Chapter 102 - The Iron Shroud over Luxembourg
The detonation tore the air from my lungs. My ears rang with a high-pitched, piercing whine as I threw myself across the slick marble floor, grabbing Julian by his coat collar and dragging him down behind the reinforced steel stanchions of the executive desk.
Through the searing white haze, Genevieve was already dragging herself toward the service elevator behind the bookshelf, leaving a thick, glistening smear of crimson across the floorboards. Despite the catastrophic wound in her shoulder, her face was contorted into a mask of pure, vicious resolve. She did not look back at us. She reached into her pocket with her uninjured left hand, pulled an encrypted transponder key, and slammed it into the elevator call terminal.
"Extraction team, mobilize," a mechanical voice barked through the private intercom channel as the steel doors slid open. "Asset secured. Scorched earth protocol initiated for sector four."
"Eleanor, get up!" Julian choked out, coughing against the acrid chemical smoke filling the room. He grabbed my wrist, pulling me toward the rear fire exit. "The building’s automated suppression system isn't going to trigger—they’ve bypassed the main grid. They’re collapsing the floor!"
Down below, the city of Luxembourg had plunged into a blackout. The streetlamps along the Boulevard Royal flickered twice and died, plunging the financial district into pitch blackness broken only by the strobing blue-and-red emergency beacons of distant police cruisers that were entirely powerless to breach the mercenary perimeter.
We burst through the heavy steel fire door into the concrete stairwell just as a deafening thud echoed from the floor above us. The structural charges had been detonated. Dust, pulverized concrete, and shards of structural rebar rained down through the vertical shaft as we scrambled down the spiraling stairs.
"Who fired that sniper shot?" Julian gasped as we hit the landing of the third subterranean level, where the building connected to the ancient underground casemates of the old fortress. "If the Architects of the Eclipse wanted us dead, why take out Genevieve?"
"They didn't," I said, catching my breath in the cold, damp dark of the limestone tunnel. I checked the small holographic interface on my wrist comm—the secondary failsafe my father had embedded in my titanium watch casing thirty years ago. "The trajectory didn't come from the ground team. The round was a NATO-standard .338 Lapua Magnum. It came from an old Whitaker perimeter beacon."
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Julian stopped in the subterranean gloom, his eyes wide in the faint green illumination of the emergency exit signs. "Your father...?"
"My father is dead," I answered coldly. "But his executioners aren't the only ones who kept a private army on retainer. Victoria Huber thought she was playing chess with pawns, but she was just the bait. Genevieve was the hand that moved her. But whoever just took out Genevieve's shoulder... is hunting both of them."
