“Derek took the bait.”
“Vance Miller provided the mats.”
“They bragged that in a real fight, nobody stops.”
“And the moment Derek tightened his forearm around Sarah’s throat…”
Cole bared his teeth in a cold, terrifying line of white bone:
“…your family triggered the self-executing forfeiture clause of Article Three, Section Three of the United States Constitution.”
“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 quiet soldier whose sister your nephew choked.”
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, un-coordinated 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 Cole 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.”
“I defend with honest steel.”
“And around here…”
Cole reached out with his hand, picking up his antique gold Montblanc pen from the table, and snapped the gold nib in half across the granite:
CRACK.
“…the soldier… always balances the ledger down to the absolute last cent.”
CHAPTER 6: THE RECKONING IN S-412
Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance let out an un-human, animalistic shriek from the bottom of his lungs:
“NOOOOOOOOOOO!”
The seventy-six-year-old titan of American law did not look like a statesman now.
He lunged across the granite table, his black silk robe tearing at the shoulder seams, his manicured hands hooked into claws aimed directly at Cole’s face:
“YOU PENNILESS WARRIOR!
I AM THE CHIEF JUSTICE!
I AM THE MASTER OF THIS CAPITOL!”
CLACK.
Two SOG tactical operators did not draw their sidearms.
The two-hundred-and-twenty-pound 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.
His cheek struck the granite, the broken pieces of his gold pen snapping beneath his chest, his bespoke silk tie soaked in the spilled coffee:
SNAP-SNAP.
A pair of heavy-duty, double-locking, high-security stainless-steel military transport restraints ratcheted around the wrists of the Chief Justice of the United States with two sharp, definitive snaps that sounded like twin rifle shots across the silent bunker:
SNAP.
A second set of chains clamped around his ankles—the identical stainless-steel irons used for capital traitors at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.
Beside him, two federal marshals pinned his private clerk against the wall, heavy transport irons slamming shut around his wrists:
SNAP-CLINK.
Arthur Vance wept into the stone, blood and tears pooling around his split lower lip:
“Cole…
Eleanor… please!
Think of the Vance family name!
Think of the Court!
We built this country together!
You can’t let them take the Chief Justice to a military prison in chains!”
Cole walked to the head of the table.
He stood beside where he lay pinned.
He did not strike his cheek.
He did not raise his voice.
He reached into his uniform pocket, pulled out the acoustic listening transceiver Sarah had recovered from the locker room behind the gym bench forty-eight hours ago:
SLIP.
Cole laid the small black device flat across the nape of Arthur Vance’s silver neck:
TINK.
