Chapter 4 - Anatomy of a Setup
The interrogation room beneath the Aegis West headquarters on 11th Avenue had no mirrors, no cameras on the walls, and no recording devices. It was lined with sound-dampening acoustic panels, illuminated only by a single recessed halogen fixture above a steel conference table.
Brooke Vance sat in the chair, her knees pulled up to her chest, her expensive designer dress crumpled, her makeup stained with black streaks down her hollow cheeks.
The steel door clicked open.
Adrian walked in alone. He was not wearing a jacket. His shirtsleeves were rolled to his forearms, revealing the pale, jagged scars from his military service a decade prior. He did not look angry; he looked hollowed out, his eyes sunken into bruised shadows, his jaw set with a lethal, rigid tension that made Brooke shrink back against her chair.
He placed a manila folder on the table between them.
"Adrian," she sobbed, reaching toward him. "Adrian, please, they dragged me out of my apartment, they wouldn't let me—"
"Quiet," he said.
The word was not shouted. It was dropped like a lead weight onto the table. Brooke snapped her mouth shut, her breath hitching in a wet rattle.
Adrian opened the folder. Inside was a toxicology screening run forty minutes ago from his own blood, drawn by an Aegis physician.
"Gamma-hydroxybutyrate combined with a synthetic piperidine derivative," Adrian read from the paper, his voice completely flat. "A dosage calculated to induce total motor suggestibility within twelve minutes, followed by anterograde amnesia lasting approximately three hours. It's an eastern-bloc military compound. You can't buy it on the street. You can't buy it on the dark web."
He looked up from the sheet, his grey eyes pinning Brooke to her seat.
"Who gave it to you, Brooke?"
"I don't know what you're talking about!" she cried, shaking her head hysterically. "You wanted me! You were drunk, you held my hand in the car, you told me you were miserable—"
Adrian leaned down, placing both palms flat on the table, bringing his face within six inches of hers. "I have loved your sister since I was twenty-four years old. I have pulled her through two miscarriages that nearly killed her. I have never looked at you with anything other than the pity one reserves for a spoiled, parasitic child."
Brooke flinched as if struck.
"Now," Adrian whispered, each syllable sharp as broken glass. "I will ask you once more before I turn this over to men who do not share my familial obligations. Who paid off your two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-dollar debt to the casino syndicate in Macau last Tuesday?"
Brooke’s face lost every shred of color. Her lips parted, trembling violently.
"They... they said nobody would get hurt," she whispered, her voice disintegrating. "They said... they said you were going to divorce her anyway. They said they just needed photographic evidence of you in the suite to force a corporate restructuring. They promised me she would get half your money. They said it would protect her."
"Who?" Adrian’s voice shook with a sudden, violent rage that made the steel table shudder under his hands.
"Mercer," Brooke wept, burying her face in her hands. "Julian Mercer. He said you ruined his family’s shipping firm. He said he was going to take the Callahan bloodline down to the marrow."
Adrian straightened up slowly.
Julian Mercer.
A ghost from five years ago. A maritime logistics mogul whose shell companies had been caught running illicit weapons and human cargo through Adrian’s Aegis-monitored ports in the Mediterranean. Adrian had provided the intelligence that had sent Mercer’s father to a federal penitentiary, where he had hung himself in his cell six months later.
Mercer didn't want Callahan Global.
Mercer wanted retribution. And he knew Adrian well enough to know that Adrian could not be killed with bullets or ruined with money. The only way to destroy Adrian Callahan was to strip him of his legacy—to make him watch the woman he worshipped walk out into the cold with his unborn child, straight into the open jaws of a wolf he couldn't see.
Cole Vance entered the room without knocking. He held a tactical tablet in his left hand, his face pale beneath his crew cut.
"Adrian," Cole said quietly.
Adrian turned. "What?"
"Her beacon just went live."
Adrian felt the floor tilt beneath his boots. "Where?"
"Hudson Valley. Near Rhinebeck. An unregistered property belonging to her late grandmother." Cole tapped the screen, zooming in on a pulsing red satellite crosshair. "She triggered the hard-contact signal three minutes ago. But Adrian... there's a problem."
"Speak," Adrian commanded, already moving toward the door.
May you like
"The local cell towers in that quadrant were jammed forty minutes before the beacon triggered. Whoever is up there brought a mobile EW unit. They aren't trying to follow her." Cole looked up, his voice grim. "They've already cornered her."
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