Chapter 14 - THE LAST PLAYER
Lang’s office had been emptied.
His bank account was closed. His car was found near the Canadian border.
Everyone assumed he had run because he was guilty.
I didn’t.
Lang had risked his career to lock the library and save us. If he wanted to escape, he would not have returned the camera.
The recovered footage showed who stole it during the blackout.
Dana Brooks.
When I confronted her, she did not lie.
“I removed it because it recorded someone we needed alive.”
The video showed Dana meeting Lang shortly before my assault.
Lang handed her documents and said, “Bell isn’t the last player.”
The final conspirator was Margaret Voss—Graham Voss’s wife and chair of the foundation that processed every Westbridge scholarship.
Graham had helped move the money, but Margaret designed the system.
After Bell’s arrest, she prepared to transfer the remaining funds overseas and disappear.
Lang had followed her.
His last location was a private airfield forty miles outside the city.
Marcus and federal agents reached it minutes before Margaret’s plane took off.
I went with them because Lang had sent the clue to me.
Inside the hangar, Margaret held Lang at gunpoint beside stacks of financial records.
“You’re Elaine’s daughter,” she said when she saw me. “She was sentimental too.”
“My mother survived you.”
“Survival is not victory.”
“No. This is.”
I raised Veronica’s old livestream phone.
Thousands of former Westbridge students were watching.
Margaret looked toward the plane, but federal vehicles blocked the runway.
She dragged Lang toward the cockpit.
Graham Voss stepped from behind the plane.
For one terrible second, I thought he had come to help his wife.
Instead, he stood in her path.
“It’s over, Margaret.”
She aimed at him.
“You weak little man.”
“Probably,” he said. “But I’m done being your excuse.”
Lang knocked the weapon aside. Agents rushed forward.
Margaret was arrested before she reached the plane.
As officers led her away, she looked at me with pure contempt.
“You think those people care about you? They care about the show.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But they saw the truth.”
Lang handed me a sealed folder recovered from Margaret’s luggage.
It contained the final account balance.
One hundred eighty-six million dollars.
Enough to restore every stolen scholarship.
May you like
But the money was scheduled to disappear automatically at midnight.
We had forty-one minutes to stop it.
