Chapter 8 - The Decoy
Armed with Otto’s confession, Nora devised a brilliant, terrible plan. If Ophelia believed the wedding ring contained the only embedded copy of her most damaging files, she would inevitably try to seize it. Nora needed to control the narrative. She allowed a carefully placed rumor to circulate among compromised executives that "the diamond held everything." She wore the heavy platinum ring openly, letting Ophelia’s paranoia fester and ripen into desperation.
But the real evidence was never going to be in the ring. The original records were already securely stored in four separate locations: with federal investigators, with her attorney, with an independent ethics counsel, and on a tiny, secondary drive hidden in the seams of her wedding gown. The night before the wedding, Nora carefully removed the actual storage chip from the ring and replaced it with a harmless, blank piece of plastic.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(1048x378:1050x380)/Jenna-Bush-Hager-100223-c94955eb572d47ea815a340c18c6e771.jpg)