesting.”
“Gideon, what the hell is going on?”
“You tell me.”
Another pause.
“I'm not following.”
“You were at St. Anthony's.”
Silence.
Daniel's eyes sharpened.
Then Sebastian laughed softly.
“I visited a foundation employee.”
“At two in the morning?”
“She was attacked.”
“And you removed her?”
“I moved her somewhere safer.”
“Where?”
“I can't tell you over the phone.”
Gideon's voice became colder.
“You can.”
“Not with whoever may be listening.”
“No one is listening who concerns me.”
“You should come alone.”
Daniel mouthed, Absolutely not.
Gideon ignored him.
“Where?”
“Old Meridian Hotel.”
The hotel had been closed for renovation eleven months earlier.
Vale property.
Downtown.
Forty-one floors of darkness.
“Thirty minutes,” Sebastian said.
“What do you want?”
“Your help fixing a terrible misunderstanding.”
The call ended.
Daniel stared at Gideon.
“You're not going alone.”
“Obviously.”
“You said that too easily.”
“I'm growing.”
Ivy tugged Daniel's sleeve.
“Is Mama there?”
Gideon crouched.
“I think so.”
“I want to go.”
“No.”
Her expression hardened.
“You can't say no.”
“I just did.”
“She is my mama.”
“And that is why you are staying somewhere protected.”
“Your house was protected.”
That shut down every adult within ten feet.
Daniel glanced at Gideon.
The girl was right again.
Gideon stood.
“Then we stop using places that belong to me.”
They moved Ivy to a private pediatric physician's residence outside the city, guarded by Daniel's independent team.
She fought Gideon the entire way.
Not physically.
Worse.
With silence.
Before he left, she handed him something.
A single loose piece of pink thread.
She had found it inside her coat.
“Bring Mama back.”
Gideon closed his hand around the thread.
“I'll try.”
“Hard.”
“As hard as I know how.”
The Meridian Hotel rose over Wabash Avenue like a dead monument.
No holiday lights.
No guests.
No staff.
Construction fencing rattled in the wind.
Gideon arrived through a service entrance while Daniel's team came from the loading dock.
“Sebastian expects me alone.”
“He also apparently kidnaps accountants,” Daniel said. “We'll disappoint him.”
The lobby smelled of dust and cut stone.
Plastic covered the chandeliers.
An elevator waited with its doors open.
A handwritten note lay on the floor.
FORTIETH FLOOR.
Daniel looked at it.
“Subtle.”
They took the service stairs instead.
On the thirty-ninth floor, Daniel's man signaled.
Voices above.
Two armed guards.
They were neutralized silently.
Gideon stepped onto the fortieth floor alone.
Sebastian stood beside the window.
Leah Shaw sat in a chair ten feet away.
Alive.
Conscious.
Hands bound.
A bruise darkened half her face.
Gideon felt something inside himself turn mechanical.
“You look terrible,” Sebastian said.
“You look exactly the same.”
“That's not the compliment you think.”
“I wasn't complimenting you.”
Sebastian smiled.
“You brought Daniel.”
“Of course.”
“He was always suspicious.”
“It's why he's alive.”
Leah lifted her head.
“Where is Ivy?”
“Safe,” Gideon said.
Her eyes closed in relief.
Sebastian stepped toward the minibar.
Even in an abandoned hotel, someone had stocked it.
He poured two drinks.
Gideon did not take one.
Sebastian sighed.
“You stopped drinking Scotch.”
“Three years ago.”
“You still keep it in your study.”
A chill moved through Gideon.
“You've been in my house.”
“Hundreds of times.”
“Tonight.”
Sebastian's smile disappeared.
“Don't be dramatic.”
“You used my fleet credentials.”
“I control half your operating systems.”
“Not anymore.”
Sebastian looked almost disappointed.
“You really don't understand what Leah found.”
“Then explain it.”
Leah spoke first.
“He stole from the foundation.”
Sebastian turned toward her.
“Careful.”
“Two hundred and eleven million dollars.”
Gideon stared at her.
Leah continued.
“Not all at once. Shell clinics. Pediatric housing partnerships. Equipment vendors. Disaster grants. Twelve years.”
Twelve years.
The Juniper Vale Foundation had existed for only three.
Which meant—
“It started before Juniper died,” Gideon said.
Leah nodded.
“When it was still the Vale Family Charitable Trust.”
