Arthur Sterling-Vance let out a dry, rattling chuckle that sounded like autumn leaves scraping over a tombstone:
“Whitaker Construction’s regional business is irrelevant pocket change, my dear Claire,” Arthur Vance whispered, tapping the vellum charter with his gold fountain pen:
“Sixteen point nine million dollars is a drop in the ocean. The real prize is what Daniel’s maternal grandfather, **Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior**, bored beneath North America eighty years ago!”
The former Chief Justice leaned closer to the scanner:
“**Conduit Ten.** Forty miles of subterranean pre-Cambrian crystalline schist running eighty feet beneath this continent, housing forty-eight solid-titanium transit cylinders containing the physical, analog mechanical targeting release matrices for our nation’s strategic nuclear deterrent!”
Arthur Vance’s eyes burned with feral, seventy-billion-dollar greed:
“Under Section Fourteen-B of the 1944 Charter, the statutory eighty-year spendthrift restriction on Parcel Ten expires at midnight tonight, October twenty-first!”
“If Daniel holds that title past zero-hundred hours, the master fee-simple deed locks irrevocably into his sole lineal custody forever, and **The Valkyrie Trust in Zurich** will be forced into an immediate sixty-million-dollar factoring default!”
“But with this scanned analog cipher… and your signed divorce petition alleging financial abandonment… we will register an adverse default quitclaim deed on the federal chancery docket in Switzerland before the clock strikes twelve!”
Claire smiled—that same cold, empty smile she had given me before handing me the divorce papers in her parents’ dining room:
“And what happens to Daniel and Sophie?”
“Daniel will spend the next thirty years at Fort Leavenworth facing a military tribunal for treasonous espionage,” Arthur Vance replied with icy finality:
“And that little girl Sophie can freeze in an indigent ward where she belongs.”
I did not scream.
I did not smash the boardroom monitor.
I reached into the inner breast pocket of my Carhartt work jacket, pulling out a hardened, thermal-nuclear-shielded military satellite transceiver unit operating on an independent, encrypted carrier wave: the **Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Admiralty Frequency**.
