“The accounts your syndicate used to funnel the mezzanine debt through Liechtenstein,” I revealed, every syllable falling like an eighty-ton iron dead-weight onto his coffin:
“You thought Mark was brilliant.”
“You thought he was siphoning forty percent of my family’s sovereign equity into Vaduz.”
I tapped the brass die:
“Mark wasn’t siphoning my family’s money, Arthur.”
“Mark was using an automated sub-fiduciary account that my grandfather, Arthur Mercer Senior, created in nineteen-eighty-four.”
“An account called The Mercer-Sterling Sovereign Sanctuary Trust.”
“And when your bankers executed those transfers… what foundation charter did they use to bypass the Swiss anti-money-laundering audits?”
Arthur Vance stopped breathing.
His pupils dilated until the blue of his eyes vanished completely into black.
His throat worked in dry, spastic, un-coordinated clicks:
*k-k-k.*
“They used our family charter…”
Arthur wheezed:
“The Sterling-Vance private foundation!”
“They did not use your family charter, Arthur,” Chief Judge Eleanor Mercer spoke from the threshold.
