Chapter 129 - The Interrogation of Beatrice
While Ethan’s men rigged the winch cables to the subterranean maintenance elevator, seven miles away in a private executive hangar at Geneva Airport, Count Dominic Sterling-Vance was losing his mind.
He stood behind a makeshift command desk inside a luxury jet hangar, surrounded by five private attorneys in gray three-piece suits and four armed enforcers in tactical wool coats.
Sitting on a metal folding chair in the center of the concrete floor was Sister Beatrice.
Her black habit was torn at the shoulder, her spectacles sat crooked on her nose, but her spine was as straight as an iron rod. She held her rosary beads between her wrinkled fingers, her lips moving in silent, rhythmic Latin prayer.
"Where are the Saint-Germain files, old woman?!" Dominic roared, slamming a heavy crystal tumbler onto the desk with enough force to shatter the base.
Bourbon splashed across a stack of fraudulent Swiss custody declarations.
Dominic’s tie was undone, his hair disheveled, the arrogance that had defined his entrance at the Palais de Justice completely shredded by twenty-four hours of manic, desperate terror.
"I don't know what you are shouting about, young man," Sister Beatrice replied, her voice cool and dismissive, not missing a single bead on her rosary. "At my age, loud noises simply sound like wind passing through an empty barn."
"Do not play the holy fool with me!" Dominic snarled, lunging forward, his hands slamming onto the back of her chair, bringing his face inches from her veil. "Hélène de Saint-Germain was my mistress! Those twins were conceived in my house! Arthur Vance stole them from me, and you signed the transfer papers!"
Sister Beatrice slowly opened her eyes.
She looked into Dominic’s bloodshot, manic gaze without a single flicker of fear.
"Hélène de Saint-Germain despised you, Dominic," the nun said, her voice dropping into a quiet, devastating clarity that echoed off the metal hangar walls. "She knew you were selling chemical delivery components to warlords in Africa. She told me the night she delivered those children that she would rather see her babies raised by wolves in the forest than let them spend one hour under your shadow."
Dominic raised his right hand, his fist clenched in blind, narcissistic rage. "I will burn your abbey to the ground! I will have every brick ground into dust!"
"You may burn the stone, Dominic," Sister Beatrice smiled—a serene, terrifying smile of pure spiritual immunity. "But you cannot burn the truth. Victoria Vance has the registry. Ethan Vance has your server keys. And before the sun reaches its peak today, the world will see you for what you actually are: a thief who tried to buy his soul back with stolen children."
A loud, frantic chime sounded from the command laptop on the desk.
Dominic’s chief legal counsel, Richard Sterling, leaped out of his chair, clutching his smartphone.
"Dominic! Look at the monitors!"
Dominic spun around.
On the live traffic feeds of central Geneva, the heavy steel sidewalk grates outside the French Consulate on the Rue du Rhône were violently blown upward in an explosion of sparks and shattered asphalt.
A massive black Land Rover, propelled by an industrial hydraulic winch, roared out of the subterranean service elevator directly onto the pedestrian plaza, its tires screaming against the stone, its police sirens wailing like war horns as it banked hard toward the Pont du Mont-Blanc.
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The convoy had breached the blockade.
And the digital clock on the wall read: 10:42 AM.
