He hadn’t been trying to teach me a lesson.
He had been trying to cause a severe concussion.
He had been trying to erase my short-term memory before I could show that device to my brother in the parking lot.
“Derek…”
I whispered, the realization hitting me like a cold wave of sea water: “You… you were trying to kill me.”
Derek didn’t look at me.
He curled tighter into a ball, his fingers clawing at the vinyl, his face buried in the seam of the mat.
Vance Miller let out a wild, ragged, whistling gasp:
“No… no, Mercer, listen to me!
I was just the tenant!
Harold Vance approached me three years ago!
He offered me this lease rent-free!
He told me the government abandoned those Cold War bunkers in the nineties!
He told me the equipment was just scrap iron!”
“The equipment is not scrap iron, Vance,” Cole answered softly.
He raised his left wrist:
*BEEP.*
A miniature, unpolished bronze chronometer strapped beneath his watchband gave a single, high-frequency encrypted pulse:
*KABOOOOM.*
The heavy, four-inch-thick steel-framed commercial glass doors at the front of Apex Grappling did not shatter.
They disintegrated.
Two eighty-pound linear hydraulic tactical breaching rams struck the frame simultaneously, shearing the heavy deadbolts clean out of the concrete jambs with an explosive, concussive roar that blew the vinyl window advertisements into ten thousand flying strips of red and black plastic:
*CRASH-ROAR-SHATTER.*
