Chapter 3 - The Rogue Shark
Arthur Vance was a legend in Los Angeles. He was a ruthless corporate litigator who had been disbarred five years ago for blackmailing a corrupt federal judge. He operated in the shadows, destroying corporate empires for a heavy fee.
We found him the next morning in a smoky dive bar in Venice Beach.
When I sat down across from him in my wrinkled navy suit, he laughed. "Richard Sterling. I saw you on the news. You look like a man who lost a fight with a freight train."
"I did," I said, dropping a banded stack of fifty thousand dollars onto the sticky table. "But I’m buying a new train. And I want you to drive it."
Vance stopped laughing. He looked at the cash, then at Elena, who slid the hard drive across the table.
"What's on the drive?" Vance asked.
"The exact paper trail of how my ex-wife, Marcus Thorne, and my executive board embezzled two hundred million dollars and framed me," I replied. "I don't just want to clear my name, Arthur. I want to obliterate them. I want to leave them with nothing but the clothes on their backs."
Vance plugged the drive into his encrypted tablet. For ten minutes, he scrolled through the documents, his eyes widening with every click.
"This is sloppy," Vance muttered. "Arrogant. Cynthia tied the Cayman accounts to a shell corporation registered under her maiden name."
"Can you get the money back?" I asked.
"Better," Vance grinned, showing teeth like a great white shark. "I can drain it. But we need the physical cryptographic key to access the Cayman accounts. And there’s only one guy stupid enough to keep a physical copy on him."
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"Trenton," I said. My former CFO. The weakest link in the board.
"Exactly," Vance said, pocketing the fifty grand. "Let’s go hunting."
