Chapter 40 - The Catwalk Abyss
The celebration on the arena floor froze in an instant of raw, suffocating panic.
The stadium lights flickered violently as the master security grid engaged, dropping the cavernous velodrome into emergency amber illumination. Far above our heads, four hundred feet in the air, a metal service door burst open onto the narrow suspension catwalk that spanned the soaring timber trusses supporting the roof.
Julian Montgomery stumbled out onto the open steel grating, his coat flapping wild in the sub-zero wind howling through the exterior ventilation dampers.
"Stay here with Becker!" I ordered Mia, my voice brook no argument.
"Dad, no!" she cried, reaching for my arm, but I had already broken away, sprinting toward the maintenance elevator at the south tower with three federal agents hard on my heels.
By the time the elevator cage slammed into the upper maintenance bay, the wind was roaring like an express train through the open roof vents. Snow flurries swirled in the amber glare of the floodlights.
Montgomery had reached the center of the span—a suspended platform holding the arena's central loudspeaker cluster directly over the finish line. He was cornered. On the northern catwalk stood two Swiss snipers, their laser sights painting bright crimson dots against his chest. Behind him, I stepped onto the shuddering metal walkway, the steel flexing beneath my boots.
"It's over, Julian!" I yelled over the scream of the alpine wind. "Look down! Look at what she did! You couldn't break her! You couldn't buy her! It's finished!"
Montgomery slowly turned around.
His hair was wild, plastered with wet snow against his skull. His face was a grotesque ruin of vanity and ruined pride. Blood dripped from a cut on his temple where he had struck the doorframe. Yet when he looked at me, he didn't look defeated.
He smiled—a wide, manic, terrifying grin.
"You think this was about a factory, Miller?" Montgomery whispered, his voice carrying with unnatural clarity through the howling gale. "You think this was about an athletic cup?"
He slowly reached his hand inside his dark coat.
The snipers leveled their rifles. "Halt! Don't move!"
Montgomery ignored them. He pulled out a small, heavy black transponder with a flip-up plastic casing—not a detonator, but an encrypted satellite uplink terminal with a single green progress bar pulsing at ninety-nine percent.
"Arthur was an idiot," Montgomery laughed, the sound ragged and unhinged. "He thought I cared about the race. The race was the broadcast carrier, Thomas. Callahan’s leak? I let him have that server. It was the handshake protocol."
My blood ran colder than the alpine frost. "What did you do?"
"The global broadcast feed that just showed your daughter’s world record..." Montgomery leaned forward, his finger hovering over the glowing terminal key. "...was linked to the master telemetry network of the Trans-Alpine freight tunnels beneath our feet. Three million tons of liquid natural gas are rolling under this mountain right now on automated rail lines."
He looked directly into my eyes, his finger pressing down hard against the glass.
"If I go to prison, Thomas... we bury this entire valley together."
*Click.*
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Far beneath the wooden floor of the velodrome, deep within the bedrock of the mountain where my daughter sat waiting for her gold medal, a low, subsonic rumble began to shake the earth.
And the amber lights went completely out.
