Arthur Junior stammered, his eyes bulging as if his carotid arteries were being pinched:
“No… that’s impossible.
Clara worked as a high school librarian in Fairfax!
She took a leave of absence to nurse Victor!
I checked her tax returns twenty-one years ago!”
“You checked an un-indexed civilian cover legend planted in the Virginia state personnel archives forty years ago by the Department of the Navy, Arthur,” Colonel Clara Mercer answered softly:
“My maiden name is not Campbell.”
“My name is **Colonel Clara Eleanor Mercer**.”
“Direct biological granddaughter of **Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior**—the naval civil engineer who, in nineteen-forty-four, under Title 50 War Powers, 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!”
“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.”
I turned my slate-gray eyes directly onto Victor’s graying face:
“And those eight properties you purchased over the last thirteen years, Victor…?”
I bared my teeth in a razor-thin, cold line of white bone:
“…the properties you thought you were hiding from your wife by using secret offshore accounts in Vaduz, Liechtenstein…?”
“Every single one of those eight parcels sits directly atop the emergency ventilation manifolds, cryogenic staging shafts, and pressurized scuttle valves of **Conduit Ten**!”
CHAPTER 3: THE SECRET OF CONDUIT TEN & THE ENVIRONMENTAL SINKHOLE
Victor’s mouth opened, but only a dry, whistling gasp escaped his throat:
*h-h-h.*
The skin around his eyes turned the color of an old bruise.
Melissa backed away until her designer handbag struck the wall:
“What… what is she talking about, Arthur?!
What does defense infrastructure have to do with my son’s lake house?!”
“Under Section Fourteen-B of the **1944 Mercer Sovereign Lineal Charter**,” I explained, turning to look at Melissa:
“Any surface parcel of real estate situated within one thousand meters of an active geodetic ventilation valve of Conduit Ten carries an un-waivable, statutory, joint-and-several environmental remediation covenant.”
“For eighty years, that bedrock has been cooled by a classified closed-loop cryogenic Freon-fluorocarbon heat exchange network.”
“In nineteen-eighty-four, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Navy classified the subterranean soil easements beneath those eight parcels as **Superfund Special Defense Sinks**.”
“Under federal maritime chancery law:”
“The registered owner of the fee-simple surface title is personally, criminally, and financially liable for the maintenance and structural integrity of the underlying bedrock valves.”
