Chapter 5 - The Digital Vault
Julian didn't return to his penthouse. He went straight to his corner office at Sterling Financial, locking the heavy glass door behind him. The city below looked different now—like a grid of lies.
If Silas was telling the truth, then the man Julian had called a father for twenty-five years was a monster.
Julian was a master of financial architecture. He knew how to hide money, and more importantly, he knew how to find it. He bypassed the standard corporate firewall, using his executive clearance to dive into the deep, archived servers of Sterling Financial. He searched for acquisitions in 1994.
Hours passed. The sun began to set. Finally, buried beneath layers of shell corporations and defunct holding companies, he found it.
Project Genesis.
Julian opened the digitized files. There it was: a patent for a revolutionary algorithmic trading software. The foundation of Sterling Financial’s billions. The signature on the original patent application didn't belong to Marcus Sterling. It read: Silas Vance.
Attached to the file was a scanned police report from 1994. Arson suspected. Two casualties reported: Elena Vance, female, 28. Unidentified remains. There was a note attached, handwritten by Marcus: Pay the fire chief. Double the usual. Erase the child's record.
Julian stumbled back from his desk, knocking over his chair. He clamped a hand over his mouth to muffle a raw, agonizing sob. His whole life was built on the ashes of his real family. The man who taught him how to tie a tie, who paid for his Ivy League education, had murdered his mother and driven his father to the streets.
Suddenly, the intercom on his desk buzzed. It was Marcus.
May you like
"Julian, my boy. My internal security team tells me you're digging through the 1994 archives. Care to tell me what you're looking for?"
The voice, once a source of comfort, now sounded like venom. The trap was springing.
