CHAPTER 6: THE AUDIT IN GERMAN
Lukas Vance backed up two paces, his bespoke tuxedo jacket catching on the edge of the dining table, his pupils dilated until the blue of his irises was swallowed completely by black:
*k-k-k.*
“Evelyn…?” Lukas wheezed, his velvet corporate voice finally reduced to a paper-thin rasp from the bottom of an open grave:
“Evelyn, darling… what… what is this?! Why are there armed federal troops in the Palmer House?! Who are these men?!”
I did not stop until I was two feet from his face.
I looked at him.
I looked at his manicured jawline.
I looked at his mother, Ingrid, whose pearls were rattling against her breastbone like dry teeth in a jar.
Then, slowly, deliberately, with a crisp, flawless Hanoverian pronunciation that cut through the dead ballroom with forty decibels of pure, unyielding polar diamond…
I spoke:
*”Guten Abend, Lukas.”*
Good evening, Lukas.
*”Glaubtest du wirklich, dass ich kein Deutsch verstehe?”*
Did you truly believe I didn’t understand German?
Lukas’s face didn’t merely pale; it underwent an apocalyptic, curdled calcification, turning the exact, sickly hue of industrial lard:
*tick-tick-tick-tick.*
His knees gave a microscopic, violent buckle. His hands flew to his throat as if an eighty-pound iron cable had just been tightened around his windpipe:
“You… you speak German…?” Lukas stammered, the words whistling through his teeth:
“Every single word, Lukas,” I answered in English, every syllable dropping like an iron depth-charge into fifty fathoms of dark water:
“I understood you when you told your mother that I would cry at first, but that I would fall in love with the baby.”
“I understood you when you laughed about my six years of infertility.”
“And I understood you when your mother said you would make me raise the child.”
I took one slow, deliberate step closer:
“Except it isn’t Sophia’s child, is it, Lukas?”
Ingrid Vance let out a sharp, suffocated shriek, her hand flying to her mouth:
*“NEIN!”*
“Sophia Weber is currently secured in the trauma pavilion at Northwestern Memorial Hospital under the armed protection of the United States Marine Corps,” I revealed, the words echoing off the gilded proscenium:
“The induction cocktail has been neutralized.”
“Dr. Hans von Berg was arrested at O’Hare International Airport forty minutes ago trying to board a Swissair flight to Zurich.”
“The liquid nitrogen transport logs from Munich have been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“And the genetic sequencing panel completed thirty minutes ago confirmed that the child in her womb… is my biological son.”
Lukas Vance’s skeleton seemed to liquefy.
He collapsed backward onto the dining table, his elbow knocking over an ice bucket, cold water and champagne cubes splashing across his silk lapels:
*thump.*
“Evelyn… Evelyn, please!” Lukas sobbed, his voice cracking into that wet, pathetic, sniveling rattle of an emperor whose kingdom had just been melted down into scrap iron before the cameras of the world:
“It was my mother! She planned it! She told me we had to produce an heir to keep the Mercer charter from reverting to the Navy! I did it for us! I wanted us to have a family!”
“You didn’t do it for us, Lukas,” Vice Admiral David Mercer spoke from behind my shoulder.
His voice was sixty decibels of mountain quarry explosive:
“Under Section Fourteen-B of the **Mercer Founding Indenture of Nineteen-Forty-Four**…”
The Admiral slammed his service portfolio onto the table:
KABOOOOM.
The impact pulverized a china platter into white dust, sending hairline fractures through the Swiss banking briefs:
“ANY ASSET, ANY DIVERTED CONTRACT, AND ANY SEDITIOUS EQUITY FUNNELED THROUGH THE VALKYRIE LIQUIDITY TRUST BY ANY MARITAL SPOUSE… REVERTS IN ABSOLUTE FEE SIMPLE UNTO THE SOLE SURVIVING DIRECT LINEAL HEIR OF ARTHUR MERCER SENIOR.”
“Unto Evelyn Eleanor Mercer-Vance.”
“And her unborn biological son.”
The Admiral bared his teeth in a cold, terrifying line of white bone:
“You didn’t steal sixty billion dollars from the Mercer defense trust tonight, Lukas.”
“You spent twelve years pouring sixty billion dollars of your mother’s personal offshore criminal reserves… straight into Evelyn’s sovereign spendthrift escrow.”
