“Do it carefully,” Ryker said. “This is why Eleanor left them behind. She couldn’t find the drive, but she knew the syndicate would track whoever had it.”

“She used her own stepchildren as bait,” I said, a wave of anger washing over me.

“Worse than that,” Ryker said, his eyes cold as flint. “She probably told them the kids had it just to buy herself time to clear the offshore accounts.”

“And Edward Vance’s death?” I asked, looking at the blinking drive. “The papers said it was a sudden heart attack.”

Ryker stared at the metal casing. “A man who goes to these lengths to hide a drive doesn’t just drop dead of natural causes. Not when Eleanor’s associates are involved.”

Owen and Lily sat on a small leather sofa in the corner, watching us with quiet, solemn eyes.

They didn’t cry. They didn’t ask for their mother or their father.

They just waited, as if they were used to adults talking about them as packages.

Marco plugged the drive into an isolated laptop.

The screen immediately turned blue, displaying a prompt for an eighty-character alphanumeric key.