Chapter 28 - The Signal from Dead Man's Ledge
The revelations inside the workshop changed the air in the Reed house completely. The feeling of absolute resolution that had followed the Monhegan Island vault opening vanished, replaced by an unsettling awareness that the past had merely been suspended, not concluded.
In the study, with the fire crackling in the hearth, Marcus explained the truth of 1988. Sarah Vance had been a senior cryptanalyst for the Naval Security Group. When she discovered that her older brother Arthur was using classified logistics infrastructure to build a private offshore network, she extracted the master operational files and attempted to flee to Canada. Marcus had been assigned to escort her to a safe house in Maine.
"Arthur intercepted our flight over Penobscot Bay," Marcus said, staring into the fire. "He didn't fire a missile. He sabotaged the aircraft’s fuel lines before we left Norfolk. The plane went down over Dead Man's Ledge in the middle of an August squall. I managed to pull Arthur and Helen Vance from the water onto a life raft. But the fuselages sank into the trench before I could reach Sarah."
"You thought she drowned," Claire said from the armchair, her hands tightly wrapped around a warm cup.
"I knew she drowned," Marcus corrected her, his voice absolute. "I spent three days diving that trench without equipment until the Navy pulled me out. Her body was never recovered, but no human could survive eighty feet under ice-cold ocean currents without gear."
"Then who left the compass on our beach?" Leo asked, leaning against the edge of the desk. "Who wrote 'She is still waiting' on a flight manifest that was sealed in Defense Department archives?"
"Someone who wants us to go to that trench," Marcus replied. "Someone who knows that Sarah Vance was carrying the original 1988 hard-copy ledger—the blueprint Arthur used to construct the entire system."
"The secondary ledger from Monhegan was just a copy," Leo realized, his mind piecing the puzzle together. "The original source file... the one containing the primary master keys... is still inside that airframe at the bottom of Dead Man's Ledge."
"And if that file exists," Claire added, her hazel eyes lighting up with sharp tactical clarity, "it means anyone who recovers it can reactivate the offshore accounts that federal marshals seized last year."
Marcus stood up, walking to the window that looked out over the dark ocean. "We aren't going near that ledge. I notified the Coast Guard Sector Commander an hour ago. A naval salvage vessel is being dispatched from Portsmouth tomorrow morning to secure the crash site."
Leo said nothing, but his steel-blue eyes caught Claire’s reflection in the glass window pane. They both knew how fast private operators could move compared to military bureaucracy. A naval salvage vessel dispatched tomorrow morning would arrive eighteen hours too late.
At two o'clock in the morning, while Marcus was asleep in his room, Leo met Claire down at the timber pier behind the house. The night air was freezing, the black ocean water slapping rhythmically against the wooden pilings.
Their thirty-two-foot deep-V offshore vessel was already untied, its twin diesels purring softly in neutral to minimize noise. Claire was at the navigation station, setting up a closed-loop sonar array, while Leo adjusted his drysuit zippers near the stern.
" Dad is going to be furious when he wakes up and finds the boat gone," Claire warned, though her hands moved across the sonar controls with practiced speed.
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"Dad is protecting a memory," Leo said, pulling his dive mask over his dark hair. "We're protecting the family. If there's a master key in that wreck, we get to it before whoever left that compass on our shore."
Leo brought the throttles forward. The deep-V vessel surged out of the sheltered harbor, its hull slicing through the dark Atlantic swells as it set a direct course for the deadly coordinates of Dead Man's Ledge.
