Part 14: The Zurich Trail
## Part 14: The Zurich Trail
The flight to Switzerland took seven hours through a silent, silver Atlantic sky.
The private Gulfstream G550—the exact jet we had seized from Richard Vance on the New Jersey tarmac—leveled out at forty thousand feet, its engines humming like a tiger waiting in the dark.
Lily sat in her customized leather bassinet across from me, her tiny fingers clutching a small silver rattle that carried the Collins family crest.
Evelyn sat by the satellite desk, her fingers moving over an encrypted ledger linked to the Swiss Union Bank in Zurich.
"The hidden accounts are verified, Madam Chairwoman," Evelyn said, sliding a digital PDF onto my tray table.
"Account number ending in nine-four-two-two."
"Registered to a shell name: 'Apex Logistics'."
"The balance is forty-two million dollars in liquid gold certificates."
"The signature card carries two names: Brendan Vance and Cassandra Miller."
"Cassandra?" I asked, my eyes narrowing.
"My stepmother's sister," I whispered, the final piece of the family puzzle falling into place like a steel gear.
"The woman who vanished from Boston in 2016 right after my mother’s death."
"She wasn't in Europe managing an art gallery."
"She was laundering the Vance corporate defaults through her sister's estate connections."
I looked out the window at the long sheet of white clouds passing beneath our wing.
The web was completely mapped.
The Vance family hadn't just been greedy; they had been collaborating with the very people who had spent a decade trying to erase my father's name from the maritime registries.
"We land in Zurich at 6:00 a.m. local time," Marcus said from the front cabin doorway.
"The private banking director has already been notified that the Chairwoman of Collins Maritime is arriving to personally execute the clawback writ."
"He attempted to stall, claiming Swiss privacy laws protect the signature card."
"What did you tell him, Marcus?" I asked.
"I told him that the bank’s New York branch currently relies on our logistics firm to secure their physical bullion shipments from the federal vaults," Marcus said, a cold smile touching his lips.
"If the Zurich office defaults on the writ, the New York vault goes dark by noon."
"He cleared his schedule within three minutes."
I leaned my head back against the plush leather seat, watching my daughter's chest rise and fall in that perfect, unbroken rhythm.
The circle was closing.
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The money they had stolen from my mother’s memory was sitting in a stone vault beneath the streets of Zurich, waiting for the true heir to sign the release.
And by sunrise, the ledger would be completely balanced.
