Arthur Sterling-Vance suddenly lunged toward the open blast door, clutching the leather briefcase to his chest, his eyes burning with trapped, cornered madness:
“Stand aside, Daniel!” Arthur snarled, pulling a sleek, silver-plated four-shot derringer from his cashmere pocket:
“I don’t care about your regional construction company! The scan of the 1944 Charter has already cleared the upload buffer! The Valkyrie Trust’s factoring attorneys in Zurich are filing the adverse quitclaim on the Swiss chancery docket right now! In twelve minutes, Conduit Ten belongs to my syndicate!”
Barnaby did not wait for a verbal command.
The eighty-pound Belgian Malinois moved like a golden thunderbolt!
His massive front paws struck Arthur Sterling-Vance squarely in the chest with four hundred pounds of linear kinetic leverage:
*SLAM.*
The derringer was knocked from Arthur’s grip, skittering across the concrete floor: *clack-clatter.*
The former Chief Justice’s head bounced off the reinforced steel blast frame with a dull, sickening thud, his leather briefcase bursting open, scattering the yellowed vellum pages of the 1944 Charter across the floorboards!
Barnaby pinned Arthur Vance’s right arm to the concrete, his scarred, dark muzzle resting one half-inch from the old man’s jugular, a low, tectonic rumble vibrating through the dog’s ribcage:
*SKRRRRR.*
Arthur shrieked into the dust, his eighty-year-old frame trembling in raw, un-calibrated terror:
“CALL HIM OFF! DANIEL, CALL THE BEAST OFF! I AM THE FORMER CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES!”
Before I could answer…
From the elevator shaft behind us…
*KABOOOOM.*
The heavy steel blast doors of the private executive elevator were obliterated inward by an eighty-pound linear hydraulic tactical breaching ram!
*CRASH-ROAR-SHATTER.*
Pouring through the breach in fluid, synchronized mechanical velocity…
Dressed in sterile dark-charcoal Nomex cold-weather drysuits, Level IV boron-carbide plate carriers, and Ops-Core ballistic helmets with four-tube panoramic night-vision brackets folded onto their foreheads…
