Chapter 5 - The Vault of Secrets
The hidden alcove smelled of stagnant air, old electronics, and sealed wax.
Nathan stepped up to the opening, holding his flashlight forward. The beam cut through the darkness and illuminated something that made even his steady pulse skip a beat.
It wasn't gold. It wasn't diamonds or bearer bonds.
It was a bank of commercial-grade digital data servers, their backup batteries completely dead, wired directly into a secondary power conduit running up from the basement. Beside the servers sat three heavy steel lockboxes, a stack of spiral-bound legal journals, and a small, vintage reel-to-reel tape recorder.
The dog trotted into the alcove ahead of him, sniffing the base of the servers before lying down with a heavy sigh, as if finally putting down a burden it had carried for two thousand days.
Nathan knelt beside the steel lockboxes. The first box was unlocked. He flipped the latch and lifted the heavy lid.
Inside lay a collection of documents that mapped out the real reason Arthur Ostrander had been murdered in September 2019.
They weren't family papers. They were internal municipal audits, land titles, and signed confessions from three sitting Rhode Island state senators, two federal judges, and the former Chief of Police of Newport. They detailed a massive, multi-million-dollar waterfront extortion ring operating out of the Providence docks—the exact docks Nathan’s family had controlled for three generations.
Arthur Ostrander hadn't been killed by a random fire or a tragic accident.
He had attempted to blow the whistle on a syndicate that reached all the way to Washington, using the Ostrander estate as a dead drop for evidence. And when he refused to hand over the digital archives, the syndicate had burned his guesthouse, murdered his wife, and staged the scene to look like a double homicide before burying the case under an avalanche of political influence.
Nathan picked up one of the legal journals. On the inside cover, written in Arthur’s hand, was a note addressed to whoever finally found the room:
If you are reading this, the men who bought my silence are still walking free. Use Vance Harbor Logistics. They are the only ones who can move this offshore before the politicians realize the house still breathes.
At the bottom of the page, a secondary note was scrawled in a different, frantic hand—dated six years ago, just hours before the fire:
The dog knows where the backup key is. Don't let them take him.
Nathan looked down at the massive black mastiff resting quietly against the server rack. The dog looked back up at him with eyes that seemed infinitely old and impossibly tired.
“You’ve been guarding this room alone for six years,” Nathan said, his voice unusually soft in the confined space.
The dog let out a low, contented rumble from deep within its chest.
Footsteps echoed suddenly from the grand hallway outside the library.
May you like
Heavy, rapid boots splashing across the hardwood floors.
“Nathan!” Warrick’s voice rang out, sharp and breathless, carrying a tone of alarm Nathan had not heard in twenty years. “Nathan, get out of the library! We’ve got company!”
