Chapter 4 - The Night of the Long Knives
The detention center was a fortress of concrete and razor wire, but to a man who had once breached the interior of a Himalayan bunker, it was just another building.
I didn't go through the front door. I went through the ventilation shaft, a path I had mapped out from the facility’s original architectural plans—the ones I had helped design during a 'consulting' project years ago.
The irony wasn't lost on me.
I dropped into the utility corridor of the high-security wing. The guards were few and far between, their attention focused on the exterior security systems, never expecting someone to be moving inside the walls.
I found him in a 'temporary' holding room, an office masquerading as a cell. He was sitting at a desk, drinking coffee, looking at a laptop. He was coordinating his defense, bribing the warden, and planning his escape.
I didn't knock. I stepped out of the shadows, the silence of my movement enough to freeze him in place.
He looked up, and for the first time in his life, Richard Sterling looked small. He wasn't the man in the silk shirt. He was a man who knew he was about to face the dark.
"Arthur?" he stammered, backing away from the desk. "You... you can't be here. The security—"
"The security is currently preoccupied," I said, stepping into the light. My voice wasn't the voice of the man who sold hammers and nails. It was the voice of the man who had seen things that would break a soul like his in half.
"I have money," he began, his voice shrill. "I have more money than you can comprehend. I can pay you—"
"You have nothing," I interrupted. "You have your life, and you have your freedom. Both of which are about to be terminated."
"You’re an old man! You’re nobody!" he screamed.
"I’m the person you should have been afraid of from the moment you looked at my daughter," I said. I pulled a small device from my pocket—a scrambler that would wipe his laptop and cut his connection to the outside world forever.
I placed it on the desk. "This is it, Richard. The end of the road."
"What are you going to do?" he gasped.
"I’m not going to kill you," I said. "That would be a mercy. I’m going to make sure you spend the rest of your life in a place where nobody knows your name, where your money is just paper, and where you have to look at your own reflection every day until you finally understand who you really are."
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I heard footsteps approaching. The guards. My time was up.
I turned and slipped back into the darkness, leaving him there—alone, disconnected, and staring at the blank screen of his life.
