Chapter 108 - The Geneva Counter-Audit
"Don't do it yet, Beatrice," I commanded into the speakerphone. "Give me ten minutes."
"Ten minutes, Julian," she choked out. "Then I walk through these doors. I won't let them turn me into what they turned you into."
The line clicked off.
I stepped up to the edge of Arthur’s bed. The old man was gasping for breath now, his chest heaving under the thin cotton gown, his monitors flashing in an unbroken cascade of crimson warning banners.
*VENTRICULAR FIBRILLATION IMMINENT.*
*HEPATIC CLEARANCE: CRITICAL FAILURE.*
"Here are the terms of your surrender, Arthur," I said, setting my laptop directly onto his rolling bedside tray. "You will sign the digital power of attorney transferring the Elgin biomedical patent portfolio to an independent oversight trust managed jointly by Clara and the Zurich bioethics board."
"Never..." Arthur hissed, his fingernails clawing at the sheets. "It is my life’s work... forty years of genetic preservation..."
"Then you die in twelve minutes," I replied without a shred of emotion. "Because that is how long your synthetic hemodialysis system has before the automated maintenance contract terminates. When the FINMA freeze took effect, the automated payment for your private facility’s liquid nitrogen and dialysis enzymes was halted. The servers are treating this clinic as an insolvent asset."
Arthur’s eyes darted frantically to the head nurse standing frozen in the corner. "Is... is that true?"
The nurse looked terrified. She glanced at the telemetry console, then back at the dying billionaire. "Mr. Sterling-Holt... the bypass pumps are switching to battery backup. The central reservoir chilling cycle has stopped. We have less than nine minutes of stabilized fluid."
"You monster," Arthur wheezed, staring at me with pure, unadulterated hatred. "You are... an accountant. A clerk!"
"I am an auditor," I corrected him. "And you are an uncollectible debt."
I pushed the stylus toward his trembling, spotted right hand.
"Sign the transfer, Arthur. If you sign, I will release five hundred thousand francs from the estate contingency reserve. That is enough to pay for your palliative transfer to the Cantonal Hospital in Lausanne. You will not have my marrow. You will not have Specimen 02. But you will have enough morphine to die with a shred of human dignity."
Arthur looked at Eleanor, sobbing on the floor. He looked at Brandt, standing like a stone sentinel by the door. He looked at Clara, whose hand remained firmly on the grip of her weapon.
He had sixty-two billion dollars on paper. He had private jets, mountain fortresses, and bloodlines engineered in sterile petri dishes.
And he was being brought to his knees by the boy he had discarded into an Illinois suburb to be starved by a pair of petty thieves.
With a rattling, pathetic sob of defeated rage, Arthur grasped the stylus with his shaking, skeletal fingers.
He pressed the tip to the capacitive screen.
*AUTHENTICATION ACCEPTED: ARTHUR STERLING-HOLT.*
*TRANSFER OF ASSETS: HELVETIA STERLING CONSORTIUM -> JULIAN VANCE (SOLE TRUSTEE).*
*STATUS: EXECUTED.*
The chime on the ThinkPad rang with a crisp, pristine tone.
The screen flashed green. Across sixty-four global banking servers, from London to Tokyo, the ownership of the entire Sterling dynasty shifted irrevocably into my name.
"Brandt," I said, not looking back. "Call the Lausanne ambulance. Transfer him. Release the palliative funds."
"Immediately, Mr. Vance," Brandt said, bowing his head with absolute deference.
I turned around to face Eleanor.
She was looking up at me through tears, her hands trembling as she reached toward my trouser leg. "Julian... my baby... thank God. You did it. You saved us. You have the money now... you can fix everything. You can buy Beatrice that condo... you can get Thomas a proper memorial... you can take care of your mother—"
I pulled my leg back, stepping cleanly away from her touch as if she were a pool of toxic waste.
"Clara," I said quietly, taking my wife’s hand in mine. "Call Detective Miller in Chicago. Tell him Beatrice is waiting for him at the Federal Plaza with the Naperville server drives."
Eleanor’s face drained of every drop of color. "Julian! No! I'm your mother! I raised you!"
May you like
"You didn't raise me, Eleanor," I said, looking down at her with a pity colder than the alpine snow outside. "You boarded me. And your thirty-five thousand dollar monthly fee has just expired."
***
