Cooper pointed his pen straight down through the hospital floorboards toward the bedrock beneath Virginia:
“Under Section Fourteen-B of the **1944 Mercer Sovereign Lineal Charter**: eighty years ago, Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior bored forty miles of subterranean pre-Cambrian crystalline schist beneath North America!”
“He built **Conduit Ten**!”
“The classified, electromagnetic-shielded, pressurized analog command artery running eighty feet beneath this continent, connecting the deep naval command redoubts at Great Lakes and Norfolk straight into the nuclear retaliatory continuity crypts beneath the Supreme Court of the United States!”
May you like
“Inside that conduit were placed forty-eight titanium transit cylinders containing the physical, analog mechanical targeting release matrices for our nation’s strategic nuclear deterrent!”
“No digital hack could touch them.”
“No foreign satellite could override them.”
“They are physical, un-hackable, eternal.”
Cooper pointed his pen straight at me, propped up in my surgical bindings:
“And our family homestead on Blackwood Ridge in Great Falls—the five-hundred-acre estate where you forced Clara to live on fifty dollars a week while you drank twenty-year-old scotch—sits directly atop **Valve Station Ten // Potomac River Fall Line Command Aperture**!”
Advertisement
“The primary northern surface ventilation manifold, cryogenic emergency staging terminal, and master pneumatic override hatch for forty miles of classified defense bedrock running eighty feet beneath her rose garden!”
Cooper slammed his palm onto the brief:
“Under Section Fourteen-B of the 1944 Charter, eighty years ago, Arthur Mercer Senior decreed that the underlying fee-simple title to forty miles of defense bedrock belongs exclusively to his direct biological descendants who maintain the physical homestead and hold an unblemished moral covenant!”
“Unto Chancellor Clara Eleanor Mercer-Vance!”
Advertisement
“And her newborn daughter, Eleanor Arthur Mercer Junior, in perpetuity!”
“You spent four years stalking her!”
“You married her under an assumed corporate identity!”
“You drained her accounts, controlled her vehicle, and isolated her from her colleagues!”
“And when your factoring notes in Zurich faced a mandatory seventy-year maturity deadline at midnight tonight, you calculated that if you could tie her hair to an iron hook, force her onto tiptoe for two hours, and induce an emergency traumatic placental abruption in the bedroom, you would step forward as her sole testamentary heir and register an adverse default quitclaim deed on the federal chancery docket in Switzerland before zero-hundred hours!”
Advertisement
Cooper’s voice rose in cold, magnificent fury:
“Under Section Fourteen-B of the 1944 Charter: if an adverse commercial factoring partner attempts to murder, defraud, abandon, or extinguish the living lineal bloodline of the master surveyor on an active sovereign defense homestead…”
Admiral David Mercer bared his teeth in a razor-thin, cold line of white bone:
**“Every commercial share of your factoring brokerage, your luxury vehicles, Diane’s colonial in McLean, every private account in Vaduz, and seventy billion dollars in carried defense reserves reverts in absolute, un-divided fee simple unto Chancellor Clara Eleanor Mercer-Vance!”**
Advertisement
“And her designated sovereign foundation in perpetuity!”
“The wife you forced onto tiptoe… the mother whose child was delivered in an emergency surgical field… is the sole registered fee-simple owner of Conduit Ten, the master sovereign creditor of your entire conspiracy, and the Director of Sovereign Continuity for the United States Armed Forces!”
“And under Section Nine of the Rivers and Harbors Act of Eighteen-Ninety-Nine: no commercial lease, no private equity conveyance, and no Swiss defense transfer can be executed without the wet-ink consent of the registered fee-simple owner.”
Advertisement
Arthur Vance wept into the linoleum, his hands clawing at his bespoke trousers as his gold watch scraped against the floor:
*rattle-clank.*
“Uncle David… please! Look at me! I am your nephew! Arthur Vance forced me to sign those factoring notes! My mother was the one who slapped her! She told me Clara was weak and would break in twenty minutes! Don’t let them take me to a military prison in chains!”
Diane shrieked from the floor, her hands clawing at her son’s shoes:
Advertisement
“YOU COWARD! YOU TIED THE KNOT! YOU BOUGHT THE BRAIDED NYLON AT THE HARDWARE STORE!”
I shifted my hips against the mattress, ignoring the blinding jolt of agony from my abdominal incision.
I looked down at the two groveling monsters at the foot of my bed.
I reached out, picking up that heavy, four-inch antique solid-titanium surveyor’s compass transit key, stepped with fifty-six analog cryptographic notches:
`KEY IDENTIFIER: MERCER-ARTHUR-CLARA-010`
`CLASSIFICATION: STRATEGIC SOVEREIGN ESCROW // TITLE 50 CONTINUITY`
`TITLE: CONDUIT TEN // THE CAPITAL COMMAND SPUR`
Advertisement
