Chapter 186: Evidence in Hand

Chapter 186: Evidence in Hand

Correa cleared his throat and launched into his black-market gospel.

"Honestly, the play is simple. You take our dirt-cheap premium raw material and use it to knock off Williams Group's high-end medical devices. Then you drop a little cash, get a few Hollywood names to stand behind the product, and sponsor a couple of European international medical awards nobody's ever heard of."

"Finally, you dump a mountain of money into media ads. People are suckers for European-sounding brands."

Correa clapped his hands together. "Run it through the whole cycle, and nobody gives a damn whether the thing's genuine—but it'll sell like crazy! Prints money faster than the U.S. Mint!"

There's an old saying—listen to the words, but hear the meaning.

From the smooth, well-oiled way Correa laid out his little "brand-laundering pipeline," Caesar caught it instantly: this guy wasn't just moving raw material. He was in on the counterfeiting himself.

Caesar pulled out a Cuban cigar, handed it to Correa, and lit it for him personally.

"Damn, brother! You just gave me a million-dollar masterclass!"

Then he set the hook. "Correa, how'd you get this whole thing figured out?"

Correa blew a smoke ring, hesitating, the words caught in his throat.

Caesar sweetened the pot. "Correa, you laid your cards on the table, so I won't play coy either. You tell me exactly how this operation runs, and if it checks out, I'll cut you in for a straight ten percent. Just you and me—we leave Thompson out of it and get rich on our own."

Earlier, on the phone, Caesar had deliberately ordered Correa—in Thompson's voice—to "shave five points off." And when Correa quoted the price a minute ago, he'd actually passed those five points off as his own generous favor.

So Caesar was certain of it: these two cousins might be thick as thieves, but Correa had long been chewing on his resentment over Thompson taking the lion's share.

Sure enough.

The second he heard "ten percent," Correa's eyes practically turned green. He flicked his cigar to the floor and ground it out under his heel.

"Caesar, since you're being straight with me, I won't hold back either!"

Correa leaned in close, dropping his voice like he was sharing a secret. "Caesar—you know that 'portable cardiac defibrillator' that's Williams Group's hottest product this year?"

Caesar nodded. "Of course. That thing's a monopoly. A license to print money."

Correa let out a cold laugh. "Then do you know what Williams Group's biggest headache is right now—aside from those Wall Street competitors?"

Caesar answered flatly. "The high-end knockoffs flooding the black market."

Correa snapped his fingers. "Bingo!"

"Those counterfeit defibrillators that are selling hottest on the black market—the ones that already ripped away half of Williams Group's legit market share? My cousin Thompson makes those. He uses this exact raw material to crank them out in secret over in the next state."

Correa spat the next words through his teeth. "He skims the raw material inside the factory, then turns around and manufactures fakes to eat his own company's market—getting paid on both ends! Rakes in a fortune, and all he throws me is a lousy storage fee. Won't even let me sip the broth off the meat!"

Caesar wore a look of dawning realization. "So that's how it is. Sly old fox. Ruthless play."

Beside them, Elizabeth—silent the whole time—was about to detonate.

Williams Group did have a high-end counterfeit product bleeding all over the market. Apart from the core chip, the surgical-grade materials were nearly identical to the genuine article, at half the price, and it had gutted the company's margins.

She'd never been able to trace where these frighteningly convincing fakes were coming from.

Now, the whole truth was laid bare.

Thompson—the rat in her own house—wasn't just stealing her premium raw material. He was using it to manufacture counterfeits and hammer her own market.

"Good... very good."

Elizabeth's voice trembled with pure fury.

Correa noticed something was off with her. He looked over, confused. "The hell's wrong with your wife?"

Caesar rubbed his nose and gave a helpless shrug. "She might... be about to flip the table."

Elizabeth couldn't hold it back a second longer.

She ripped off the Chanel sunglasses and tore away the silk scarf covering half her face—revealing that stunning, ice-cold face that everyone on Wall Street and inside Williams Group knew by heart.

Her gaze locked onto Correa like a knife pressed edge-first against his skin.

"Mr. Correa. Every single word you just said..." Elizabeth raised the micro-camera in her hand. "I recorded all of it."

The instant Correa saw Elizabeth's face clearly, it was like he'd seen a ghost. His face drained white as paper in a heartbeat.

"You... you... you're Elizabeth?!"

Caesar patted Correa's rigid shoulder, his tone as casual as a man settling a bar tab.

"All right, pal. You already confessed to everything you should've—and a whole lot of stuff you never should have."

"We've got the audio, we've got the photos. Witnesses, evidence, the whole chain sealed up nice and tight." Caesar gave him a faint smile. "Let's go. Come grab a coffee with us down at the FBI."

Correa snapped out of it. His face shifted from ashen white to the twisted snarl of a man swallowed whole by terror.

"Fuck! This is a goddamn sting!"

He staggered back two steps, yanked a pistol from the small of his back, and screamed at the top of his lungs. "Grab them! They're wired! Nobody leaves alive!"

A shrill alarm whistle pierced the air.

Dozens of black-market goons in coveralls, faces slabbed with muscle, came pouring out of every corner of the warehouse, closing in around Caesar and Elizabeth. They wielded steel pipes, machetes, and heavy wrenches, murder radiating off every one of them.

