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“You didn’t steal sixty billion dollars from the national defense redoubt tonight, Arthur.”
“You spent forty years pouring sixty billion dollars of your personal criminal reserves… straight into my sovereign trust.”
“You spent four decades engineering a grand takeover…”
Judge Mercer bared her teeth in a cold, terrifying line of white bone:
“…only to hand your entire dynastic empire to the twelve-year-old boy whose father you poisoned.”
Arthur Vance’s skeleton seemed to liquefy.
He collapsed backward into his leather executive chair, his head hitting the headrest with a dull, hollow thud:
*thump.*
His eyes rolled back in his head; his throat worked in spastic, dry, uncoordinated clicks:
*k-k-k.*
“The money…” Arthur whimpered, his velvet cello voice finally reduced to a shredded, dry rattle from the bottom of an open grave:
“My sixty billion… my life’s work… my offshore empire…”
“Is gone, Arthur,” Major General Caleb Mercer whispered softly across the table.
Every syllable fell like an un-appealable epitaph that sealed forty years of dynastic treason into solid rock forever:
“My grandfather surveyed with honest stone.”
“My father played with honest wood.”
“I audit with honest steel.”
“And around here…”
Caleb reached out with his hand, picking up the antique gold Montblanc pen from the table, and snapped the gold nib in half across the granite:
CRACK.
“…the Son… always balances the ledger down to the absolute last cent.”
Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance let out an un-human, animalistic shriek from the bottom of his lungs:
“NOOOOOOOOOOO!”
He lunged across the granite table, his black silk robe tearing at the shoulder seams, his manicured hands hooked into claws aimed directly at my son’s face:
“YOU PENNILESS SCHOOLBOY! I AM THE CHIEF JUSTICE! I AM THE MASTER OF THIS CAPITOL!”
CLACK.
Two SOG tactical operators stepped forward in synchronized, terrifying mechanical precision:
Their gloved hands caught Chief Justice Arthur Vance by his midnight-blue lapels, spun his six-foot-three frame ninety degrees against the black granite table, and drove his face down onto the stone with three hundred pounds of linear kinetic leverage:
SLAM.
