“I am aware,” I said.

“He is not like Arthur,” Vance warned. “Arthur is arrogant, but he is predictable. Julian is hungry. He wants the whole city, and he knows you are the only one who can hand it to him.”

“Goodbye, Commissioner,” I said, and ended the call.

I took the battery out of the burner phone and laid the two pieces on the wooden table.

Outside, the wind howled off the ocean, rattling the loose shingles on the roof of the cottage.

I walked down the narrow hallway to the small back bedroom.

A single metal desk sat in the corner, illuminated by the green indicator light of a portable server stack.

On the screen, a progress bar showed ninety-eight percent encryption completion on the primary ledger.

This was the record of every dollar that had passed through the Costello family since the mid-nineties.

Arthur had believed the files were stored on his secure network in the penthouse.

He did not know I had mirrored the database to a private cloud three days before I resigned.

The ledger was not just a list of names and numbers.