Chapter 18 - The Whistleblower in Chains
Before the helicopters spun up at Fort Belvoir, an urgent, red-line encrypted transmission came through from the Alexandria Federal Detention Center.
Arthur Mercer had collapsed in his cell.
I took the secure radio headset handed to me by Miller inside the mobile command van.
"Kate?"
The voice on the other end was barely audible.
It was cracked, dry, and hollowed out by terror.
It was not the voice of the billionaire who had looked down on me in the White House ballroom.
It was the voice of an old man dying in the dark.
"Arthur," I said coldly.
"They... they poisoned the water in my block, Kate," Arthur gasped, his breathing labored and shallow.
"Eleanor’s people... no, not Eleanor... Trevor."
"Trevor did this."
"I know," I answered, looking through the rain-streaked window at the two MH-60 Black Hawks waiting on the tarmac.
"Eleanor is already dead, Arthur."
A terrible, shuddering sob echoed across the line.
"He killed her?"
"My boy killed his mother?"
"He killed her to take the Blackwood vault keys," I said, showing no mercy in my tone.
"You raised a monster, Arthur."
"You taught him that human lives were nothing more than entries on a balance sheet."
"Now he is balancing the books with your blood."
Silence stretched over the secure frequency for five long seconds, broken only by the sound of a heart monitor beeping erratically in the prison infirmary.
"Listen to me, Katherine," Arthur whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying realization.
"You have to listen to me."
"I... I never wanted this."
"I never wanted to hurt Abigail."
"I was weak, Kate."
"Thirty years ago, when the government was going to audit my first missile project, Eleanor’s father came to me."
"He told me they would destroy my family unless I signed the company over to their network."
"They owned me from the very first day."
"You let them bury my mother," I said, my voice cutting like a razor.
"You watched her work three jobs while you flew private jets."
"You don't get to play the victim now, Arthur."
"The biometric lock on the Mount Weather vault," Arthur gasped, pain tearing through his chest.
"It’s not just your handprint, Kate."
"There’s a fail-safe."
"Trevor knows it."
"If you enter the vault using your primary security clearance, it triggers a thermite purge of the hard drives."
"He wants you to chase him inside."
"He wants the purge to burn the evidence of the overseas accounts so he can walk away clean in Europe."
I paused, my eyes narrowing.
"What is the bypass code?"
Arthur coughed violently, the sound of blood rattling in his throat.
"Your birthday, Katherine," the dying man whispered.
"October fourteenth."
"Nineteen eighty-three."
"The only day in my entire life... that I was ever an honest man."
The line went dead with a high-pitched, continuous tone.
The heart monitor had flatlined.
Arthur Mercer was gone.
He had died in chains, in a concrete infirmary, surrounded by armed guards who despised him.
I slowly took off the headset and handed it back to Miller.
"Arthur is dead," I stated quietly.
Miller looked at me, waiting for a reaction.
There was no sorrow in my chest.
There were no tears.
There was only the cold, unyielding resolve of a soldier who had a mission to execute.
"Helos are ready, General," Miller reported.
"Let's move," I said.
May you like
"Let's put an end to the Mercer name once and for all."
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