Chapter 3 - The Ghost on the Network
The battery took twenty agonizing minutes to crawl to three percent.
When the home screen finally unlocked, my heart sank. Jordan’s passcode was four digits. I tried his birthday: failed. My mother’s birthday: failed.
*What does Jordan care about more than anything in the world?*
I typed the horsepower of his beloved vintage Mustang: *0-4-5-0*.
*Click.* The screen slid open.
There was no cellular service; the SIM card had been deactivated five years ago. But when I swiped down the control center, my breath caught.
The phone had automatically locked onto our home Wi-Fi network: *Barrett_Private_5G*.
My mother had forgotten that the router ran on the main house generator's low-voltage standby line. She had cut the breakers to the utility room, but she hadn’t unplugged the central rack in Tony’s study.
I didn't call 911 immediately.
Why? Because I knew my mother. Sheila Barrett was the daughter of an appellate judge. Her brother was the district attorney for our parish. If I simply had a patrol car kick open the door, my mother would claim from Paris that I was having a "delusional schizophrenic episode," that Rosie had "misunderstood" instructions, and that I was a danger to myself. She would have me committed to a private psychiatric ward before the jet lag even wore off, taking full legal conservatorship over my body and my father’s eighteen-million-dollar estate.
I needed proof. Incontrovertible, airtight, digital proof that this was premeditated murder.
My hands flew across the glass. I downloaded a secure cloud-storage application and logged into my personal email. Then, I accessed our home’s smart-hub security portal using Jordan’s cached administrator credentials.
My screen illuminated with live feeds from forty-eight high-definition cameras scattered across the property.
I scrolled the history back eight hours.
There she was. Sheila Barrett, impeccably dressed, standing in the kitchen with Rosie. The audio was crystal clear.
*"Take the vials out of the fridge and put them in the trunk of the secondary vehicle in the shed,"* Sheila’s icy, aristocratic voice resonated through the tiny speaker. *"The heat will denature the proteins by tomorrow morning. They’ll be completely useless."*
*"Mrs. Barrett... if she doesn't get her infusion by Friday, her lungs could paralyze,"* Rosie had whispered, wringing her apron.
*"Una has been an anchor dragging this family down for five years, Rosie. My son is graduating top of his class at Sorbonne. He deserves a mother who isn't a nursemaid to a cripple. When we come back in sixty-eight days, whatever happens will be God’s will. You took the five thousand dollars. You keep your mouth shut, or I tell the immigration board who forged your papers."*
I sat in the pitch-black storage room, tears burning tracks through the grime on my face, watching my mother consign me to a slow, agonizing death on high-definition video.
I downloaded the clip. I duplicated it across three separate encrypted drives in Switzerland, Iceland, and an off-grid server belonging to the one man my mother feared more than God: Julian Vance.
Julian had been my father’s personal attorney and closest confidant before Sheila forced him out of the estate administration through endless bad-faith litigation.
I opened an email draft.
May you like
*Subject: Julian. She locked me in the cellar. Do not call the police yet. Read the attachments.*
***