Sebastian placed his glass down.
“You built a machine too large for one person to understand.”
“So you robbed it.”
“I used it.”
“For what?”
“Political access. Real estate permits. Foreign licenses. Judges. Labor officials. Things that kept your companies alive.”
Gideon's hands curled.
“You laundered bribes through children's hospitals?”
Sebastian's expression sharpened.
“You think the towers built themselves? You think regulators simply admired your face?”
“You told me those relationships were legal.”
“They became legal.”
Leah laughed bitterly.
“You paid yourself too.”
Sebastian looked at her.
“That was rude.”
She did not flinch.
“You buried forty-three million in private trusts.”
“And yet here I am still working.”
“You were preparing to disappear.”
Sebastian's face changed.
Gideon saw it.
There it was.
The real fear.
Not exposure.
Escape interrupted.
“What did she take?” Gideon asked.
Sebastian said nothing.
Gideon looked at Leah.
“What did you take?”
“A ledger.”
“Digital?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
Leah's eyes filled.
“In Ivy's rabbit.”
Sebastian closed his eyes.
Gideon almost smiled.
“You lost it.”
“I had three teams search the house.”
“The girl dropped the rabbit.”
Sebastian opened his eyes.
“Where?”
Gideon shrugged.
“In a twenty-three-bedroom house currently occupied by armed men who failed to kill me.”
Sebastian stepped closer.
“The drive has encrypted transaction records, audio files and account maps. It doesn't only destroy me.”
“What else?”
“It destroys you.”
Gideon said nothing.
“Every payment went through Vale entities.”
“Without my approval.”
“Prove it.”
Leah stared at Gideon.
“That is his plan.”
Gideon looked at her.
She nodded.
“He was going to take the money, expose selected records and make it look like you used your dead daughter's foundation to hide bribes.”
For the first time all night, Gideon felt truly sick.
Sebastian saw it.
“Now you understand.”
“You used her name.”
“It was an efficient shield.”
Gideon crossed the room so quickly Sebastian barely had time to react.
He grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the wall.
The glass hit the floor.
“You used my daughter's name.”
Sebastian struggled.
“You think grief makes you special?”
Gideon hit him once.
Blood appeared at Sebastian's mouth.
Then Leah screamed.
“Gideon!”
A red laser dot moved across Gideon's chest.
Sniper.
Daniel shouted from the stairwell.
“Down!”
Glass exploded.
Gideon pulled Sebastian with him as a bullet tore through the window.
Daniel's team entered.
Gunfire erupted from the neighboring tower.
Sebastian crawled toward the service corridor.
Leah's chair overturned.
Gideon moved toward her.
“Stay down!”
He cut one wrist free.
Another shot struck the floor.
Sebastian disappeared through a doorway.
Daniel chased him.
Gideon freed Leah.
“Can you run?”
“Yes.”
“Then run.”
They reached the stairwell.
Daniel returned thirty seconds later.
“He had an extraction team.”
“Gone?”
“Yes.”
Leah leaned against the wall, breathing hard.
“There's something you don't know.”
Gideon looked at her.
“Please tell me we're running out of things I don't know.”
“We aren't.”
“What?”
She hesitated.
“Michael.”
“Your husband?”
“He didn't die in an accident.”
The world seemed to slow.
Leah's eyes filled with tears.
“He found the accounts first.”
Gideon stared at her.
“Sebastian killed him?”
“I couldn't prove it.”
“But you believe it.”
“Yes.”
She wiped blood from her mouth.
“That's why I kept digging.”
Daniel's phone rang.
He answered.
His face changed instantly.
“No.”
Gideon stepped toward him.
“What?”
Daniel held up one finger.
Listened.
Then lowered the phone.
“The doctor watching Ivy is alive.”
Gideon's stomach dropped.
“Why did you phrase it that way?”
“Because the two men outside the house aren't.”
Leah stopped breathing.
“No.”
Daniel continued.
“The girl is gone.”
Leah screamed.
Gideon's phone buzzed.
A photograph appeared.
Ivy sat in the back of a car.
Albert the rabbit was lying in her lap.
Underneath the image was one message from Sebastian Rourke.
May you like
BRING ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW BEFORE MIDNIGHT TOMORROW.
OR THIS CHRISTMAS, YOU BURY ANOTHER LITTLE GIRL.
