For nine years, I had lived in a modest four-bedroom fieldstone home on the river bluffs of Great Falls, Virginia, believing that Tyler Mercer was an honorable, hardworking commercial captain who occasionally struggled with the demands of long-haul aviation schedules.
I had packed his uniform shirts.
I had picked him up from midnight arrivals at Dulles in the rain.
I had spent my weekends reading bedtime stories to our son while Tyler sat in his private study behind locked doors, allegedly reviewing instrument landing charts and company union grievances.
And now, my husband had just proposed to his mistress over the cabin speakers of a Boeing 737, with his seven-year-old son sitting eighty feet behind him in row twenty-four.
Vanessa Sterling.
The name struck my cerebral cortex with the hydrostatic impact of an armor-piercing projectile.
Vanessa Sterling was the thirty-two-year-old niece of former Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance—the eighty-year-old disgraced federal jurist who chaired The Valkyrie Trust, a seventy-billion-dollar shadow factoring cartel based out of Vaduz, Liechtenstein!
Two months ago, my counter-intelligence desk at the Navy Yard had flagged an un-indexed commercial conveyance involving fifty-six million dollars in mezzanine debt encumbering the deep-water terminal easements along the Potomac River.
The offshore factoring entity was registered in Zurich.
And the designated commercial transport proxy listed on the classified transit charter…
Was Captain Tyler Arthur Mercer.
Tyler wasn’t flying an out-and-back turn to Chicago today.
Tyler was not coming home for dinner at eighteen-thirty.
He had booked Vanessa into seat 2B on this domestic leg to connect directly with a private, chartered Dassault Falcon 8X waiting on the executive tarmac at O’Hare—an aircraft cleared for an immediate trans-Atlantic flight to Geneva at fifteen-hundred hours!
He had packed his life into the belly of this plane.
He had drained our joint marital operating accounts forty-eight hours ago under the guise of an executive investment certificate.
And he had planned to vanish to Switzerland with Arthur Vance’s niece, leaving Mason and me in Great Falls to face sixty million dollars in defaulted factoring debt and the total destruction of our family name!
