The crash of splintering glass tore through the newsroom. Victor Garrick, crowbar in hand, breached the main glass doors downstairs, his men fanning out behind him. Their heavy footsteps thudded up the emergency stairwell.
“They’re coming!” Nora yelled, pointing at the stairwell door.
My fingers flew across Nora’s keyboard. The upload bar crawled, agonizingly slow, towards completion. Arthur’s signed 2009 confession, the vessel coordinates, the damning wire receipts. All high-resolution scans.
“Sending to Lloyd’s of London,” I muttered, hitting enter. “USCG Marine Safety Office. Done.”
Then, I targeted Kestrel’s top five global maritime insurance syndicates, external clients who underwrote millions in cargo. I pressed enter again. The digital payload was unleashed.
“Go!” Nora shouted, not at me, but at her own laptop. She hit send, broadcasting the raw PDF of the letter and all its attachments to every major commercial shipping news hub in the Pacific Northwest. Local and international. No vetting, no filter. Just the truth.
Suddenly, Garrick’s men, halfway up the stairs, stopped dead. Their phones, strapped to their belts, began to ring. Not one, but all of them. A discordant chorus of frantic alerts. Confused, they pulled out their devices, glancing at the screens, then at each other.
“What is this?” one of them muttered, his voice uncertain.
A collective gasp from the men on the stairs. Their faces, moments ago set in grim determination, dissolved into a mixture of shock and dawning panic. Their global operating insurance, the very bedrock of Kestrel’s existence, had been instantly suspended. Mid-transit. The entire fleet, stalled on the ocean.
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