Chapter 15 - The Children With New Names
The rescue operation lasted nine days.
I slept perhaps twelve hours during all of them.
Authorities moved across four countries.
Some children were found quickly.
Others had lived under new names for years.
One boy had been told his mother was dead.
She was alive in Ohio and had searched for him for five years.
Two sisters had been separated after their disappearance.
They were reunited in a federal facility while their parents flew across the country to reach them.
A ten-year-old girl was discovered living inside the guesthouse of a millionaire philanthropist who had publicly donated to the search for her.
The hypocrisy was almost impossible to process.
Thirty children came home.
Two locations were empty.
Those children remained missing.
Victoria survived surgery.
Sebastian survived too.
He was transported directly from the hospital into federal custody.
Alexander Vale was arrested at a private airport while attempting to leave the country.
Nathaniel accepted protective custody and began cooperating.
Margaret disappeared from public view.
The Vale Foundation collapsed in less than forty-eight hours.
Then came the names.
Judges.
Doctors.
Lawyers.
Executives.
Adoption specialists.
Police officials.
Three members of Congress.
Two foreign diplomats.
Dozens of donors.
The network had survived because each participant believed the others would protect it.
Once Claire's files became public, that protection vanished.
Everyone started betraying everyone else.
But one question haunted me.
Two children were still missing.
A boy named Owen Price.
And a girl named Sophie Lane.
Both had disappeared from the database six months earlier.
Daniel spent every hour rebuilding old transfer records.
One evening, he appeared at my apartment holding printed flight logs.
“I found something.”
Both children had been moved on the same aircraft.
Destination listed as Geneva.
But the plane never landed in Switzerland.
It changed course over the Atlantic.
The true destination was hidden behind an emergency diversion code.
I looked at Daniel.
“Where did it land?”
He placed another page on the table.
Maine.
Vale Island.
My stomach tightened.
“We searched the island.”
“Not all of it.”
Daniel pointed to an old architectural survey.
The mansion sat over tunnels built during Prohibition.
Most had supposedly collapsed.
One tunnel led beneath the cliffs.
Directly beneath Victoria's bedroom.
May you like
The blue room had never been just one room.
It was an entrance.
