The Dead Billionaire's Revenge

The Missing Page

Two versions of the same statement lay side by side on the screen, and they did not agree.

The official copy, filed with the accident inquiry, said Elena Marsh had arrived at the hospital after the crash, in shock, unable to give a coherent account. The original, the one Marcus had pulled from the dead drive's activity log, said something else. Damien read the sentence three times.

*I was already on the road that night, before the accident occurred.*

"Why were you there, Elena?" he said, very quietly.

Marcus leaned over his shoulder and scrolled. "Sir. The original has four pages. The last one is missing."

Damien looked at the page count in the corner of the file. Three of four. Someone had cut off the end and left the rest to look complete.

---

"Trace its history," he said. "Every hand it passed through."

It took Marcus ninety minutes. The original statement had not gone directly to the police. It had been submitted first to a private investigator named Samuel Reed, a former employee of the Hale family's legal department. Reed had resigned three years ago and left New York without a forwarding address. His last recorded payment came from an account Damien recognized after a minute of staring.

Victor's.

"They paid him to alter it," Damien said.

"Or to lose a page."

"Find him."

Marcus was already dialing. Damien turned back to the surviving pages and made himself read them the way he would read a contract, slowly, hunting for the line that mattered.

It was in the second paragraph. Elena wrote that on the afternoon before the accident she had received an anonymous phone call. The caller told her not to let her husband attend a private meeting scheduled for the following evening. She had not recognized the voice. Then, below it, in the careful block capitals she used when she was frightened:

*I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know how far they would go.*

He sat back. The room had gone very quiet.

In the last week of their marriage she had gone silent at dinner. She had watched his phone. She had asked him twice to cancel a meeting and had refused to say why. He had decided she was angry about the long hours, the secrets, the rooms he left to take calls. He had told himself it was the marriage failing.

She had been trying to keep him alive.

---

Reed had gone to ground in a rented office above a tax preparer in Nyack. Marcus found him by noon. Damien went himself, leaving Marcus in the car with the engine running, and climbed a flight of stairs that smelled of damp carpet and old coffee.

Reed looked up from behind a cheap desk and went white. Damien had not announced himself. He had not needed to. The man had spent four years working in the same corridors as his father.

"You're dead," Reed said.

"People keep telling me." Damien laid the altered statement on the desk, the third page uppermost. "Someone paid you to remove a page. Who?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Your last payment came from an account Victor controls." Damien kept his voice level. "I can put that on a desk at the Treasury tomorrow, with your name on it."

Reed's hands began to shake. "You don't understand. You think it was him. It wasn't. The person who paid me wasn't the one giving the orders."

"Then who was?"

Reed opened his mouth. His eyes slid past Damien to the window.

Outside, a black vehicle had pulled up to the curb and stopped. No one got out. Nothing moved.

"They found me," Reed whispered.

---

They went down the back stairs, through a service corridor that smelled of bleach, and out into an alley where Marcus had already swung the car round. Reed fell into the back seat. Damien dropped in beside him. Marcus drove.

The black vehicle was behind them before they reached the end of the alley.

"Left," Damien said.

"I know."

They tore through two lights and cut across a loading lot. The vehicle matched every turn, never closing, never falling back. It was herding them.

Reed spoke fast, his voice cracking. "She tried to call you. Your wife. The night before. She called you eleven times."

Damien felt the words land in his chest. "I got no calls."

"They were blocked. Before they reached your phone. I saw the log." Reed was dragging something out of his jacket, a small flash drive in a plastic sleeve. "The last page. I kept a copy. I was going to use it if they ever came for me. Take it."

Damien took it. The drive was warm from the man's skin.

"Who blocked them?"

"I don't—"

The impact came from the right, a black bumper slamming into the rear quarter panel. The car spun. Glass burst. Damien felt the seat belt bite across his chest, a wall of white, then the sound of metal folding.

Then the street was upside down, and then it was still.

---

He crawled out through the broken window with blood in his eye and a ringing in his ears. The street lay dim and strange around him. A shop shutter. A bent signpost. The black vehicle sat fifty yards back with its lights off, and as he watched, it reversed slowly and turned the corner.

He staggered to the other side of the wreck. The rear door hung open. Reed's seat was empty. On the pavement, a dark smear led two yards and stopped, as if someone had been dragged and then lifted.

"Reed!"

Nothing answered.

He found the flash drive under the passenger seat, where it had slid when the car rolled. He closed his fist around it and heard footsteps pounding toward him.

Marcus, gray with dust, a cut across his forehead. "Sir. Are you hurt?"

"Reed's gone."

"I know. I looked. There's no trace." He pulled Damien upright. "We have to leave. They'll come back."

---

The safe location was a flat above a laundrette in Queens. Damien sat at the table with a wet cloth against his eyebrow and plugged the drive into the laptop.

One file. A single scanned page.

It was in Elena's handwriting, and the sight of it stopped his breath. The pen pressed deeper than usual. The letters leaned forward.

*If anything happens to Damien, the person responsible will be someone he trusts.*

Below it, a list of three names.

*Victor Hale.*

*Adrian Cross.*

He read the third name twice before it registered.

*Marcus.*

The room seemed to tilt. He did not move his head. Behind him, he could hear Marcus washing his hands at the sink, water running steadily, a man cleaning a cut. The tap shut off. The footsteps crossed the floor and stopped.

Neither of them spoke.

Damien closed the laptop slowly. He stood, and turned, and for the first time in six years he looked at Marcus the way he looked at a stranger.

"How long have you known about this?"

Marcus stared at him. His face held nothing Damien could read. "Known about what?"

Damien opened the laptop again and turned it around. He set his finger on the third line.

Marcus read it. A long moment passed. Something moved in his face, and Damien watched it with every instinct he had.

"Sir," Marcus said, quietly. "That name wasn't there when I recovered the file."

Damien looked back at the screen.

The list was changing.

He watched it happen. The letters of the third line shivered, as if the page were breathing, and dissolved. New letters formed in the same loops of Elena's hand, the same pressure, the same forward lean.

The name that had read *Marcus* now read:

*Damien Hale.*

He stared at the screen. Behind him, Marcus had stopped breathing too.

Someone was inside their system. Someone could reach in and rewrite the evidence while they watched, in a room no one knew existed, on a drive that had never touched a network

And they were watching now.