Chapter 114 - The Eleventh Minute of Protocol Zero
The heavy iron ventilation louvers in the ceiling slammed shut with the force of guillotine blades. Instantly, pressurized river water began to geyser through the drainage grates in the floor, churning up from the Limmat at thousands of gallons per minute, freezing cold and black with silt.
"What did you do?!" Julian roared, momentarily lowering his weapon as the torrent of icy water slammed into his boots, nearly knocking him off balance.
"The blue folder, Julian!" I shouted over the thunder of the deluge, lunging forward with every ounce of strength remaining in my body. "You never read page forty-four! Eleanor’s final directive wasn't an inheritance—it was a scuttle protocol!"
I collided with Julian, driving my shoulder into his ribs. The pistol in his hand discharged with a blinding flash, the bullet ricocheting harmlessly off the reinforced concrete ceiling before splashing into the rising water. We crashed into the churning current, fighting like beasts in the dark as the freezing river rose toward our waists in seconds.
Clara, dragging herself through the rising torrent despite her wounded arm, lunged for Maya, pulling the girl up onto the top of the massive steel server rack, out of the freezing current.
Julian broke my grip, his face twisted in homicidal rage, his fingers closing around my throat beneath the icy water. "If I drown here, you die with me!" he choked out, forcing my head down into the freezing flood.
I clawed at his eyes, my lungs burning, the icy blackness of the Limmat swallowing my vision. The water was already at our shoulders; the servers were popping and short-circuiting in brilliant explosions of blue sparks, filling the chamber with the stench of boiling ozone.
Suddenly, a massive, concussive crash shook the vault door.
The heavy iron door that Clara had barred from the inside buckled inward with a terrifying screech. A pneumatic cutting ram punched clean through the center seam of the steel, followed by the blinding beam of high-intensity tactical spotlights.
Through the breach came three figures in full diving rebreathers and dark, unmarked maritime tactical gear. But they didn't fire at us.
The lead diver leveled an underwater stun spear directly at Julian’s back, firing a high-voltage dart that seized his entire muscular system in an instantaneous, violent convulsion. Julian’s grip on my throat went completely slack, and he was swept backward by the churning torrent, his paralyzed body pinned against the intake grate of the drain.
A gloved hand reached down into the freezing water, hauling me up by the collar of my coat onto the platform of the server rack beside Maya and Clara.
I coughed violently, vomiting river water, my vision swimming as I looked up at our rescuer.
The lead operative pulled off his rebreather mask, revealing a face lined with deep scars, soaked in sweat and freezing water, but carrying an unmistakable, cold authority. It wasn't Marcus. It wasn't cantonal police.
It was an older woman—her silver hair cropped close, her eyes possessing the exact same piercing gray hue as Eleanor’s.
"Katherine," the woman said, her voice cutting through the wail of the sirens and the roar of the flooding vault. "You did well to trigger the siphon. But Julian was never working alone. The people who bought your father’s soul forty years ago are already waiting at the mouth of the river."
The woman turned her gaze to Maya, who was shivering violently in my arms, clutching the terminal as the water reached the base of the servers.
"My name is Marianne Vance," the woman said, extending a hand bearing an identical signet ring. "I am your grandmother's sister. And we have exactly forty-five seconds to abandon this vault before the Consortium detonates the foundation of the Grossmünster above our heads."
Before I could speak, before Maya could utter a single word, the concrete ceiling above us groaned with the sound of thousands of tons of historical masonry beginning to fracture under an immense, structural collapse—and the terminal in Maya’s hands flashed with a final, unread transmission from a location that should have been impossible:
*INCOMING TRANSMISSION: SIBERIAN VAULT COMPLEX NINE.*
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*AUTHENTICATION: ARTHUR VANCE II.*
*MESSAGE: 'THE FATHER YOU BURIED TODAY WAS A DOUBLE.'*
