Chapter 8 - The Interrogation of Victoria Sterling
At 9:00 AM the following morning, the winter sun broke through the coastal clouds over Boston in a brilliant sheet of sapphire and gold.
Inside the subterranean holding vaults beneath Pier 8, the air was freezing, smelling of wet concrete, diesel fuel, and the cold salt spray of the harbor.
Victoria Sterling sat on an iron bench inside a reinforced security cell, her crimson gown wrinkled and stained with black grease, her bare feet blue with cold, her hands shivering violently inside steel transport cuffs.
The heavy sliding iron door hissed open.
Julian walked into the vault, accompanied by Assistant United States Attorney Marcus Vance and two federal marshals carrying thick evidence binders.
When Victoria saw Julian, she scrambled to the bars, her bloodshot eyes wide with hysterical panic.
“Julian! Please! Tell the marshals to release me! My father had another cardiac episode in federal custody this morning—he can't survive in a prison cell!”
Marcus Vance stepped forward, opening the primary federal indictment folder.
“Your father is currently under armed federal guard at Massachusetts General Hospital, Miss Sterling,” the prosecutor said, his voice flat as an iron slab. “The grand jury returned true bills across seventy-two counts thirty minutes ago. Aggravated kidnapping of a minor, maritime terrorism, corporate extortion, and the attempted poisoning of Don Arthur Vance.”
He showed her the decrypted banking ledgers retrieved from the sea cellar vault.
“For fourteen months, the Sterling Consortium siphoned eighty million dollars from the Vance Maritime Trust while systematically drugging the syndicate founder with unmanifested chemical paralytics.”
Victoria looked at Julian, weeping in broken, hopeless defeat.
“Julian... what are you going to do to me?”
Julian looked down at his former fiancée with cold, absolute detachment.
“I am not going to do anything to you, Victoria,” Julian whispered, his voice quiet enough that the water dripping in the drain sounded like a metronome. “The law will do it for me. You will spend thirty-five years at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. You will eat prison bread. You will scrub prison floors. And every morning when you wake up, you will remember that the nurse you tried to silence owns every terminal your father ever built.”
May you like
He turned on his heel and walked out of the holding block, leaving her frantic, weeping cries to echo against the damp concrete until the heavy iron door slammed shut forever.
---
