Voss's team located Josephine Renard's younger sister within three days, a retired piano teacher named Margot Fontaine living quietly outside Lyon, and Nathan flew out personally alongside Voss, understanding the delicacy of the conversation required someone who could speak to exactly what it meant to carry a parent's dangerous secret for decades.Margot met them in a small, book-lined sitting room, her hands trembling slightly as she poured tea with the careful, deliberate movements of someone managing early tremors she hadn't yet fully adjusted to. "I wondered if anyone would ever come asking about Josephine again," she said, settling into a worn armchair across from them. "After all these years, I'd almost convinced myself nobody ever would.""We're investigating her daughter," Voss said gently. "Camille. We believe she may be continuing something your sister started, possibly without her even realizing it."Margot's hands stilled briefly over the teapot, something careful and guar

Nathan landed in Blackridge fourteen hours later, exhausted and anxious, and found Elena and Voss's team already gathered at the foundation's office, working through what little information they'd managed to gather about the three missing names."They're not dead," Elena said immediately, watching the relief wash visibly across Nathan's tired face, crossing the room to embrace him despite his travel exhaustion. "At least, we don't believe so. All three disappeared within hours of each other, but there's no sign of violence at any of their last known locations. No blood, no struggle, nothing consistent with what happened to Darnell Osei.""How was Geneva," she asked quietly, studying his tired, travel-worn expression."Complicated," Nathan admitted. "We found exactly what Josephine hid. Proof of the original murder, the one my father's journal referenced. But Camille already had it, two weeks before we even arrived." He set down his bag, exhaustion finally catching up with him now that

Rosalind agreed to relay a message, careful and deliberately vague enough not to compromise her own tenuous position between both sides of an increasingly complicated negotiation, and Camille's response arrived within six hours, a single secure link directing Nathan to a video call scheduled for that same evening.She appeared on screen exactly as composed as every previous encounter, seated in what looked like a modest hotel room, giving nothing away about her actual location."Mr. Cross. I confess I'm curious what prompted this particular approach, given our previous conversations."Elena sat beside him, carefully positioned out of the camera's frame but close enough to hear every word, her presence a steady, grounding comfort against the particular tension of negotiating directly with the woman who'd threatened both their lives."I spoke with Rosalind Chen," Nathan said carefully. "She told us about the Foundation building. The anniversary. The structure of what you're actually pla

The regulator's death turned out to be the first of four over the following six days, each one ruled natural causes or accident by local authorities, each one involving someone whose name appeared on the confirmed corruption list Nathan and Camille's teams had spent weeks carefully verifying together."Someone's systematically eliminating our verified targets," Voss said, spreading four case files across the foundation's conference table. "Not randomly. Not even clumsily, the way Soren eventually did. These are carefully staged, medically plausible deaths, each one timed to occur before we could secure formal protective custody or prosecution.""They're getting a head start on the anniversary," Elena said grimly. "Eliminating the evidence before it can ever be presented publicly.""Which is exactly the outcome Camille warned us about from the very beginning," Nathan said quietly. "Powerful people finding ways to bury inconvenient truths before they can ever reach daylight. I hate that

The monitoring van sat three hundred yards down the road from Étienne Roux's private residence, a modest-looking cargo vehicle packed with enough surveillance equipment to track every breath inside the estate's main house, and Nathan sat in the back with Marcus and Voss, watching a grainy audio waveform pulse across a screen while Camille's voice carried clearly through the speakers."Thank you for coming," Roux said, his smooth, cultured voice filling the small van. "I confess I've been looking forward to this conversation."The residence itself had looked unremarkable from the road, a sprawling stone house surrounded by manicured grounds and a perimeter wall that spoke to the quiet, careful wealth of a man who'd spent decades cultivating discretion as a lifestyle. Reyes waited with two federal agents in a second vehicle fifty yards closer, ready to move the instant anything went wrong, and Nathan found himself gripping the edge of the van's narrow console hard enough that his knuckl