Chapter 19 - The Red-Eye Return
I didn't wait for the scheduled Friday morning closing sessions of the corporate retreat. Within an hour of decoding the encrypted documents, I had contacted the airline, changed my return ticket to a red-eye flight departing Seattle-Tacoma at midnight, and sent a brief, professional message to Arthur Sterling explaining that an urgent personal matter required my immediate physical presence in Ohio. By midnight, I was strapped into a window seat on a Boeing 767 hurtling eastward through the starless abyss of the upper atmosphere, the hum of the jet engines providing a hypnotic backdrop to my relentless mental calculations. I didn't sleep a wink. I spent the entire four-hour flight cross-referencing the Delaware LLC registration numbers with public state archives using my laptop’s offline database, tracing the corporate officers through historical filings, previous litigation records, and archived property deeds.
When the first rays of dawn began to paint the horizon in streaks of bruised violet and burning gold, our descent into John Glenn Columbus International Airport began. The familiar sprawl of the Ohio suburbs rose up through the morning mist, peaceful and deceptively quiet from five thousand feet in the air. I hailed a cab directly from the terminal, instructing the driver to bypass my house entirely and take me straight to the Franklin County Courthouse downtown. The morning air was biting as I stepped out onto the granite plaza, clutching my leather briefcase tightly against my side. The courthouse doors had just unlocked for the day. I walked past the security scanners with the cold, measured precision of an apex predator. I needed to access the deep archives of the county recorder’s office before my father’s defense attorneys filed their final discovery motions. The clock was ticking, and the real masterminds behind the family betrayal were about to discover that waking a sleeping dragon was the last mistake they would ever make.
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