*clink.*
Claire shrieked into the steel frame, her emerald silk dress tearing along the seams, her tears mixing with the concrete dust on the floor:
“DANIEL! TELL THEM! I AM YOUR WIFE! YOU CANNOT PUT ME IN LEAVENWORTH IRONS IN FRONT OF MILITARY OPERATORS!”
CLICK-CLACK.
The two federal marshals hauled Arthur Sterling-Vance and Claire Collins to their feet by their armpits, marching them out of the vault in waist-chains and leg-irons toward the service freight elevators:
*SCREEECH.*
Behind them were marched the three Swiss factoring litigators who had been intercepted in their chase sedans outside the building, their designer Italian loafers dragging through the pulverized concrete, leaving long, jagged, gray streaks across the floorboards as they were hauled toward the waiting tactical transport vans:
*CRASH-ROAR-PANT.*
The heavy double blast doors of the vault closed behind them with an authoritative, airtight, pneumatic THUD.
The subterranean archive returned to absolute, ringing silence.
The digital countdown above the master analog console read: `23:59:14`.
Admiral David Mercer looked at Captain Garrett Stone and me:
“The deadline closes in forty-six seconds, Daniel,” Uncle David said softly:
“Let us go secure the bedrock.”
23:59:30 EST.
Beneath the records archive of Whitaker Construction, accessible through a concealed, circular hydraulic titanium airlock located eighty feet beneath the foundation stones, lay the master western intake of Conduit Ten: **Valve Station Ten // Ohio River Fall Line Command Aperture**.
The chamber was circular, forty feet in diameter, constructed of pre-Cambrian crystalline schist blocks reinforced with hand-poured naval titanium plating. It smelled of ozone, eighty-year-old cedar preservation oil, and the dry, pure chill of an un-violated mountain redoubt.
Down the center of the chamber, illuminated by the continuous amber glow of independent tritium emergency lamps, sat forty-eight massive titanium transit cylinders bolted to the bedrock.
Inside each cylinder, sealed in pressurized nitrogen, rested the mechanical, analog brass code-drums and mechanical target-release ciphers for the nuclear deterrent of the United States.
