Chapter 8 - The Initials B.D.
Brendan did not reach for his weapon.
That was the only reason I did not reach for mine.
Tessa stepped backward.
I stopped the tape.
“Explain.”
Brendan stared at the recorder.
“I can’t.”
“That was the wrong answer.”
“I mean I don’t know why Nicholas said my initials.”
Tessa spoke quietly.
“He trusted you.”
Brendan looked at her.
“You knew?”
“Nicholas mentioned a Brendan once. Someone who tried to help.”
Brendan slowly sat down.
Then he told me the secret he had kept for nine years.
Nicholas called him forty minutes after the harbor explosion.
Alive.
Terrified.
Brendan drove to Cambridge and helped move Nicholas and Tessa to the apartment where he eventually died.
“You saw my brother alive.”
“Yes.”
“And you let me bury an empty coffin.”
Brendan’s eyes dropped.
“Nicholas begged me not to tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because the night I helped him, someone sent a photograph to my phone.”
He pulled an old device from his security case.
He had kept it for nearly a decade.
The photograph showed Tessa asleep inside the apartment.
Someone had taken it through the window.
Written underneath:
Tell Vincent and the woman dies first.
Tessa covered her mouth.
Brendan stayed quiet to keep her alive.
Then he joined my inner security circle and spent years trying to identify the leak.
“But B.D.?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“That isn’t me.”
We returned to the tape.
Nicholas’s next sentence had been distorted.
Brendan cleaned the audio digitally.
The letters were not B.D.
They were B.D. Holdings.
A company.
I searched the name.
It had dissolved seventeen years earlier.
The registered owner appeared on the screen.
Benjamin Dominic Moretti.
My father.
Nobody moved.
My father had created the company Graham used to hide money.
And Nicholas had discovered it.
Then the tape played one final sentence.
May you like
I will never forget my brother’s voice saying it.
“Vincent, Graham followed orders. The person who decided I had to die was Dad.”
