The Flashback

(Tracking chip in second button of Ethan's shirt)

Inside Manhattan's Fifth Avenue tailor store, Violette's fingertips trace Fibonacci solenoids on the fabric of a Brioni suit. It's her third week undercover as Ethan's personal tailor, and the chemical molecular formula for a potent Alzheimer's drug is playing on a loop in her bone-conduction headphones - syllables that allow her to precisely avoid the nanoscale bugging fibers of the suit's lining as she sews the stitching.

"Cufflink holes closed another .3 millimeters." Ethan adjusts his tie in the three-way mirror, a defibrillator hidden under the gray stripes of his Armani, "to be as lethal as when he hanged Lehman Brothers in 2008." Violette leans over and bites off the gold thread, the miniature scanner between his lips has read the quantum chip in his second button - the footage of his mother's funeral twenty years ago is boiling in atomic-level storage layers.

Suddenly, Ethan's customized leather shoe crushed her left wrist, and the dial of her Vacheron Constantin wristwatch burst into flames." I heard you were looking for this?" He shook the chip he'd removed from the button, its plated surface reflecting the surveillance angle of Violette's father's fall, "You should be thanking me, it cost me thirty million dollars to buy the firemen off to delete the raw data back then."

The old radio in the tailor's store suddenly plays Chopin's Nocturne, a danger signal from Lucas, and Violette's thimble shoots out a hardened silver needle, which Ethan deflects with the gold cigarette case his father left behind. Yellowed stock certificates flutter down from the cigarette case's compartment - the original documents from the hostile takeover that led to her family's demise.

"You think the tracking chip is a weakness?" Ethan ripped open his shirt to reveal a signal booster implanted in his ribs, "It's the most elegant mousetrap on Wall Street." The mirrors throughout the store suddenly turn into displays showing infrared footage of Violette as she gets a tattoo in a women's prison, the Moody's code under her collarbone eerily synchronized with the Dow Jones.

Memory flashbacks swoop in like high-frequency trading.Violette sees eighteen-year-old Ethan in a Wharton lab, injecting Alzheimer's drugs into her father's coffee cup. As her father's trembling fingers write the last line of the formula on the blackboard, the sound waves of a piano lesson of Chopin's Funeral March sweep through the window-a countdown to death that Scarlett deliberately plays in the next room.

"Now it's your turn to forget." Ethan inserts the chip into the old sewing machine, the neurotoxin injecting itself into the suit's shoulder pads along with the stitches, "This new potion will make you forget three things: revenge, your father, and..." He suddenly convulses, and an electrical spark from the sewing machine detonates the cryptocurrency wallet concealed in the shoulder pad.

Violette takes the opportunity to swallow the antidote capsule contained under her tongue-an antitoxin synthesized from a sample of Lucas's cerebrospinal fluid. She overturns the antique dressmaker's table, under which a quantum computer is compiling chip data into a holographic projection. The murder footage from twenty years ago showed Ethan's cufflinks blinking in Morse code identical to that of the present day, the leaked signals of the Federal Reserve's decision to raise interest rates.

"Surprise?" Scarlett kicks open the store door with her pregnant belly, an EMP belt hidden under her Givenchy high-fashion maternity dress, "Your father's math equations are so perfect for nursery wallpaper." She flings out a diagnosis of preterm labor with a due date that perfectly coincides with the Federal Reserve chairman's retirement date, and an amniotic fluid test report that shows the embryo is carrying Violette's mitochondrial DNA.

A rainstorm slaps the centuries-old stained glass, and Violette assembles memory fragments amidst the shredded fabric littering the floor. When Ethan lunges with gold-plated scissors in his hand, she presses the miniature button inside her Dior lipstick - and all the Wall Street displays suddenly play the raw footage from the chip, the formula that her father wrote in blood on the window sill before he crashed, the very same genetic sequence of the embryo in Scarlett's womb.

"That's the real heir." Violette rips off Ethan's platinum cufflinks, the links crashing into a strong acid solution revealing the Swiss bank codes, "The key to the fortune you spent twenty years trying to decipher was actually engraved in my chromosomes at birth." She injects an Alzheimer's agent into his carotid artery and watches as the Wall Street demon begins to forget his most cherished bank account.

A fire escape signaled Lucas's brainwave locator, but Violette turned toward the NYSE in the torrential rain. Her cashmere shawl soaks up the rain, revealing a complete chain of evidence woven with nanotechnology. Behind her, the tailor's store explodes, splattering Brooks Brothers buttons in a metallic rainstorm on Wall Street, each engraved with the dirty secrets of the powerful.