Chapter 111 - The Vault in the Sky
The cabin door of the Falcon 900 opened above them, and a tall, slender figure stepped onto the top platform of the mobile stairs.
Victor Vance looked nothing like the sepia-toned portraits in the library. He wore a heavy, midnight-blue cashmere topcoat with a sable collar. Despite being in his late seventies, his posture was military-straight, his features aristocratic and sharp as a scalpel. He held a silver-topped walking cane in his gloved right hand.
He looked down at the snow-covered tarmac, his cold gray eyes sweeping over the kneeling Eleanor, then Claire, before finally coming to rest on Emma and the bundle wrapped inside her coat.
"You have your father’s stubbornness, Emma," Victor said, his cultured voice carrying effortlessly above the scream of the jet turbines. "He died in a damp motel room because he refused to understand how the world operates. I would hate for you to share his fate."
"Let Eleanor go," Emma shouted back, holding Lily tight. "She’s broken. She has nothing left."
Victor didn't even look at the sobbing woman on the slush. "Eleanor is an accounting error that should have been corrected forty years ago. She means nothing to me. The only thing of value on this entire airfield is the child."
A medical technician in a white biohazard suit stepped onto the aircraft platform behind Victor, carrying a stainless-steel cryo-sampling case and a digital biometric scanner.
"Bring the girl up the stairs," Victor ordered, his voice brooking no argument. "One drop of blood from her index finger onto the plate. That is all it takes. Once the Geneva repository verifies the cipher, the funds will unlock. I will transfer five hundred million dollars into an untraceable Panamanian account under your name, Emma. You and your sister will walk away wealthier than queens. Eleanor will go to prison, Julian will stay in a cage, and you will never see my face again."
Claire shifted slightly beside Emma, her hand tightening in her pocket. "And if she refuses, Victor?"
Victor smiled—a thin, terrible smile that showed too many white teeth.
"If she refuses," Victor said softly, raising his walking stick and pointing the silver tip toward the far hangar doors, "my men will take the sample from the child’s corpse, and your bodies will be dropped into the Saint Lawrence River before midnight."
The hangar floodlights suddenly flickered and died, plunging the entire apron into pitch darkness save for the fiery blue exhaust of the idling jet.
From the perimeter fence behind them came the deafening, earth-shaking roar of three heavy tactical helicopters dropping out of the blizzard without transponders, their massive spotlights blinding everyone on the tarmac in an instant.
A voice thundered over an external megaphone from the lead gunship, echoing like divine judgment across the freezing ice:
May you like
"STAND DOWN, VICTOR. THE ESCROW HAS ALREADY BEEN CLAIMED."
Victor Vance’s smile vanished, his aristocratic composure shattering into sheer, unadulterated shock as the mobile stairs beneath him began to shake violently.
