Maya turned her head frantically toward her lawyer. "Arthur! Is this true?!"
Arthur Vance Jr. looked at the documents on the table, then looked at Maya with a expression of sudden, deep coldness. He slowly closed his leather briefcase, stood up, and smoothed his tie.
"My retainer was issued by Sterling Maritime Industries," Arthur said quietly, avoiding Maya's eyes. "If there is an active conflict of interest involving embezzlement against my primary client, I must immediately recuse myself from your representation."
"Arthur! You can't leave me!" Maya screamed, reaching out with her cuffed hands as the lawyer walked briskly toward the steel door, knocked twice, and exited without looking back.
The steel door buzzed shut, leaving Maya alone in the cold room with Daniel and Marcus.
Chapter 7: The Terms of Surrender
Maya collapsed back into the metal chair, her head bowed, her shoulder shaking as real, unscripted tears finally began to stream down her face. The brilliant, invincible operative was gone; all that remained was a terrified twenty-six-year-old woman facing twenty years in a federal penitentiary.
"He'll kill me," Maya whimpered, her hands covering her face, the handcuffs clinking loudly in the small room. "If Julian finds out I took that money... he won't just let me go to prison. He’ll make sure I never testify."
Daniel sat down slowly in the chair across from her. For the first time since entering the precinct, a flicker of genuine human pity crossed his face, though his eyes remained firm as granite.
"Julian Sterling doesn't have to find out," Daniel said softly.
Maya looked up through her tear-stained lashes. "What?"
"I don't care about your three million dollars in Zurich, Maya," Daniel said. "Keep it. Use it to start a new life under a new name in South America for all I care. But you are going to give me Julian Sterling."
"How?" she whispered, her voice trembling. "He operates through three layers of shell corporations and blind trusts. He never signs anything himself!"
Daniel pushed the third document across the table toward her. It was a single-page immunity agreement drafted by the State District Attorney's office.
"In twenty minutes," Daniel explained, "the District Attorney is going to walk through that door. You are going to sign a full state and federal deposition detailing every instruction, every wire transfer, and every corporate directive given to you directly by Julian Sterling over the last twenty-four months."
"He'll destroy you, Daniel," Maya whispered, her eyes wide with fear. "You don't know what Sterling Maritime is capable of. They own half the judges in New York!"
"They don't own my father," Daniel said quietly. "And they don't own me."
He slid a sleek black ballpoint pen across the stainless steel table until it rested against her trembling metal cuffs.
"You have two choices, Maya," Daniel said, standing up and buttoning his charcoal jacket. "Option one: you stay here, Arthur tells Julian you've been compromised, and you take the fall for corporate espionage, felony assault, and grand larceny alone. Option two: you sign that paper, you give us the encryption keys to Sterling's private ledger, and you walk out of here under federal witness protection before sunrise."
Maya stared at the pen lying on the cold steel table. The blue ink of the agreement seemed to glare up at her like an open door over an abyss.
Slowly, her cuffed hands reached out, her trembling fingers wrapping around the pen.