Chapter 5 - The Man Behind the Screen
The video remained visible for only four seconds.
Then the screens erased themselves.
Luca disconnected the main system, but the storage drives had already been wiped.
“Did you recognize him?” he asked.
Mariana did not answer immediately.
The man on the screen had been older than her father would have been, his hair almost entirely gray, his face marked by a long scar near the jaw.
But the eyes were unmistakable.
Marcus Vale had looked at people as if he were reading the decision they would make before they made it.
The man behind Samuel had looked at Mariana the same way.
“It may have been altered,” Luca said. “Synthetic video. Prosthetics. A relative.”
“My father had no brothers.”
“Then someone wants you to believe he survived.”
Mariana replayed the four seconds in her mind.
The man had not spoken.
That mattered.
A face could be copied. A voice was more difficult to reproduce under forensic analysis.
“He wanted me to activate the Winter Rose Protocol,” she said.
“Andrew?”
“Whoever is controlling Andrew.”
Luca examined the disconnected equipment.
“You heard Andrew say your investigation is following their plan.”
“Which means the visible fraud is bait.”
“For what?”
Mariana looked at the empty screens.
“My father built the Vale trusts so no single person could seize everything. If an external threat gained access, the Winter Rose Protocol would transfer control.”
“To whom?”
“I do not know.”
“That seems impossible.”
“My father believed knowledge could become a vulnerability. He divided information among different people.”
“Samuel knows part of it.”
“Yes.”
“And Andrew knows enough to manipulate you.”
Mariana felt anger rising, but she forced it down.
Andrew had used their marriage, her trust, and her grief. Yet the strategy was too sophisticated for him to have created alone.
She opened the old letter from her father again.
Trust only the person who knows why the eastern staircase has thirteen steps.
Andrew knew about the passage, but not why it had been built.
Samuel might know.
Mariana knew the answer because her father had told her when she was a child.
The passage existed so the original owner could escape the mansion without being seen.
A hidden route.
Not a hidden room.
The eastern storage wing contained the entrance, but Mariana had never followed the passage to its end.
She returned to the mansion before Andrew woke.
At 6:15, she entered the east wing and descended the stone staircase where she had found Samuel’s glasses.
The brass key opened a second door behind the shelves.
A narrow tunnel continued beneath the gardens.
Mariana followed it for nearly ten minutes.
The passage ended beneath an old carriage house outside the main security perimeter.
Inside, she found fresh tire tracks and a table covered with maps.
One map marked Blackwood International offices around the world.
Another marked Vale Meridian properties.
A third showed banks holding assets connected to both families.
Red circles surrounded eleven locations.
Ten were institutions Mariana recognized.
The eleventh was a private bank in Zurich that no longer existed.
On the table lay a photograph of Andrew entering a hotel with Brenda.
Mariana felt no surprise.
Their affair had become obvious weeks earlier.
What interested her was the date.
The photograph had been taken eighteen months ago, six months before Brenda joined Andrew’s restructuring committee.
Behind it was another photograph.
Andrew stood in the same hotel lobby with Samuel.
The date was five years earlier.
Samuel and Andrew had been meeting long before the forged documents, the winter benefit, or the recent financial transfers.
Mariana heard a vehicle outside.
She moved behind a partition.
The carriage-house door opened.
Brenda entered alone.
She removed her coat, placed a phone on the table, and opened a locked cabinet.
Inside were dozens of passports.
Mariana recognized Andrew’s photograph beneath several different names.
She also saw one bearing Samuel’s image.
Brenda took out a dark-blue passport.
The name printed inside was Elena Mercer.
The photograph showed Mariana’s mother.
Mariana’s mother had died seven years ago after a long illness.
Brenda placed the passport inside her bag and dialed a number.
“She found the tunnel,” Brenda said.
Mariana remained perfectly still.
A distorted voice answered through the phone.
“Did she see you?”
“No.”
“Then continue.”
“Andrew is becoming unstable.”
“He was always disposable.”
“And Mariana?”
“She must remain alive until she authorizes the transfer.”
Brenda looked toward the partition.
Mariana wondered whether she had heard something.
The distorted voice continued.
“If she refuses, use the recording from the benefit.”
“That will not be enough.”
“It will be when Samuel testifies.”
“Samuel will never testify voluntarily.”
“He will when he sees what happened to Elena.”
Brenda ended the call.
She closed the cabinet and left.
Mariana waited until the car disappeared.
Then she opened the cabinet.
The passports were expertly produced, but several had real government entry stamps.
Her mother’s passport showed travel through Vienna, Prague, and Zurich during the same period Mariana had been sitting beside her hospital bed.
Either the passport was false, or the woman Mariana buried had not lived the life Mariana believed.
At the bottom of the cabinet was a sealed medical file.
PATIENT: ELENA VALE.
STATUS: ACTIVE.
LOCATION: RESTRICTED.
Mariana turned the page.
The most recent examination had taken place six days earlier.
May you like
Her mother was not only alive.
Someone was still treating her.
