Page 86 of Locked and Loaded

Dragan didn't look surprised. "You sure?"

"I’m a financial forensic investigator. I spent years untangling exactly this kind of thing before I ever touched corporate security. Nested ownership, offshore trusts, people who build paper walls because they think paper walls hold. They don't. Not against someone who knows where the seams are." She leaned toward the phone. "Send me everything. The metadata, the registry searches you’ve already run, all of it. I don't want to waste time repeating your work but I want to take a look at it." She realized quickly that what she said could sound insulting. “I mean, that is… if you’re okay with it.”

“I’m more than okay with it,” Mick confirmed. “Check over all the stuff and make sure I didn’t miss anything. You want me to loop you in on the harbor registry stuff too?"

"Everything. If we're trying to find whoever's behind my sister’s kidnapping, and whoever's coming after the Society while they're at it, I want the whole picture, not just my corner of it."

Dragan was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, it was without any flourish, just a flat statement of fact. "You're good at this. That's not a compliment. It's just true. But you need to be objective. Can you do that?"

It shouldn't have meant as much as it did. She'd spent weeks trying everything to find her sister. This was the first time since her search started that someone had handed her something real that she could work with, something she was trained for and excelled at, and he trusted her not to drop it.

"Then let's get started," she said.

Two hours later, the platter of fruit and cheese Hassan had delivered was decimated, and her tea glass was empty and forgotten on the low table. Lennox was still bent over the same laptop with exactly nothing to show for it. She'd been cross-referencing shell companies against the harbor registries Mick had sent over, and every trail dead-ended at a Cayman Islands mailbox or a Panamanian law firm that had conveniently dissolved six months ago.

She rubbed her eyes and reached for her water bottle. Empty. Of course.

The door opened, and Dragan stepped back inside. His expression was carefully neutral, but something had shifted. His jaw was tighter than it had been ten minutes ago.

"Anything?" she asked.

Before he could answer, his phone buzzed again. He glanced at the screen and put it on speaker.

"Mick."

"Still nowhere, mate." Mick's voice crackled through the speaker, tinged with frustration. "The financials are a bloody maze. Every time I think I've found a lead on that estate, it splits into three more dead ends. Whoever set this up knew what they were doing."

Dragan dragged a hand down his face. "How long?"

"Could be days. Could be weeks. I'm not even sure I'm looking in the right direction anymore."

"Give me what you've got," Lennox said. "Start with the trust structure. Where does it break down for you?"

Mick pulled up the structure on his end and talked her through it while she scrolled the same documents on her own laptop. It was worse than the shell companies she'd untangled at her old job with the government, but the shape of it was familiar. A holding company in the British Virgin Islands owned three subsidiaries, each of those registered in a different jurisdiction, and each subsidiary held a trust that in turn owned the account that had paid for the estate. Cyprus. Malta. Seychelles. Money moving through all three before it ever touched anything that could be traced to a bank willing to answer questions.

"Malta," Mick said, in the flat tone of a man who'd stared at the same wall too long. "The trust there is nominee-run. Whoever set it up used a local law firm that specializes in exactly this. No beneficial owner on file, or none they'll cough up without a court order we don't have."

"Do you have the trust deed itself? Not the registry filing, the actual deed."

A pause. "I've got the registry filing,” Mick confirmed.

"That's not the same thing,” Lennox explained. “The registry filing tells you the trust exists. The deed tells you who has the power to direct it, and usually there's a protector named, someone who can fire the trustee and appoint a new one. That's not always the beneficial owner, but it's usually someone close enough to matter. If the firm won't hand over the deed, look at who else uses that same law firm. Trust mills like that reuse boilerplate. Same protector clauses, sometimes the same protector named across multiple unrelated trusts because it's easier for the firm to keep one person on file."

"You think it's one person running more than one of these?" Mick asked.

Lennox nodded. "I think whoever set this up did it fast and didn't want to pay for a dozen custom-drafted trusts when three would do the job with enough shuffling in between. Pull every trust that firm has registered in the last two years. See if any of them share a protector or a registered address."

Mick was quiet for a second. "That's actually not nothing."

"It's not everything either. It just gives you a smaller haystack." She pulled the photo back up on her tablet, the estate, the dock, the sliver of hull with three letters on it. "What about the boat? Any movement on M-A-R?"

"Nothing yet,” he said. “There are a hundred boats it could be. I'm not going to get anywhere on facial recognition for the estate's owner. Whoever they are, they'll have scrubbed themselves out of anything public, or they're using a name that doesn't match their face anywhere online. But the boat might still get us somewhere. Yacht registrations are public in most flag states, and a boat that size doesn't move without a crew who files something, somewhere."

"You can read the boat off a photo?" Lennox asked, impressed.

"Not the boat. The dock. See the cleat pattern and the fendering,” Mick asked. “That's a marina fit-out, not generic. There's a limited number of marinas that build slips to that spec for boats over a certain length. If I can place the marina, I can pull the slip logs for the week that photo was taken and cross them against the flag registry for anything starting with those three letters."

“Nobody lives a fully anonymous life, not anymore. Not even people trying this hard,” Mick pointed out. “We just need to find the one they didn't think to hide."