Chapter 5 - The Architect
Forty-eight hours later, we were in a windowless motel room in upstate New York. I had used cash from Vance's emergency stash to buy cheap laptops and burner equipment.
I spent two days decrypting the financial ledgers my father had left. Vanguard wasn't just a shadow network; it was a corporate empire. They funded their black sites through a web of shell companies.
"Look at this," I told Vance, pointing to the screen. "A massive recurring payment, fifty million dollars a month, goes to an offshore rig in the North Sea. It’s listed as an oil platform, but it produces zero barrels. That’s Site Echo."
Vance leaned over my shoulder. "An oil rig. It’s brilliant. Heavily fortified, surrounded by hostile waters, completely isolated."
"But before we storm a fortress, we need leverage," I said. "And I know exactly how to get it."
I traced a secondary payment to a man named Silas Thorne. He was the rogue bio-engineer who had created the synthetic decoy of my father. If we found him, we could prove to the world that Vanguard was manufacturing deaths to cover their tracks.
We tracked Thorne to a high-end medical facility in Manhattan. Vance and I breached his private lab after hours, bypassing the security with ease.
Thorne, a frail man in his sixties, nearly jumped out of his skin when I pressed the barrel of my SIG to the back of his head.
"Silas Thorne," I whispered. "You do exceptional work. My father looked incredibly peaceful in his casket."
Thorne trembled. "Marcus? You’re Marcus’s daughter. Please, they forced me! Vanguard threatened my family."
"I don't care," I snapped. "Give me the blueprints for Site Echo. My father was the architect. You built the decoy to give him cover. Which means you still have the comms link to him."
Thorne nodded frantically, typing into his encrypted terminal. "He… he left a backdoor in the rig’s mainframe. I can give you the schematics."
Suddenly, the glass window of the lab shattered.
Thorne’s chest exploded in a spray of crimson. A sniper bullet had taken him out before he could hit enter.
I hit the floor, dragging Vance down with me.
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"They were watching him!" Vance yelled.
I grabbed Thorne’s bloody hard drive, yanked it from the computer, and crawled toward the emergency exit. Vanguard was burning their own assets just to keep us in the dark.
