Chapter 77 - The Gathering at Hanscom
By three in the morning, the Black Hawk touched down once more on the wet tarmac at Hanscom Field.
Medical teams rushed forward with gurneys to whisk Jason toward the trauma unit under heavy armed escort. As they wheeled him past, he reached out a trembling, pale hand, catching the edge of my sleeve one last time.
"Brian," he croaked, his eyes red-rimmed and filled with a broken, pathetic humility. "Tell Emily... tell her I didn't know what she was. I thought you had hired an actress. I thought you were lying to save face. I was so jealous of you... I was so damn jealous of how she looked at you."
I looked at him—this man who had spent his entire existence measuring his self-worth against the misery he could inflict on me.
"Rest, Jason," I said quietly. "Your life as the Golden Boy is over. The only thing you have left to salvage is the truth."
I turned away and walked back toward the VIP terminal.
The moment I pushed through the double doors, Emily was there. She didn't say a word. She set Leo safely into the secured travel bassinet watched over by two stone-faced federal agents, crossed the room in three strides, and threw her arms around my neck.
Her skin was warm, smelling of lavender and fresh rain. I buried my face in her hair, feeling the tight, agonizing tension of the past twelve hours begin to crack inside my ribcage.
"You saved him," she whispered against my ear.
"I saved the witness," I corrected softly, holding her tight against me. "And I saved the family name from being buried in ocean slime."
"He told you where Amanda is?" Emily asked, pulling back just far enough to search my face with her sharp, brilliant eyes.
"Blackwood Sound," I replied. "The ancestral summer estate in Maine. She's raiding Marcus's deep vault before running for the Gulfstream at Sanford."
Harris strode into the room, tossing a set of tactical satellite maps onto the conference table. His sidearm was re-holstered, but his demeanor was that of a man preparing for open warfare.
"We just intercepted an encrypted comm from the Sanford tower," Harris said, stabbing a thick finger against the map of the Maine coastline. "A private security detail of twelve former eastern-bloc mercenaries arrived at Blackwood Sound twenty minutes ago in three armored Suburbans. Amanda isn't just raiding a vault, Harrington. She’s setting up a defensive perimeter. She knows we’re coming."
"Then we don't give her time to fortify," Emily said coldly, stepping beside me and looking down at the satellite photographs of the sprawling, stone-clad compound overlooking the rocky cliffs of Maine. "Marcus designed that house in the seventies. Brian, didn't you tell me once about the storm drainage tunnels running from the private dock into the boiler room?"
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I looked at my wife, a slow, grim smile cutting across my face for the first time that night. "You never forget an architectural blueprint, do you?"
"I don't forget anything that might protect my husband and my son," Emily said softly, her fingers lacing firmly through mine.
