Chapter 5 - Unmasking V. C. Sterling
The entire ballroom seemed to tilt on its axis.
Randolph stopped dead in his tracks. He blinked, staring at me as if I were speaking ancient Greek.
"What did you say?" Randolph breathed.
"I said, I didn't approve the rollover," I repeated.
I reached out my hand. Marcus immediately stepped forward, unzipping a sleek leather portfolio and placing a thick, black leather-bound dossier into my grasp.
I held it up for the entire room to see.
"For three years," I said, my voice ringing out across the frozen guests, "you have been communicating with an auditor named V. C. Sterling from the Zurich Financial Consultancy. You sent her your private ledgers. You sent her the confidential offshore routing numbers for the shell corporations in the Caymans. You asked her to hide forty-two million dollars in unpaid subcontractor invoices from the city inspectors."
Prescott’s eyes bugged out of his head. "You... you’re Sterling?"
"Victoria Clara Vance," I said with clinical precision. "Sterling was my mother’s maiden name. I hold a master’s degree in forensic accounting from MIT and a doctorate in international tax law from Oxford. Did you really think I married into your family because I needed your country club membership, Prescott?"
Prescott took a step backward, his face as white as a corpse. "No... no, you were just a girl from Syracuse. Your father worked on cars!"
"My father *owns* vintage cars," I countered coldly. "He restores them with his bare hands because, unlike you and your father, he actually knows how to build something of value instead of stealing from the public."
A collective gasp swept through the room.
Several prominent investors at table two immediately pulled out their cellphones, frantically checking their private accounts.
Randolph was hyperventilating now, his chest heaving beneath his custom tuxedo. "You trapped us! You spied on us! That evidence is inadmissible! It’s a breach of fiduciary duty! I’ll sue you into oblivion! I’ll have your license revoked!"
"There was no entrapment, Randolph," a new voice rang out.
Stepping forward from Thomas Vance’s legal team was Arthur Vance-Pendleton, the lead federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, accompanied by two armed agents bearing federal warrants.
"Everything Mrs. Vance documented was voluntarily submitted by your corporate officers under standard SEC compliance protocols," Arthur said, holding up a certified court document stamped with the federal seal. "And as of four o’clock this afternoon, a federal grand jury indicted Randolph Prescott, Prescott Vance-Prescott, and six members of your executive committee on thirty-four counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal campaign contributions."
The words struck the room like physical blows.
A socialite in the front row dropped her champagne glass, the crystal shattering with a violent chime that seemed to break the spell.
Panic set in.
"Randolph, what is he talking about?" shouted Richard Hayes, CEO of Hayes Global, who had invested fifty million in the Prescott IPO. "Is the treasury audit real?"
"Call my lawyer!" Randolph screamed, losing all his polished composure, his aristocratic mask completely shredding into hysterics. "Security! Clear this room! Clear the press! Don't let them film this!"
"Too late, Randolph," I said quietly, pointing toward the mezzanine.
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High above the ballroom floor, where the string quartet had ceased playing, three camera crews from Bloomberg, CNBC, and the *New York Post* were broadcasting the entire scene live to millions of viewers worldwide.
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