CHAPTER 10: THE AUDIT ON THE BLACK GRANITE
I walked down the twenty-foot center aisle of the West Conference Room.
My leather boots left dark, geometric tread marks across the greenstone floorboards:
*crunch… tack… crunch.*
Barnaby walked beside me, his paws striking the stone in synchronized cadence.
Admiral Mercer walked on my right flank, his father’s chronometer watch ticking steadily on my wrist:
*tack… tack… tack.*
We stopped at the head of the black granite table, two paces from the Chief Justice’s leather throne.
I did not draw a weapon.
I reached inside my tweed jacket, pulled out the thick, faded blue vellum envelope containing the original 1944 Mercer Sovereign Charter, and slammed it flat atop the Chief Justice’s sixty-billion-dollar Swiss conveyance deed:
THUD.
The heavy granite table seemed to absorb the blow with a dull, subterranean groan:
“Look at the vellum, Arthur,” Logan said softly:
“Look at line four of the master title patent.”
Chief Justice Arthur Vance’s face calcified into an apocalyptic, curdled shade of un-cured limestone.
His pupils dilated until the slate-gray of his irises was swallowed completely by black.
His large, manicured hands, flat on the granite table, began to tremble with that spastic, involuntary tremor of an embezzler whose vault door has just been blown off its hinges by an artillery shell:
*tick-tick-tick-tick.*
“The… the Mercer Charter…?”
Arthur gasped, his voice cracking into that thin, pathetic squeak:
“Roland…
Roland swore to me that the mechanic was completely broken!
That you were an ordinary, exhausted veteran who could be dropped on your knees by a young kickboxer!”
“Logan was the Commander of Special Operations Reconnaissance and the master fiduciary auditor who uncovered your entire logistics theft twelve years ago, Arthur,” Vice Admiral David Mercer spoke from behind our shoulders.
His voice was sixty decibels of mountain quarry explosive:
“He audited your enterprise while Travis was bragging about his state championships.”
“He protected this nation’s bedrock while your family was plotting to bore into Conduit Ten from behind an abandoned timber mill.”
Admiral Mercer slammed his service portfolio onto the granite table:
KABOOOOM.
The impact pulverized a corner of the black stone into white powder, sending hairline fractures through the Swiss banking contracts:
“Under Section Fourteen-B of the Mercer Admiralty Founding Indenture of Nineteen-Forty-Four…”
Judge Eleanor Mercer stepped forward, opening her leather portfolio, her voice cutting through the vault:
“…the chief certifying surveyor who established the sovereign defense conduits of the Atlantic and Northwest command sectors… retains an un-divided, un-alienable fifty-one percent legal equity in the property in perpetuity.”
“Transferable to his surviving lineal heirs ab initio upon the statutory anniversary.”
Judge Mercer leaned forward, resting her fists on the granite table:
“Colonel Logan Arthur Mercer is the sole surviving direct biological grandson of Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior.”
“Which means under federal maritime chancery law…”
Judge Mercer pointed her cane toward me:
“…Colonel Logan Mercer is the registered, sovereign fee-simple owner of Conduit Ten.”
“And under Section Nine of the Rivers and Harbors Act of Eighteen-Ninety-Nine…”
