Noel locked himself into his private, secured office suite for a full twenty-four hours, the Operation Lighthouse master file glowing on the screen of his isolated laptop. He ignored the insistent buzz of his phone, the emails from Victoria detailing scheduling conflicts, and the mounting demands of the corporation. He was no longer the CEO; he was the general, locked in the war room, dissecting the enemy’s blueprint.
The sheer scale of the operation was staggering, confirming his worst fears. The Ledger detailed $780 million in laundered funds, masquerading as corporate investments. The money flowed through dozens of shell corporations—numbered entities that existed solely to obscure the source of the wealth—before being injected into high-value, global real estate. But the real core o
