Chapter 46 - The Phantom War
Thirty-six hours later, the safe house in the hills overlooking Zurich was cold, silent, and humming with military-grade servers.
Through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, the Swiss Alps stood stark against a gray, snow-laden sky. Inside, the four children were asleep on adjoining velvet sofas, wrapped in cashmere blankets, exhausted by the subterranean escape and the whirlwind transit across international borders. Alexander stood by the hearth, his coat off, clean bandages wrapped around his forearm where a flying shard of stone had cut him.
I sat at a mahogany desk covered in flat-panel monitors. The news cycle was deafening.
*GENEVA BANKING CATASTROPHE: HISTORIC SUBTERRANEAN VAULT COLLAPSES UNDER LAKE ROAD.*
*OLD WORLD TRUSTS LIQUIDATED AMID FEDERAL CORRUPTION INVESTIGATION.*
*ELEANOR VANCE AND ELDER SON CHRISTIAN WANTED FOR HIGH TREASON AND FINANCIAL TERRORISM.*
The media didn't know half of it. They reported the event as a geological failure and a banking fraud scandal, completely oblivious to the shadow war that had nearly extinguished two generations of a family in the dark.
"Christian and Eleanor escaped through the old drainage aqueduct," Alexander said, his voice quiet so as not to wake the children. "Interpol intercepted their boat on Lake Geneva, but it was empty. Christian had a helicopter waiting on a private pad in Lausanne. They’re gone."
"Where?" I asked, not looking up from the screens.
"London," Alexander replied, walking over and placing a warm mug of black coffee beside my keyboard. "Eleanor has one final sanctuary left. The original Vance ancestral manor in Mayfair, and an emergency liquidity facility held under British Crown maritime charters. She is gathering what remains of her loyalists. But she has no money left, Katherine. You cut the arteries in Geneva."
"A dying beast is the most dangerous, Alexander," I whispered, watching the flickering stock tickers of European sovereign bonds plummeting. "Eleanor won't surrender quietly in an English court. She will try to burn the global market down just to deny me the victory."
Suddenly, an encrypted notification chimed on my private monitor. A video file from an unlisted terminal in Paris had arrived, bypassing three layers of biometric firewalls.
I clicked open the file.
May you like
The screen flickered, revealing a face I almost failed to recognize.
It was Julian.
