Chapter 8 - The Caldwell Debt
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I left Elena securing the digital logs and walked down the marble corridor to the glass-walled conference room.
Inside, Julian Vance had been moved to a separate security holding office down the hall at my instruction so the two conspirators couldn't coordinate their stories. Diana sat alone at the end of the glass table under the watchful eye of my guard, her diamond engagement ring still glittering on her trembling finger as she stared at the Manhattan skyline.
When I opened the heavy glass door and stepped inside, closing it behind me, Diana scrambled up from her chair and threw herself onto her knees at my feet, wrapping both hands around my tuxedo trousers.
"Marcus! Thank God!" Diana sobbed, pressing her tear-streaked cheek against my knee. "Please, you have to listen to me before the police come up here! Julian forced me to do it! I didn't know he was going to poison your glass tonight, I swear to you on everything sacred!"
I looked down at the woman I had planned to spend my life with. Six hours ago, if she had shed a single tear, I would have moved heaven and earth to comfort her. Now, looking at the silver gown and the theatrical grief, all I saw was the sneer on her face when she mocked a three-year-old child in pink socks.
I stepped backward, pulling my leg cleanly out of her grasp.
"Stand up, Diana," I said coldly. "We’re well past the stage where crying on my shoes is going to save you."
Diana stayed on her knees, looking up at me with wide, terrified blue eyes.
"It’s the truth!" she cried desperately. "Two weeks ago, Julian found out about the SEC audit on my father’s hedge fund! He came to my apartment with that Geneva operative, Viktor. Julian told me that if I didn't let Viktor into the service elevator tonight and keep that black package hidden under my chair as a backup drive until the toast was over, Julian would hand my father’s forged ledger straight to the U.S. Attorney!"
"And what did you think was inside a package labeled POST-MORTEM with an empty poison atomizer, Diana?" I asked, resting both hands on the back of a leather conference chair.
Diana’s lower lip quivered violently as she realized the trap she had walked into.
"Julian told me the syringe inside the pouch was just an emetic—something to make you violently sick to your stomach during the toast so the ambulance would take you to the hospital for forty-eight hours!" she lied frantically, her voice rising in pitch. "He said while you were sedated in the hospital over the weekend, he would use the emergency COO override on that hard drive to wire my father the thirty million as a short-term bridge loan and wire it back before you woke up on Tuesday! I didn't know it was a lethal dose! I didn't know he put my fingerprints on the inside of the plastic wrap to frame me for murder!"
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I studied her pale, desperate face for five long seconds.
The terrifying thing about people like Diana Caldwell was that she almost believed her own sanitized version of events—until I pulled out my phone and hit play on a decrypting audio file Elena had just sent to my screen from the hidden cache on the titanium drive.
