Read Chapter 26: The Fake Evidence

The hotel room had gone quiet except for the hum of the air conditioning and the soft click of Emile’s laptop keys. Jack stood at the window, parting the curtain a finger’s width, scanning the street below. Three hours since they’d decided. Three hours of Emile hunched over the forged email chain, building something that looked real enough to burn a team to the ground.

“How’s it coming?” Jack asked without turning.

“Almost done.” Emile’s voice was thin, strained. The bandage on his shoulder showed a fresh bloom of red. “Alain’s tone is easy. Short sentences. He never uses contractions in official correspondence. But this one—this one he’d write differently. It’s about money.”

Jack turned. Emile’s face was pale under the desk lamp, sweat beading at his hairline. He’d refused painkillers, said he needed a clear head. Jack wasn’t sure a man bleeding through his dressing had any business climbing through a factory ventilation shaft, but the alternative was doing it alone.

“Read it back.”

Emile cleared his throat. “‘Philippe—the Monza numbers are what we discussed. Blumer’s P2 keeps the pot tight. Next target window: Bahrain. Expect ten on the nose if the safety car lands before lap twelve. Alain.’”

“Ten what?”

“Thousand. But the betting ring doesn’t work in flat sums. It works in multipliers on the odds. Ten thousand placed at the right moment returns eighty. Split three ways.” Emile’s jaw tightened. “That’s what they did to Luca. He didn’t know until Monaco.”

Jack let the curtain fall. “Does it name the betting syndicate?”

“Yes. ‘Our partners in Genoa remain committed.’ That’s enough to start a paper trail investigators can pull on. The transaction records will match if they look.”

“If they look.”

Emile closed the laptop. “They’ll look. Because we’re also going to leave a second file—a receipt from a numbered account in Monaco. I’ve coded it to look like a transfer log Alain kept privately. It points to Philippe’s shell company. One layer down, but they’ll find it.”

Jack nodded, felt the weight of the USB in his pocket. The real evidence. It burned there, waiting. But they couldn’t use it yet. Not until the forged trail pointed investigators toward the top. Then the truth would be the second blow.

“When we plant it,” Jack said, “we need to make sure Alain finds it first. If he deletes it before anyone else sees it, the whole play dies.”

“He won’t delete it.” Emile’s face hardened. “He’ll open it, read it, and panic. He’ll call Philippe. That’s when you want them reacting. Panic makes people reach out to their co-conspirators. And their co-conspirators are on our wire.”

Jack hadn’t told Emile about the recorder yet. A tiny digital device Dana—before she’d gone sideways—had slipped him in a folded napkin. It looked like a USB stick, held eight hours of audio, and had cost her a contact in the Monaco police. If Philippe said anything incriminating to Alain on the phone, they’d have it.

“Let’s move,” Jack said.

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The fabrication bay sat quiet at 3 a.m., the only sound the distant hum of servers in the data wing. Jack had memorized the blind spot from Emile’s sketches: a maintenance crawlspace behind the composites press, accessible through a vent grill that hadn’t been alarmed since 2019. Fenice’s security budget went to the main gates and the driver rooms. The old part of the factory was a ghost.

Emile stopped at the vent, breathing hard. The climb down the exterior fire escape had cost him. His left hand pressed against the wound site. Jack could see the blood soaking through his knuckles.

“You wait here,” Jack said. “Give me the drive.”

“No.” Emile shook his head. “You don’t know his office layout. The desk has a false drawer—third one down, left side. Alain keeps his backup drive there. We put the file in that backup, not the main system. He’ll find it when he syncs in the morning.”

“Then I do it fast.”

Jack took the laptop case from Emile, heavier now with the cloned data drive inside. He ducked through the vent, dragging himself along the crawlspace. Dust filled his lungs, but he held his cough, listening for footsteps, for the crackle of radios. Nothing. Three minutes of crawling brought him to the interior wall of Alain’s office.

He eased the vent cover off, slid through, and landed soft on a carpet the color of burnt orange. Alain’s office was clean. A single desk, a laptop dock, and a row of framed photos: Alain with drivers, Alain at podiums, Alain shaking hands with men Jack didn’t recognize. One photo caught his eye—Alain and Philippe in a box at some racetrack, champagne raised. Luca wasn’t in any of the photos. Jack noted that. A man who erased his driver from history had already decided death was coming.

He found the false drawer, popped it open. The backup drive was a matte black Seagate, unlabeled. Jack plugged the clone into the dock and ran Emile’s script. The transfer bar moved fast. Fifty seconds. The file appeared in the backup’s root directory: *Genoa_Transfers_0223.xlsx*.

He pulled the clone, replaced the drive, closed the drawer. Then he went to the desktop monitor and typed in the password Emile had given him. The screen woke. He pasted a file shortcut onto Alain’s desktop—an icon labeled ‘RE: Bahrain Targets’—and set the email program to open it as unread in the morning.

The vents rattled.

Jack froze. Footsteps, deliberate, coming down the corridor outside. He killed the monitor, dropped behind the desk, pressed himself into the shadow beneath it. The door handle turned.

Henri stepped in, Jacque Fontaine’s head of security. Big man, neck thick as a fire hydrant, the kind who wore a suit to hide the fact that he’d killed with his hands. He didn’t flick the lights on. Instead he stood in the dark, scanning the room. Then he moved to the desk.

Jack’s heart hammered. He wasn’t sure if Henri could hear it. The man reached down—not for the drawer, for the desktop. He touched the monitor, then the keyboard.

“Still warm,” Henri said, to the room. He spoke in a low murmur, almost to himself.

A phone buzzed. Henri pulled it out, read something, and let out a breath. “Boss says stand down. False alarm.” He paused, looked around once more, then stepped out and closed the door behind him.

Jack stayed under the desk for two full minutes, counting his heartbeats. When he finally moved, his legs had cramped. He crawled back through the vent, past the crawlspace, and dropped into the bay where Emile waited, face white as the composites panels around them.

“He found the office,” Jack whispered. “He knows someone was there.”

Emile’s eyes darted to the vent Jack had come through, then back. “But he didn’t check the backup. He didn’t see it.”

“He will. In the morning, when he syncs Alain’s system, he’ll see the file and tie it back to this. We accelerated the timeline. We have one window—maybe hours—to get Philippe to react before Henri realizes the forgery is ours.”

Emile pushed off the wall, gritting his teeth against the pain. “Then we don’t wait for morning. We go to Philippe now. You make him think you’re selling out. You give him a reason to reach out to Alain tonight, on a line we’re monitoring.”

Jack pulled the recorder from his pocket—small, silver, still dormant. He turned it over in his hand. “I need ground rules. Where do we do this?”

“The casino. Philippe keeps a private room upstairs at the Monte Carlo. He thinks no one records in there—but maintenance crews sweep it weekly. There’s a plant in the ventilation.” Emile’s smile was thin and bloodless. “I never stopped gathering evidence. I just didn’t know what to do with it until you showed up.”

Jack slid the recorder into his jacket pocket. One night. One conversation. Everything he had left riding on making Philippe arrogant enough to confess to a man he thought he’d already bought.

“Let’s go,” Jack said. “Before he hears about the office from Henri and shuts everything down.”

They slipped out through the fire escape, the Monaco skyline glittering ahead, indifferent to the two men running against a clock they couldn’t see. Behind them, in the dark of the fabrication bay, a camera light flicked from red to green.