CHAPTER 7: THE RECKONING IN S-412
Senator Julian Sterling-Vance let out an un-human, animalistic shriek from the bottom of his lungs.
The eighty-year-old titan of American defense politics did not look like a statesman now.
He lunged across the granite table, his bespoke cashmere suit tearing at the armpit seams, his manicured hands hooked into claws aimed directly at my face:
“YOU PEASANT MECHANIC’S BITCH! I AM THE SENATOR! I AM THE OWNER OF THIS EMPIRE!”
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 Senator Julian Vance by his midnight-blue lapels, spun his six-foot-two 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, his gold Montblanc 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 Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee 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, the four corporate defense raiders and two Swiss bankers scrambled away from the table in an undignified, petrified stampede, backing against the greenstone walls with their hands held over their chests, their faces bleached of all color, abandoning their encrypted tablets in a desperate scramble to clear their names from the corporate records:
CRASH-ROAR-PANT.
Julian Vance did not look back.
His head hung limp against the granite, tears and hair wax dripping from his chin onto his torn collar, weeping with the wet, pathetic, sniveling sobs of an emperor whose forty-year kingdom had just been melted down into scrap iron before the cameras of the world:
“Clara…” Julian wept into the stone, his blood pooling around his split lower lip:
“Clara, please! Think of the family name! Think of Arthur! We built this country together! You can’t let them take me to a military prison in chains!”
Uncle Arthur walked to the head of the table.
He stood beside where the Senator lay pinned.
He carried the titanium transit cylinder in his right hand.
He did not strike Julian’s cheek.
He did not raise his voice.
Uncle Arthur reached into his pocket, pulled out the two jagged pieces of the broken rattan cane that I had snapped across my knee in California, and laid them flat atop Julian Vance’s silver head:
CLATTER.
“You told Evelyn to break her across a bench, Julian,” Uncle Arthur whispered softly:
“You told her to sprinkle capsaicin into the wounds.”
Uncle Arthur leaned down until his grease-stained jaw was two inches from the Senator’s ear:
“The Vance family builds with honest steel.”
“We don’t build with canes.”
“And around here…”
A slow, radiant, permanent smile broke across Arthur Vance’s face:
“…nobody ever, ever… hurts our girl again.”
CLICK-CLACK.
The two federal marshals hauled Senator Julian Sterling-Vance to his feet by his armpits, marching him down the greenstone corridor in waist-chains and leg-irons toward the armored transport BearCats waiting on Constitution Avenue.
Behind him were marched his chief of staff and the corporate executives, their designer shoes dragging through the drywall dust on the floorboards, leaving long, jagged, gray streaks across the stone as they were hauled toward the waiting tactical vans:
SCREEECH.
The heavy four-inch blast doors of Committee Room S-412 closed behind them with an authoritative, airtight, pneumatic THUD.
The vault returned to silence.
The only sound left was the clean, cool sixty-cycle hum of the ventilation ducts and the steady, rhythmic tack… tack… tack of my grandfather’s chronometer watch on my wrist.
