Chapter 3 - The Ghost in the CCTV
“Delete the tracker on your phone, pull the SIM card, and smash it,” Dad commanded as the SUV maneuvered out of the underground parking structure and merged into the chaotic flow of Los Angeles freeway traffic.
I didn't hesitate. Using the metal corner of my belt buckle, I popped the tray out of my iPhone, pulled the tiny SIM chip, and bent it in half between my fingers before tossing the pieces onto the floor mat.
“Where are we going, Dad?” I asked, leaning over the back seat to stroke Leo’s cheek. The color was slowly returning to his skin, his breathing deepening under Marcus’s watchful care.
“To a safe house I’ve maintained since my days with the bureau in West Hollywood,” Dad replied, his eyes darting to the rearview mirrors to check if we were being tailed. “And while Marcus monitors the boy, I have a digital forensics guy—an old asset of mine named Benny—working overtime. Before we left the hotel parking lot, Benny managed to bypass the hotel’s local security server and pull the master CCTV logs from the private suite corridor for the past forty-eight hours.”
My breath hitched. “You think someone planted the camera?”
“I don't think, kiddo. I know.”
An hour later, we were holed up in a nondescript, brick-faced safe house tucked away in a quiet residential pocket of Culver City. Heavy iron security bars lined the windows, and the interior was furnished with sparse, utilitarian furniture that smelled faintly of old paper and coffee.
Leo was resting peacefully on a makeshift bed of folded blankets on the sofa, his vitals stable. Marcus was packing up his medical kit, giving me an encouraging nod before slipping out the front door to keep watch outside.
Dad sat at a metal folding table under a harsh overhead lamp, his laptop open. A tangle of cables connected it to an encrypted external hard drive.
“Come look at this, Mariana,” Dad called out softly.
I walked over, pulling my wool coat tighter around my shoulders. On the laptop screen, a high-definition security camera feed from the hallway outside the private suite was paused. The timestamp in the corner read 14:42:12—several hours before the party even began, long before I had brought Leo upstairs.
“Watch the timestamp,” Dad said, hitting play.
The corridor was empty for a moment. Then, the elevator doors at the end of the hall opened.
Beatrice Vance stepped out. But she wasn't alone.
Trailing behind her was a man in a crisp gray maintenance uniform bearing the hotel logo, pushing a service cart loaded with linens. However, the man wasn't carrying towels or cleaning supplies. As they stopped outside our private suite, the man produced a master electronic keycard, swiped it, and the door clicked open.
Beatrice glanced up and down the empty hallway, checking for witnesses, then stepped inside. The maintenance worker followed her, pulling a heavy black tool kit.
“Look at the angle of the second camera,” Dad muttered, tapping a second window on the screen that showed the interior view from an opposite hallway corridor.
Through the slightly ajar door, we watched Beatrice stand guard by the entrance while the maintenance worker climbed onto a chair directly beneath the ornate wooden headboard of the king-sized bed. With swift, practiced movements, he pressed a specialized suction tool against the wall, drilled a microscopic hole, and pushed a cylindrical black lens through, securing it from the inside.
My stomach churned. “That's... that's a pinhole camera. They were watching us the entire weekend.”
“Not just watching,” Dad corrected, his voice dropping into a dangerous, gravelly register. “Look at what he does next.”
On the screen, the maintenance worker pulled a small, sterile blister pack from his pocket. He extracted a pre-loaded micro-syringe. He didn't use it on the bed; instead, he placed it neatly on the nightstand beside a small vial of clear liquid, nodded to Beatrice, and packed up his tools.
Beatrice reached into her designer handbag, pulled out a thick white envelope—visibly bulging with cash—and handed it to the worker. He took it without a word, turned, and strode down the hall.
Beatrice remained behind for a moment. She walked over to the nightstand, picked up the micro-syringe, held it up to the light to check the dosage, and placed it back down with a chillingly satisfied smirk. Then, she adjusted her blazer, stepped out into the hallway, and let the door lock behind her.
“She prepared the room hours before we even checked in,” I whispered, the horror washing over me in cold waves. “They were planning to sedate Leo from the very beginning. But why? What purpose does drugging a one-year-old serve?”
Dad closed the laptop lid with a sharp click that broke the heavy silence of the room.
“That,” Dad said, standing up and walking over to a corkboard covered in notes, newspaper clippings, and printouts of financial registries, “is what we’re going to find out. Benny also managed to scrape a secondary database from Ryan’s corporate server before the firewall locked us out.”
He pulled a folded sheet of financial ledger paper from his pocket and handed it to me.
My eyes scanned the rows of numbers, corporate entity names, and bank routing codes. At the top was a shell company registered in the Cayman Islands under the name Aegis Holdings Ltd. Beneath it were three massive wire transfers executed within the last forty-eight hours, totaling $1.7 million.
The beneficiary account wasn't Ryan’s tech startup.
It was a private Swiss trust fund managed by a pediatric oncology research foundation in Zurich—a foundation where Beatrice Vance served as the primary voting trustee.
“Read the memo line on the third transfer,” Dad instructed quietly.
I squinted at the fine print.
Specialized Clinical Trial Subject Acquisition — Phase 1 Pediatric Neural Regeneration Protocol.
The room seemed to spin on its axis.
Clinical trial. Subject acquisition.
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Ryan hadn't just built a tech company; he was pivoting Aegis Health into experimental, unregulated neural-regeneration therapies—therapies that required live human infant subjects with specific genetic markers. Markers that Leo happened to possess through my side of the family.
My husband had sold our son to his mother’s medical research syndicate for one point seven million dollars.
