Did Beatrice say something to you?”
“I’m inside her house, Simon,” I whispered, looking through the louvered slats toward the kitchen island where Beatrice was laughing with her mother:
“She didn’t hear me come in.”
I took a slow, steadying breath, my fingers locking around the phone until the glass creaked:
“Our mother didn’t abandon us in a motel room during a blizzard, Simon.”
On the line from Chicago, three hundred miles away, the ambient sound of keyboards and cooling fans seemed to freeze:
“…What did you say?”
“Our mother’s name was **Eleanor Mercer**,” I told him, every syllable etched in stone:
“She was Kenneth’s elder sister.
Kenneth was our biological uncle.
Our grandfather was **Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior**, who built **Conduit Ten** eighty feet beneath the ground under Title Fifty War Powers in nineteen-forty-four.”
I watched Beatrice lift her champagne flute to her mother’s glass through the slats:
“Beatrice and her mother stole the birth registries.
They stole sixty thousand dollars a quarter in mineral royalties that belonged to us.
They have a four-hundred-page litigation brief on her kitchen island right now, prepared by Julian Vance, designed to convey sixty billion dollars in sovereign defense equity to an offshore trust in Vaduz when the seventy-year spendthrift restriction expires at midnight tonight.”
The silence from Simon lasted for five unbroken seconds.
When he finally spoke, his voice was not the voice of an ordinary commercial engineer.
It was a low, terrifying rumble that sounded like the foundation piers of a suspension bridge groaning under three million tons of tension:
“Are you certain of this, Mason?”
“I am looking at the blue vellum brief on her kitchen counter through the pantry door right now, Simon.
It is stamped with our grandfather’s Admiralty seal.”
“Listen to me very carefully, brother,” Simon spoke, his words measured, rhythmic, and deadly:
“Do not confront her alone.
Do not let her know you are in that house.
I am boarding the private charter transport at Midway in twelve minutes.
I have our grandfather’s surveying logbook—the one Kenneth gave us in the attic.
I ran the geodetic coordinates through our structural modeling mainframe three weeks ago during the Pentagon tunnel audit.
I know what is buried beneath Blackthorn Ridgeway.”
