NOVEL ONLINE FREE Chapter 267: Conviction
Rain fell in relentless, silver sheets over Arlington National Cemetery, drumming a hollow rhythm against ten thousand marble headstones.
The sky wept charcoal tears, blurring the world into a watercolor grayscale. Lilian Greaves knelt on the sodden earth, her black coat plastered to her skin like a second shadow. Her gloved fingers traced the letters carved into the cold stone, each groove a familiar scar on her soul:
ROBERT GREAVES
BELOVED FATHER
1939 – 1994
Water dripped from her lashes, mingling with rain as it slid down her cheeks. She didn't wipe it away, her limbs were too saddened to do anything.
She barely felt cold anymore. Cold had ceased to register years ago, buried alongside the memory of finding him— her loving father — in their cramped Kings apartment.
The sour tang of despair still haunted her: the stillness of his hand curled around the foreclosure notice, the vacant stare, the silence louder than any scream.
"I'm close, Dad," she whispered, her voice frayed at the edges. "Closer than I've ever been."
"If I get another promotion, I'll know for sure that I can be Deputy Director some day—" The wind snatched her words, tossing them into the downpour.
Then, her eyes narrowed. "That boy. He mocked you. Darren Steele. Used your pain like it was… a bargaining chip." Her knuckles whitened against the stone. "But he doesn't know what he's awakened. I'll tear his empire apart. I'll do it for you, Dad. I swear it."
Usually she would pray, but she felt she was too angry to. It wasn't right to pray in such a state. More so, the only divinity she recognized at the moment was the law.
Justice was everything to her. It was everything she wanted. It wasn't a mere courtroom verdict; it was the erasure of the rot that let men like Steele to thrive.
The rain intensified, soaking through her collar, but she remained, a statue of grief and grim purpose.
She heard approaching footsteps behind her, crunching wet gravel. Beside her, polished black Oxford shoes appeared, stopping before her father's stone. The rain slackened abruptly as a vast umbrella eclipsed the downpour.
Deputy Director Warren Caldridge stood there. Rain beaded on the shoulders of his tailored wool overcoat. His face, half-hidden behind mirrored sunglasses even in the storm's gloom, was unreadable.
"I suspected I'd find you here."
Lilian quickly got to her feet. "Sir."
"TALON," he stated, ignoring everything else with the weight of an indictment. "You activated it. Without consultation. Without oversight."
Water sluiced from Lilian's sleeves as she met his obscured gaze, tightening her expression. "The protocol exists for imminent threats. I identified one."
Caldridge adjusted his glasses, a fractional tilt that caught a sliver of distant lightning. "For financial terrorists, Lilian. Not twenty-one-year-old Silicon Valley savants."
He took a step closer, the umbrella shielding them both now. The scent of his sandalwood cologne cut through the petrichor, sharp and sterile. "You've lit a fuse that could detonate the entire Directorate. Explain yourself."
Lilian's eyes narrowed. "You said I could do this my way."
"Clearly that was a mistake."
Her jaw tightened. "This guy isn't playing around, sir. He's built a labyrinth. Offshore vaults nested inside shell companies, layered over with anonymized transactions. It's not like he's simply hiding his wealth which is already a red flag, he's hiding a movement. Many people are going to follow his footsteps in the future if I do not make an example out of it."
She stepped forward, her eyes blazing. "He looked at me during the interrogation… like he was disassembling me. Calculating vectors of pain. He said things about me."
Caldridge remained impassive when he looked at her. "Which is clearly why you're so shaken. The warehouse in Navarro, isn't it just a defunct industrial site? That's what Intel says."
"No no. There are other activities." Lilian's voice dropped, though still fierce and urgent. "R. Talmor LLC. It's the key. On paper, a defunct vendor. In reality? A surgical shunt. Tiny, untraceable flows of cryptocurrency funneling into the void. And Navarro… it's the heart. Power draws that could light a small town. Buried fiber optics. It's just well hidden. But please, trust me to find it."
A long silence stretched, broken only by the drumming rain on nylon. Caldridge finally reached inside his coat. He withdrew a slender manila folder, crisp and dry despite the storm.
"Full warrants," he said, extending it. "Signed. Sealed. Judicial blessing for your crusade." His voice hardened. "But understand this, Lilian: TALON isn't just a scalpel. It's a particle beam. Illuminate the target, and you illuminate everything around it. Including yourself. If your conviction is misplaced… the fallout won't just end your career. It will erase you."
Lilian took the folder. It felt heavier than stone. "My conviction," she said, her voice glacial, absolute, "is the only truth I have left."
He held her gaze for a heartbeat longer, then turned, the umbrella swallowing him back into the gray deluge. Lilian clutched the warrants to her chest, the paper a fragile shield against the storm and the crushing weight of the ghosts she chased.
Just two days later, in the DFI Headquarters, the Briefing Room Gamma was filled with action once again.
The air hung thick with the acrid tang of stale coffee and exhaustion. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, bleaching the faces of Lilian's team.
The walls were a chaotic tapestry of madness – sprawling flowcharts connected by frantic red yarn, satellite imagery of the Navarro compound overlaid with thermal signatures, and transaction logs pinned like captured butterflies.
Petrov slumped in his chair, rubbing eyes raw as ground glass. "The late John Brittle's warehouse," he rasped, pulling a grainy deed of sale from a stack. "Steele Global inherited it through acquisition. Turns out Ryan Anders was after it too."
"That's a worrisome name. There must be something really special about that warehouse if those two wanted it," Lilian remarked.
Petrov tapped a highlighted line on Brittle's old tax return. "Look. Right after the sale closed. A $2.3 million 'consulting fee' from an entity called 'Horizon Dusk.' Vanished the next fiscal year. Poof."
Rivera, wired on her third espresso, spun her laptop. Bank records bloomed on the central screen. "R. Talmor LLC wasn't just a vendor. It was a drip-feed." Her finger traced a spider web of micro-transactions. "$5,000 worth of Bitcoin here. $12,000 there. Barely noise in Steele's daily flow. But they all trickled… here." The screen zoomed in on an offshore registry:
Black Cipher Ltd. - Grand Cayman.
Lilian's pulse hammered against her ribs.
This is the void. The destination. The fake company that the money is going into.
"What's the ownership?"
Cho cleared his throat, hesitation etched in the lines around his mouth. "Black Cipher's a Matryoshka doll, Lilian. Shells within shells. But…" He pulled up a scanned document – a faded investor agreement from Steele's nascent crypto days. "Hold on, I think I've found something."
Lilian hurried to his position. "What? What is it? Show me right away!"