Chapter 83 - Flight into the Tempest
The library in Maine dissolved into controlled chaos within seconds. Harris was already on his tactical radio, screaming priority-one override codes into the federal dispatch network, but every single channel returned a wall of harsh white noise. Arthur Sterling’s reach had not merely tapped into Portsmouth; it had severed the regional command grid.
"Satellite comms are completely scrambled," Harris yelled over the wailing coastal wind rattling the glass panes. "He’s using military-grade broad-spectrum jammers. Local state police won't even receive the distress call!"
"Then we don't wait for dispatch," I said, slamming the birth documents and Marcus’s final ledger into a weatherproof tactical pouch and strapping it to my chest. "We take the chopper on the north ridge."
"Brian, look outside!" Harris pointed through the fractured library window. The sky over the Gulf of Maine had turned into an ominous canvas of bruised purple and pitch black. A late-season nor'easter was tearing across the coast, hurling sleet against the timberline at sixty miles an hour. "No civilian or federal pilot will clear that rotor wash! It’s suicide!"
"My wife and son are behind a door being cut open with thermite," I said, stepping into his space, my voice dead and cold. "You can stay here and draft your federal report, Harris. But I am getting on that bird."
Harris looked at my face, swallowed hard, and chambered a round into his sidearm. "I’m flying with you. If Arthur Sterling is alive, the entire Department of Justice has been compromised from the top down."
Five minutes later, the twin turbines of the commandeered Sikorsky roared to life against the shrieking gale. The pilot fought the cyclic stick with white-knuckled desperation as the skids ripped free from the frozen turf, tossing us violently sideways into the driving storm.
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As the Maine coastline vanished below us into an abyss of swirling snow and black water, I gripped the armrest until the leather cracked. All my life, I had thought I was fighting a petty family grudge—a bitter, jealous brother at Thanksgiving, a vindictive mother who favored her golden boy, and a shadowy corporate rival. But the game had never been about Jason’s petty insults or Marcus’s stolen fortune.
I was the son of a ghost who commanded an empire from the shadows. And that ghost had just put a price on my family’s lives.
