Chapter 12 - The Ghost of Zurich
Federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn was designed to strip a man of his ego, piece by piece.
When the heavy iron gate slid open, Arthur Mercer sat at a bolted steel table in an orange jumpsuit that hung loosely over his sunken shoulders.
The arrogant billionaire who had sneered at my uniform outside the White House East Gate had aged twenty years in twenty-four hours.
His manicured hands trembled violently around a styrofoam cup of lukewarm water.
He looked up, expecting his team of high-priced defense attorneys, but when he saw my four stars and dress blue uniform, his face went ghostly pale.
"Katherine," he croaked, his voice brittle and dry as autumn leaves.
"Did you come to gloat over your handiwork?"
"Did you come to watch your father rot before they send me to ADX Florence for the rest of my natural life?"
I did not take the chair across from him.
I stood erect, towering over him, casting a long shadow across the stained concrete floor.
"I didn't waste government jet fuel to gloat over a broken man, Arthur," I said, dropping a glossy photograph onto the table between us.
The image showed the wax-sealed emblem of the black falcon recovered from the sunken freighter.
Arthur’s gaze fell upon the photograph, and the styrofoam cup crushed instantly in his grip.
Water spilled across the table, soaking his paper-thin prison sleeve, but he didn't even flinch.
His pupils dilated in sheer, suffocating terror.
"Where did you get this?" he stammered, his eyes darting frantically toward the corners of the interrogation room.
"Are they recording this room?"
"Turn off the cameras, Katherine!"
"Turn them off right now, or they will kill me before sundown!"
"Nobody is turning off anything," I countered coldly.
"You told the Securities and Exchange Commission that you owned ninety percent of the voting shares in Mercer Defense."
"You told the President that the defective armor was just an unfortunate manufacturing oversight caused by supply chain bottlenecks."
"You lied to save your skin, but you were covering for someone else."
"She didn't die in the Alps, did she?"
Arthur buried his face in his trembling hands, a ragged sob tearing from his chest.
"You don't understand what she is," Arthur wept, his fingernails digging into his scalp.
"My mother didn't build a corporation, Katherine."
"She built a blood syndicate that stretches into thirteen allied defense ministries."
"When your mother, Evelyn, found the original foreign ledgers twenty-six years ago, she begged me to go to the FBI."
"She begged me to burn House Mercer to the ground before it corrupted our souls."
The air in the room suddenly grew so thin I could hear the electric hum of the fluorescent tube overhead.
"What did you do to my mother, Arthur?" I whispered, my voice carrying the weight of a firing squad.
Arthur looked up at me, tears carving clean tracks through the gray stubble on his cheeks.
"I didn't kill her, Katherine."
"I swear before Almighty God, I loved Evelyn with every broken piece of my heart!"
"Then why did you throw her into the street with an infant in her arms?" I demanded, slamming my palm against the steel table with enough force to echo down the cell block.
"Why did you let her starve in a roach-infested studio while you drank champagne in the Hamptons?"
"Because Eleanor told me that if I didn't cast you both out, she would have Evelyn executed in front of you!" Arthur screamed, his voice cracking into hysterics.
"I thought making you nobody would keep you safe!"
"I thought poverty would be your shield!"
"Arthur," I said, leaning down until my eyes were inches from his terrified face.
"Where is Eleanor Mercer right now?"
Arthur swallowed hard, his throat clicking like a dry lock.
"Look at the Zurich accounts," he whispered in a voice barely above a breath.
"Vault 414 at the Bank of Helvetica."
"She keeps the ledger of the dead there."
"And Katherine... she knows you took my company."
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"She will not rest until she turns your uniform into a shroud."
***
