As I stood to leave, my hand brushed against a worn, leather-bound book on his nightstand. It looked like a journal. I opened it. The pages were filled with my father's familiar, precise handwriting, but it wasn't a journal. It was code.
Complex algorithms, data strings, encryption keys, his life's work. It was all there. And on the very last page, a single line was circled in red ink. It wasn't code. It was a name.
Eleanor. And next to it, a date. The date of his accident. The flight back to New York was a blur of rage and grief. Eleanor Vance hadn't just been Harrison's wife.
Before she was a Vance, she was Eleanor Bishop, the lead project manager at Citadel Systems, my father's boss, the one who had championed his work, who had seen its potential before anyone else, the one who had signed off on every report, and apparently the one who had signed his death warrant. It wasn't just Harrison. It was her. She was the architect of my family's destruction. When I landed, Anya was waiting for me on the tarmac.
Her face was grim. Marcus, while you were gone, we dug deeper. It's not just about the algorithm, the foundation of Vance Industries entire trading platform, the very thing that made them billions over the last two decades. It's built on a proprietary predictive model. She handed me a tablet.
I cracked it. It's your father's signature, Marcus. The framework, the architecture, it's all him. They've been using a stolen, bastardized version of his code to manipulate the stock market for 20 years. She swiped the screen.
And there's more. We found the kill switch, a single back door he built into the original source code, a fail-safe. If it's activated, it won't just crash their system. It'll expose every illegal trade they've ever made. It will wipe them out.
She looked me in the eye, her expression deadly serious. But Marcus, the back door is biometrically sealed. It can only be activated by one person on Earth. The silence in the cabin of the jet was absolute. The hum of the engines, the city lights below, all of it faded into a dull roar in my ears.
Anya didn't have to say the name. I already knew. The back door, the kill switch to the entire Vance empire, could only be activated by the man who built it. My father, Ben Thorne. A man who was currently lying catatonic in a hospital bed, a ghost in the machine he had created.
For a moment, despair washed over me. It was a perfect, cruel irony. The key to my vengeance was locked inside a mind that had been broken by the very people I wanted to destroy. They had thought of everything. They hadn't just silenced him.