Chapter 73 - The Ghost of Halifax
Julian lunged through the smoke, his black tactical uniform shredded at the sleeves, blood trickling from a shallow cut on his temple. His weapon was up, trained directly between Alistair Whitaker’s eyes.
"Don't move," Julian commanded, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "One muscle, Alistair, and I paint this bulkhead with whatever soul you have left."
My father did not raise his hands. He lay half-propped against the edge of the shattered desk, wiping a smear of blood from his lip, and began to laugh. The sound was thin, reedy, and chillingly devoid of fear.
"Shoot me, Julian," Alistair wheezed, his chest heaving under his tailored wool vest. "Pull the trigger. See what happens to the ballast controls. See what happens to the coordinates locked into the primary guidance array. You think you're rescuing the Queen of Manhattan? You're piloting a steel coffin straight into the jaws of the Newfoundland Trench."
Julian didn't lower the gun, but his eyes flicked toward me. "Eleanor. We have less than four minutes. An unidentified submarine wolfpack has boxed us in from the eastern sector. They aren't firing torpedoes to kill—they're using localized acoustic charges to herd us toward a trench shelf."
"The coordinates from Halifax," I said, stepping over the smoking debris of the bulkhead. My heart was pounding, but my mind was operating with the clarity of a diamond edge. "The broadcast wasn't coming from a crash site on land. It’s an underwater installation."
Alistair leaned his head back against the steel paneling, his laughter subsiding into a venomous sneer. "Very good, my dear. Thirty years ago, Flight 416 didn't plunge into the Atlantic because of mechanical failure. It dropped forty miles off the coast of Halifax into an acoustic blind spot created by the Royal Canadian Navy during the height of the Cold War. The wreckage that washed ashore was a hollowed-out fuselage bought from an aircraft graveyard in Arizona."
"And the bodies?" Julian asked, his voice shaking with suppressed rage. "The two hundred and eighteen passengers on that manifest?"
"Collateral," Alistair replied without a shred of remorse. "The price of vanishing completely from the surface ledger. The Conclave built the Obsidian Basin—an automated subterranean fortress carved five hundred feet into the granite bedrock beneath the seabed. That is the Eighth Vault. It is where the real architects sit. They have watched you, Eleanor. They watched you crush the Vances. They allowed you to bankrupt Arthur Sterling. Why? Because you pruned the dead wood. You eliminated the weak, the greedy, the incompetent."
May you like
He pointed a shaking, blood-stained finger at me.
"You think you fought your way to the top of the empire out of your own sheer will? You were an audition, Eleanor. And you passed with flying colors. Now, they are calling the sovereign home."
