Chapter 5 - The Snake's Nest
When I burst through the front door, Grandpa was sitting in the library, a map of the Hartford financial district spread out across his desk. He looked up, his expression instantly shifting when he saw the panic on my face.
“Avery,” he said, standing up quickly. “What happened?”
“A man met me in the park,” I gasped, throwing my coat onto the chair. “He knew my name. He threatened us, Grandpa. He said if we don't withdraw the statement in forty-eight hours, there will be an 'accident.' He mentioned Charles Montgomery.”
Grandpa didn't look surprised. He walked over to the liquor cabinet, poured a small glass of brandy, and handed it to me. “Drink this. It will steady your nerves.”
I took a sip, the warm liquid burning my throat, helping to clear the fog of panic in my brain.
“They are getting desperate, Avery,” Grandpa said, his voice cool and calculated. “This means the District Attorney’s office has already started quietly querying Montgomery’s accounts. The snake is starting to writhe because the fire is getting too close.”
“What do we do?” I asked. “Should we call the police?”
“The police cannot protect us from a shadow, Avery,” Grandpa said, walking back to his desk. “But we can use their desperation against them. Montgomery thinks he can scare us because he thinks we are playing by the rules. He thinks this is a legal battle. He doesn't realize that I built my business in a time when you had to fight with more than just paper.”
He pulled a small, encrypted hard drive from his pocket and plugged it into his computer.
“During my years in the real estate market, I kept a private ledger,” Grandpa explained. “A ledger of every politician, every banker, and every judge who took a kickback to approve our zoning permits. Charles Montgomery’s name is on thirty-two separate entries in this ledger, dating back to 1995. He wasn't just helping your father, Avery. He was using your father’s greed to launder money from an illegal offshore gambling ring.”
My jaw dropped. “An illegal gambling ring?”
“Yes,” Grandpa nodded. “And the servers for that ring are located in a private warehouse in downtown New Haven. A warehouse owned by a shell company called 'Apex Management.' If we can get the access logs from those servers, we won't just destroy Montgomery’s career—we will put him in a federal prison for racketeering.”
“But how do we get the logs?” I asked. “We can't just walk into a secure warehouse.”
Grandpa smiled, a dangerous, youthful expression that made him look thirty years younger.
“We don’t have to walk in, Avery,” he said. “We have an inside source.”
He clicked on the screen, bringing up a live video feed of an office. Sitting at the desk was none other than my brother, Caleb.
He looked miserable. He was wearing a cheap corporate polo shirt, his face pale and covered in sweat, as he typed frantically on a computer terminal.
“Caleb?” I whispered. “What is he doing there?”
“When your father’s accounts were frozen, Caleb realized his tuition was gone,” Grandpa said. “He went to Montgomery to beg for a job, thinking his father’s old partner would help him. Montgomery put him to work at Apex Management, using him as a low-level clerk to shred documents and manage the local server backups. He thinks Caleb is too stupid to realize what he’s handling.”
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Grandpa looked at me, his eyes sharp.
“But Caleb is still a Whitaker, Avery. And when he realized his father was going to prison, he called me. He wants to make a deal.”
