Chapter 46 - Blood on the Valve Wheel
The heavy clatter of a bolt cycling echoed sharply through the concrete hall.
I didn't turn around. I kept the barrel of the Glock pointed directly at the floor, but my thumb clicked the thumb safety into the firing position.
"You're not State Police Internal Affairs," I said quietly, the coldness in my voice surprising even myself. "You were never sent by the magistrate. You were the buyer."
Harris stayed completely still on the wooden spool. The look of exhausted pain on his face vanished, replaced by the calculating, unblinking mask of a professional operative who had been running an operation for far longer than twenty-four hours.
"Vance was an idiot," Harris said, his voice flat, devoid of the earlier urgency. "He panicked the moment you walked into the country club with your mother’s ring on your finger. He knew the biometric chip wasn't in your wrist—it was inside the heirloom setting of that sapphire. When he slammed that cake into your face, he wasn't trying to humiliate you, Rachel. He was trying to tear the ring off your finger with the serrated edge of an industrial cake lifter."
"And you let him," I replied. "You let him stage the scene, you let him lock himself in the garage, and you staged the raid so you could recover the drives before Thomas could wipe them."
"Forty million dollars isn't a trust fund, Rachel. It’s an advance payment for the infrastructure mapping Vance compiled over eight years," Harris said, slowly sliding his hand toward his tactical belt. "Thomas thought he was selling to a foreign consortium. He didn't know I was brokering the deal on both ends. Now give me the drive, and I’ll ensure your name disappears from the federal indictment."
A sudden sound shattered the standoff: a dull, metallic clang from the steel catwalk forty feet above our heads.
May you like
Before Harris could react, a figure dropped from the shadows of the overhead gantry. The impact was deafening as a pair of heavy tactical boots struck Harris directly in the chest, driving him backward off the wooden spool and pinning him against the concrete base of the turbine.
Standing over him, his face covered in dried mud, soot, and the grotesque remains of yellow cake frosting still matted into his hairline, was Vance.
