Chapter 5 - The Microdot
I forced myself to remain completely calm as I looked at the man who had murdered Sofia.
“No problem at all, Marco,” I said smoothly, stepping casually between him and Rosie.
“Just comforting the child.”
Marco nodded slowly, his cold eyes lingering on Rosie for a second too long.
“The guests are getting extremely restless in the drawing room, sir.”
“Let them wait,” I replied, walking toward him and forcing him to step back into the hallway.
I closed the nursery door firmly behind me, ensuring Rosie was safely out of sight.
“Keep guarding the main exits, Marco,” I ordered, keeping my voice authoritative.
He gave a slight bow of his head and walked away down the long corridor.
I immediately sprinted in the opposite direction toward the underground server room.
I locked the heavy steel door behind me and accessed the primary security mainframe.
If Marco had killed Sofia, he would have altered the security footage to cover his own tracks.
I bypassed his administrative passwords using a backdoor code I had secretly installed years ago.
I pulled up the raw, unedited footage from the night of the murder.
The real video showed Marco entering Sofia’s room at midnight holding a medical syringe.
Ten minutes later, Vivienne walked into the room, clearly working in tandem with the killer.
But they were not looking for a simple platinum ring.
They were systematically tearing the room apart, searching for something incredibly valuable.
I pulled Sofia’s ring out of my pocket and placed it under the bright desk lamp.
I picked up a magnifying glass and examined the tiny, hand-carved star on the inside of the band.
The star was not merely a decorative carving.
It was a perfectly square indentation holding a microscopic, nearly invisible data chip.
I used a sterile pair of tweezers to carefully extract the tiny microdot from the metal.
I slid the chip into a specialized adapter and plugged it directly into the secure server.
A heavily encrypted folder instantly popped up on the large monitor.
I ran a brute-force decryption program, praying the password was something simple.
Three agonizing minutes later, the progress bar hit one hundred percent.
Hundreds of offshore banking records and illegal weapon shipment manifests flooded the screen.
Sofia had not been a simple housekeeper.
She had been a high-level corporate whistleblower hiding a massive treasure trove of criminal evidence.
I clicked on the very last document in the folder, titled with a single word.
The word was "Management."
I opened the file to finally see the face of the criminal mastermind running this massive syndicate.
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The high-resolution photograph staring back at me was my own father.
The same father who had tragically died in a fiery plane crash exactly five years ago.
