CHAPTER 5: 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.
Evelyn walked beside me, her steps synchronized with mine.
Barnaby walked on our flank, his amber eyes locked onto Arthur Vance.
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 set Clara down gently beside her sister, reached inside my tweed jacket, pulled out the thick, faded blue vellum envelope containing the original 1944 Mercer-Vance 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,” I said softly:
“Look at the signature on line four.”
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 blue envelope…” Arthur gasped, his voice cracking into that thin, pathetic squeak:
“Eleanor… Eleanor swore to me that the children were disowned! That you had zero knowledge of their existence!”
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“Eleanor was blinded by her own sociopathic vanity, Arthur,” Vice Admiral David Mercer spoke from behind our shoulders.
His voice had no brotherly affection.
It was sixty decibels of mountain quarry explosive:
“Eleanor was too busy calculating her carried equity to notice that an honest man doesn’t abandon his blood. Marcus recognized his daughters across thirty yards of concourse.”
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-Vance 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 command sector… retains an un-divided, un-alienable fifty-one percent legal equity in the property in perpetuity.”
“Transferable to his surviving lineal heirs ab initio.”
Judge Mercer leaned forward, resting her fists on the granite table:
“Marcus Arthur Vance is the sole surviving direct lineal custodian of Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Vance Senior.”
“Which means under federal maritime chancery law…”
Judge Mercer pointed her cane toward Clara and Eleanor:
“…Clara Marie Vance and Eleanor Marie Vance are the registered, sovereign lineal custodians of Conduit Ten.”
“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 owners.”
Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance slowly, agonizingly rose from his leather executive chair.
He stood six feet three inches tall, his black judicial robe hanging from his broad shoulders as if his skeleton had just been liquefied by high-pressure steam.
His silver hair was disheveled; his eyes were wild, burning with an unholy, volcanic fury that stripped away forty years of aristocratic supremacy:
“It doesn’t matter what an antique codicil says, Eleanor!” Arthur roared, his voice shaking the acoustic baffles of the vault:
“I am the Chief Justice of the United States!”
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“Under Article Three of the United States Constitution, the judicial power of the United States is vested exclusively in this Court!”
“No commercial hotelier, no naval admiral, and no five-year-old bastards have the statutory authority to question an executive order countersigned by this bench!”
Arthur Vance lunged across the granite table, his manicured hands hooked into claws aimed directly at Clara’s collar:
“I will have the United States Marshals Service purged!”
“I will have the Department of Defense sealed under Title Fifty Executive Secrecy!”
“And as for those two little vagrants, Marcus…?”
Arthur bared his teeth in an ugly, dying sneer:
“…I will have the state child welfare agency declare them non-persons before the morning recess!”
