It carried forty decibels of compressed, sub-zero polar diamond that made the concrete walls of the vault hum:
“That an ordinary handyman wouldn’t know how to defend his home.”
“Claire told her father that I was an illiterate ditch-digger.”
I raised the four-inch solid-titanium key in my hand:
“You were right about one thing, Arthur.”
“I dig ditches.”
“And tonight… I am burying your entire seventy-billion-dollar dynasty.”
The heavy leather briefcase clutched in Former Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance’s gloved hand trembled with such violent, spastic force that the brass latches clicked rhythmically against the steel lockplates:
*tink-tink-tink.*
The silence that clamped down over the subterranean records vault was so dense, so absolute, that the rhythmic hum of the high-speed document scanner sounded like a detonator counting down inside an armored vault.
Arthur Sterling-Vance did not maintain his aristocratic composure.
His eighty-year-old frame gave a violent, involuntary shudder, his cultured, appellate baritone cracking into an ugly, paper-thin whistle:
“Daniel… Mercer…?! You… you are Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer’s surviving grandson?!”
Arthur Vance took an involuntary, shuffling step backward, his wingtips sliding across the shattered fragments of Claire’s tablet:
*crunch-crunch.*
“Claire!” Arthur snarled, his voice rising in panicked, feral fury:
“You told me your husband was an uneducated blue-collar laborer from Kentucky! You told me he owned a bankrupt residential repair franchise with three service vans!”
Claire stood frozen against the industrial steel filing shelves, her emerald silk cocktail dress clashing grotesquely against the utilitarian concrete walls. Her hands clawed frantically at her twenty-four-thousand-dollar diamond bracelet, her chest heaving in rapid, shallow hitches:
“He IS a handyman, Arthur!” Claire shrieked, her voice pitching into hysterical disbelief:
“I’ve lived with him for eight years! He drives a rusted Ford F-250! He wears Carhartt jackets with holes in the sleeves! He took seventy-five dollars a week from our joint checking account to buy drill bits! Daniel… what kind of sick, psychotic game are you playing?!”
