Chapter 20 - The Shadow Firm
The realization settled over me like a sheet of ice.
Julian Mercer hadn't just sprinted into St. Jude’s yesterday as Apex Capital's high-priced mercenary. He wasn't simply an outside defense attorney hired to enforce an eviction notice.
"Mercer didn't represent the trust," I said, looking from the yellowed manifest to Arthur. "He was the courier."
"Julian Mercer was my father’s junior clerk in 1985," Arthur replied, his knuckles stark white against his cane. "He left the family practice six months after Miriam's delivery to open his boutique firm in Geneva."
"Funded by an initial retainer of two point four million dollars," Elena added, pulling up an encrypted PDF on her tablet. "Drawn directly from the 1974 Caldwell land royalties."
A patrol unit pulled away, Judith’s hysterical screaming muffled behind reinforced cruiser glass as they transported her to the federal holding facility. Dr. Arthur Vance remained seated in the back of a second interceptor, staring blankly at his cuffed wrists.
"If Mercer took Infant B to Switzerland," I said, my voice catching as I thought of Lily safe in the nursery wing, "who was raising him?"
"Not who, Nora," Arthur said gravely, looking toward the Dallas skyline catching the pink morning light. "Where."
Arthur unlocked his phone and brought up a satellite blueprint of Mercer & Vance’s private corporate compound in Zurich. The parent company wasn't a law partnership. It was an offshore asset-holding entity named Gemini Heritage Trust.
"The nineteen-seventy-four charter required two bloodline signatures to liquidate the sovereign acreage," Arthur murmured, connecting the pieces. "Judith kept Ryan under her thumb in Dallas to control one half. Mercer held the twin abroad to control the reserve key."
My phone vibrated violently against my palm.
It was an automated security ping from the Dallas County Probate clerk’s office.
May you like
A counter-petition had just hit the public emergency docket at six-fifteen a.m.
Petitioner: Caleb Vance-Caldwell. Verified Biological Heir to the 1926 Sovereign Patent.
