Chapter 36 - The Forensic Reversal
We reached the private gate of the Lake George estate at 6:45 AM.
The wrought-iron gates were already swung open, their electronic motor housings smashed and trailing severed wires into the snowbank. Fresh tire tracks cut through the three inches of unplowed slush—heavy, wide-tread tires belonging to an armored suburban.
"Paul is here," Henley said, her hand instantly going to the Glock nestled in her shoulder holster. "He tracked the primary account liquidation alerts. He knows the master server is under the boathouse."
"Paul doesn't know how to read a balance sheet without an associate highlighting the totals in yellow," I replied, killing the SUV's headlights and coasting down the long, winding gravel driveway through the hemlock grove.
The estate was eerily silent. The Lake George waters were dark, slate-gray, lapping against the stone breakwater with a dead, rhythmic slap. The main cottage—a rustic, stone-and-timber mansion built in the 1930s—sat dark, its windows blank and lifeless.
Down on the shore, the Victorian boathouse was ablaze with light.
Thick, yellow vapor billowed from the boathouse’s auxiliary exhaust stacks—halon gas. The fire suppression system in the sub-level had been triggered.
I stepped out of the vehicle into the freezing Adirondack air, pulling the collar of my wool coat up against the wind. The smell of burning paper and ozone was thick, carried on the lake breeze like the aftermath of an artillery strike.
We entered the boathouse through the side service door.
Inside, the polished teak slipway was empty of boats. Where my father’s classic mahogany runabout had once floated, the water had been drained, revealing a heavy, steel blast hatch in the concrete floor of the dry dock. The hatch was propped open with an iron crowbar.
From the depths of the shaft below, shouting echoed—strangled, hysterical, familiar.
"Where is it! Where did he put the secondary routing files!"
It was Paul.
I walked to the lip of the shaft and looked down the spiral iron staircase.
Paul was there, his five-thousand-dollar cashmere overcoat soaked in filthy bilge water, tearing frantically through rows of open server racks and pulling steel tape reels from their mounts, smashing them against the concrete floor.
Standing in the corner, seated in a high-backed leather wing chair behind a green-felt library desk that looked entirely out of place amidst the humming mainframe racks, was Thomas Mallerie.
He looked eighty. He looked ninety. His hair was a thin, white halo around a skull that seemed carved from dry birch bark, his emaciated body swallowed by an oversized camel-hair cardigan. But his eyes—pale, predatory blue—were burning with the same terrifying, lucid malice I had known since childhood.
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On the desk in front of him sat an antique green banker's lamp, an open bottle of Macallan, and a heavy, nickel-plated Colt revolver.
"Paul, my boy," Thomas said softly, without looking at his screaming son. "Stop making such a mess. Your brother has arrived."