Butcher, the lobby manager, hung back behind the crowd and bellowed, "Grab that camera! Kill them both!"

"Kill them!"

The goons roared, brandishing their weapons as they pressed forward.

Caesar tucked Elizabeth behind him, and his eyes turned cold—Siberian ice.

Facing dozens of armed thugs, he didn't even draw his gun.

His wrist flicked, and a tactical folding knife slid into his palm like a magician's trick.

Shhk—

The blade flashed like a ribbon of light.

Thup!

With a hideous, wet slicing sound—

The index and middle fingers of Correa's gun hand were severed clean at the base.

The two severed fingers dropped to the cold concrete in a spray of blood, twitching a couple of times on the floor from raw nerve reflex.

Blood erupted from the stump of Correa's hand like a fountain, staining a wide patch of the ground red.

"AAAARGH—!!!"

It wasn't until that moment that the pain hit him. Correa let out a scream like a pig at slaughter, the pistol clattering from his grip as he collapsed to his knees, every muscle in his face contorting.

Caesar didn't pause for so much as a breath.

He raised his left hand, thumbed a windproof lighter to life with a soft click, and flicked it with pinpoint precision into an open steel drum beside him.

The drum was brimming with high-concentration industrial alcohol used for stripping machine grease.

WHOOSH—!!!

A massive blue fireball blasted up out of the drum's mouth, the heat wave shooting skyward, lighting up half the dim warehouse.

The goons nearest the drum stumbled back from the searing heat, their formation shattering into chaos.

Caesar grabbed Correa by the collar and dragged him toward the flaming drum like a dead dog.

Then, without a flicker of expression, he snatched a steel pry bar off a nearby tool rack—one that had been heated glowing red—and pressed it down hard against the stump of Correa's still-gushing hand.

Sssssssssss—!!!

A thick stench of charred meat and sickening blood filled the air in an instant.

The blistering heat cauterized the blood vessels on contact, forcibly stopping the hemorrhage.

"AAAAH—!!!" Correa let out a scream so shrill it barely sounded human, his eyes rolling back white before the sheer agony dropped him into unconsciousness.

Caesar tossed the pry bar aside—seared flesh still clinging to it—and lifted his cold, dead eyes, sweeping them across the ring of goons like the Grim Reaper.

Those thirty, forty black-market brutes who'd looked so bloodthirsty a moment ago now stood frozen in place, exchanging glances. Staring at Correa passed out on the ground, not a single one dared take even half a step forward.

Clang.

Someone, no one knew who, was so scared the steel pipe just dropped from his hand and hit the floor.

Caesar fished a cigarette from his pocket, set it between his lips, and lit it off the flames dancing from the drum.

He took a long drag and blew out a thick cloud of smoke.

"Back off."

The crowd parted like the Red Sea, scrambling terrified to both sides, opening up a wide corridor.

Caesar took Elizabeth's hand in one of his—and with the other, hauled the unconscious Correa along like a plucked chicken. Under the stares of dozens of thugs, he strode brazenly toward the Hummer.

Only when the black Hummer let out a beast-like roar and tore away into the distance—

Did the dozens of men in the warehouse remain frozen solid, not one of them daring to make a sound.

...

Two hours later.

The top-floor conference room of Williams Group's Nevada factory.

Smoke hung thick in the air, the atmosphere strained to the breaking point. Both sides of the massive oval conference table were packed—department supervisors, heads of finance, warehousing, quality control, logistics—every last one of them present.

Thompson sat in the first seat to the right of the head of the table. The cup of premium black coffee in front of him had long gone stone cold.

Irritated, Thompson yanked his silk tie loose and threw it on the table.

"Have you found her yet?!"

His right-hand assistant rushed in, drenched in sweat, shaking his head over and over. "Boss, still no sign of President Elizabeth. We've turned the whole factory upside down—nobody saw where she went. Her car's not in the lot either."

Thompson's fingers went white around the bone-china coffee cup.

Elizabeth had said, clearly, that the inquiry meeting would convene in three hours. But now three and a half hours had crawled by, and that untouchable, coldly beautiful Wall Street president was still nowhere to be found.

A powerful sense of dread settled over Thompson.

"Then send people to the hotels in town and keep looking!" Thompson slammed his palm down on the solid-wood table.

Just then—

The heavy double doors of the conference room were shoved open from outside.

"No need to keep looking."

Elizabeth's ice-cold voice echoed through the room.

She stood in the doorway. The disguise was gone—she'd changed back into that minimalist, commanding Armani gray couture suit. Her blonde hair was pulled crisply back, her stunning face devoid of any excess expression, like a snow queen who held the power of life and death.

Thompson shot up out of his chair.

The irritation vanished from his face in an instant, replaced by an oily, obsequious smile.

"Ms. Elizabeth! Where have you been? The whole management team's been waiting here for you—we were all terribly worried about your safety!"

Elizabeth didn't spare him a single glance. In her heels, trailing a wave of cold air, she walked straight to the seat at the head of the table and sat down.

She dropped a USB drive on the table with a sharp clack.

"Mr. Thompson, I'm formally notifying you now."

Elizabeth folded her hands on the tabletop, her gaze sweeping like a blade over every parasite in the room.

"You're fired. Effective immediately."