Chapter 17 - The Cayman Bait
The corrupt agent stared at the glowing computer screen, mesmerized by the sheer amount of zeroes in the bank balance.
"Cortez does not do face-to-face meetings with dead men," the agent scoffed, trying to mask his rising panic.
Elias violently jammed the barrel of the pistol harder against the base of the agent's skull.
"Then you are going to convince him," I said softly.
I pulled out a burner phone and dialed a secure routing number Elias had managed to extract from the bleeding cartel lieutenant.
I held the phone to the agent’s ear.
The line clicked open, and a smooth, chillingly calm voice spoke in Spanish.
The agent swallowed hard, his voice trembling as he spoke to the phantom boss.
"He has the money, Alejandro, but he is completely locked into the Cayman server. He will only authorize the final release directly to you."
There was a long, agonizing silence on the other end of the line.
"Bring him to the old steel mill on the riverfront," Cortez finally replied, his voice devoid of any human emotion. "Alone."
The line went completely dead.
I looked at Elias, who nodded grimly. The trap was officially set, but I was the bait.
I walked over to the makeshift camp we had set up in the foreman's office and knelt in front of Sarah.
She was holding Leo tight, her eyes completely red from crying, but her posture was entirely unyielding.
"I am not letting you go to that mill alone, Charles," she stated firmly, grabbing the collar of my jacket.
"You have to stay here where it is safe," I pleaded, resting my forehead against hers.
"If I don't come back, Elias has the secondary transfer codes. He will use the money to completely erase your identities and get you out of the country."
Sarah shook her head, tears finally spilling over her eyelashes.
"You are not dying in a rusty factory for a mistake Marcus made," she whispered fiercely.
I kissed her deeply, memorizing the feeling of her lips and the scent of her hair.
I kissed Leo’s sleeping forehead, making a silent promise to a son I had just met that I would fight like hell to come home.
I left the corrupt federal agent zip-tied to a steel I-beam on the third floor, entirely at the mercy of the freezing Chicago wind.
Elias and I drove the armored van toward the riverfront in absolute silence.
I opened the encrypted laptop one last time, initiating a delayed-release protocol on the Cayman Island account.
In exactly two hours, the forty million dollars would completely vaporize, permanently scattered into a thousand untraceable cryptocurrency wallets.
If Cortez killed me, he would lose absolutely everything.
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I chambered a round in my tactical pistol and stared out at the towering, rusted smokestacks of the abandoned steel mill.
It was time to kill a ghost.
