Chapter 102 - The Phantom Consortium
We sprinted through the darkness, the water spraying around our knees, the air growing thicker with every yard. Behind us, the sharp beam of a high-intensity weapon light pierced the murk of the tunnel, refracting through the spray of our footsteps.
"Halt!" a voice barked in German, followed instantly by the sharp *thwack-thwack* of suppressed rounds striking the stone arches above our heads. Shards of ancient mortar rained down onto our hair and shoulders.
Marcus spun around, dropping to one knee in the freezing water. He fired four deliberate rounds back into the tunnel to buy us time. A sharp grunt echoed from the darkness—one of the pursuers went down, his weapon splashing into the water.
"Keep moving!" Marcus yelled, racking his slide. "I'm down to my last magazine!"
We rounded a curve in the aqueduct and slammed against the heavy wrought-iron gate Clara had described. Beyond the rusted bars, a stone spiral staircase led upward into the dry darkness of the Fraumünster undercroft. The gate was held shut by a massive, oxidized iron padlock the size of a dinner plate.
"Maya, the third card," Clara demanded, pulling a small set of horological picks from her inner coat pocket. "I need the high-tensile brass strip inside the card’s laminate!"
Maya didn't hesitate. She peeled the edge of the cream-colored card, extracting a sliver of flexible, tempered brass that Eleanor had embedded inside the parchment fifty years ago. Clara jammed the brass strip into the keyway alongside her pick, her fingers moving with miraculous speed, guided only by the tactile feedback of the tumbler pins.
*Click.*
*Click-click.*
A heavy thud resounded within the iron casing. Clara shoved the gate outward. It groaned on its ancient hinges, swinging open just wide enough for us to squeeze through.
"Marcus, now!" I screamed.
Marcus fired his final two rounds, scrambled through the opening, and slammed the gate shut behind him. He threw an iron bar across the external catch just as a burst of automatic fire shredded the wooden casing of the tunnel entrance behind us, the rounds ricocheting harmlessly off the heavy wrought iron.
We collapsed onto the dry stone floor of the undercroft, panting, our clothes soaked through with freezing river water. Above us, the faint, resonant hum of an organ pipe vibrated through the stone floor—the Fraumünster choir rehearsing for the midnight service.
May you like
Arthur slumped against a tomb effigy of an eleventh-century abbess, his face gray as parchment. He looked up at Maya, his breath rattling in his lungs.
"You have Eleanor’s hands," he whispered, a strange, hollow wonder in his voice. "She could open any lock in Zurich with a strip of clock brass. She always said... the only prison a Vance couldn't escape was the one they built out of their own greed."
