Chapter 15 - The Zurich Vault
I did not wait for the London court to convene.
I left Marcus with three Queen’s Counsel attorneys to tie Beatrice in procedural knots for forty-eight hours.
By three o'clock that afternoon, my jet was cutting through the Alpine clouds toward Zurich Kloten Airport.
I traveled with Dominic Vance, my trusted head of global corporate security.
He had no blood connection to Beatrice, but he possessed thirty years of intelligence work across European capitals.
A private black Mercedes carried us through the polished financial district of Bahnhofstrasse.
The headquarters of Bank Julius Bär stood like an ancient fortress of gray granite and reinforced glass.
We were escorted down three subterranean levels into the high-security private vault room.
The managing director, an austere Swiss banker named Herr Weber, bowed stiffly.
"Chairwoman Alden," Weber said, examining my passport and biometric thumbprint.
"The account you requested has been inactive for twenty-two months."
"It requires dual-key authorization."
I laid Camden’s encrypted digital access token on the glass desk, alongside my own executive power of attorney.
Weber inserted both keys into the brass wall panel.
The heavy vault door swung open with a muffled click of heavy tumblers.
Inside the narrow steel safety box lay a single leather-bound ledger and three encrypted flash drives.
I opened the ledger under the harsh halogen lamp.
The first page was not dated twenty-two months ago.
It was dated twenty-five years ago.
The signatures at the bottom did not belong to Camden or Beatrice.
The first signature belonged to my late father, Arthur Alden.
And right next to it was the signature of Beatrice’s late husband, Lord Charles Vance.
A chill seized my spine, so violent that my breath caught in my throat.
Camden hadn't infiltrated our family out of nowhere.
My father and Beatrice’s husband had once been equal partners in a covert shipping enterprise during the Cold War.
And at the bottom of the page, written in my father’s unmistakable fountain-pen script, was a terrifying warning:
*If the Vance family ever demands payment for the Kent estate, execute protocol Zero.*
May you like
*They do not own the land.*
*They buried their secrets beneath it.*
