Chapter 24 - A House Built on Graves
Through the monitor, the scene in the living room upstairs looked like a silent film suddenly thrown into chaotic reverse.
The massive white-oak floorboards beneath the feet of the four lead mercenaries suddenly gave way. It wasn't an explosion; it was the precision release of two heavy steel drop-pins that held the center beam of the living room suspended over a thirty-foot vertical shaft.
The floor collapsed in a clean V-shape. The four mercenaries vanished into the pitch-black void below, their screams swallowed by the roar of falling timbers and plaster dust.
On the porch camera, Eleanor stumbled back against her two remaining bodyguards, her face contorting from icy composure to blind panic. The tablet slipped from her fingers, shattering on the flagstones.
"Arthur!" Her voice screamed through the outdoor audio pickup, distorted by the screeching wind and rain. "Arthur, you bastard! I know you're down there! You can't bury this! The consortium has already authorized a perimeter strike! In fifteen minutes, this entire mountain will be leveled by an air strike from Langley!"
Arthur pressed a button on the intercom console. His voice boomed out through hidden loudspeakers concealed in the eaves of the house and the stone wells of the courtyard.
"Langley doesn't own those jets, Eleanor," Arthur said, his tone chillingly polite. "And the men flying them don't take orders from a disgraced logistics coordinator’s daughter. You should have checked the tail numbers on the gunships that landed ten minutes ago."
Eleanor froze. Her head snapped toward the sky.
The three black Sikorsky helicopters were still hovering, their searchlights pinning her and her remaining bodyguards in an overlapping cage of blinding light. The miniguns mounted on their lateral pylons rotated downward with a synchronized, mechanical hum.
"You brought mercenaries to a military installation, Eleanor," Arthur continued over the loudspeaker. "That makes you an unlawful combatant on sovereign federal defense property. Under the Vance Protocol of 1974, which your father had the misfortune of signing into law, I am authorized to use any and all means to neutralize the threat."
Eleanor took two steps back toward the Escalade, but one of her own bodyguards suddenly spun around, drew his sidearm, and aimed it directly at the back of her head.
The man reached up with his left hand, peeled off his tactical balaclava, and looked directly into the porch camera.
"Target secured, Colonel Vance," the mercenary said, his voice coming through the bunker radio loud and clear. "Contract inverted. Escrow funds transferred from her Swiss holding to the defense recovery pool."
Arthur released the microphone switch and looked at me with an unreadable expression.
May you like
"Always pay the opposition’s security team double what they were promised," Arthur said matter-of-factly. "It saves on ammunition."
***
