Chapter 186 - The Fall at the Falls
Thomas's fingers brushed the cold surface of the cylinder, his left hand useless in its sling, throwing his center of gravity completely off balance. The sheet of ice beneath his feet buckled instantly, exploding into a dozen jagged triangles that tilted upward into the freezing froth.
"No!" Thomas snarled, his cultured composure vanishing in a feral gasp as icy water surged up over his knees, dragging him downward into the swift undercurrent.
Emma didn't hesitate. She didn't wait to watch him drown. She grabbed Maya by the hand and hoisted the child onto her back, scrambling up the western bank of the creek bed toward the dark boundary markers of the Canadian border.
Behind them, Thomas’s revolver fired—a wild, uncontrolled blast that shattered a pine bough ten feet above their heads.
"Julian!" Emma yelled into the darkness of the trees. "Julian!"
From the shadows fifty yards ahead, a shadow broke away from the hemlocks. Julian stumbled toward them, limping heavily, Mercer draped over his shoulders. Mercer had regained consciousness, his feet dragging through the snow, but his right hand held a secure satellite handset that blinked with a steady green light.
"Over the ridge!" Julian shouted through the wind. "The border fence is down! Mercer’s team breached the gate from the Quebec side!"
Emma pushed through the deep snow, Maya’s arms locked around her throat, Maya’s tears soaking through Emma’s hair. They crossed an overgrown clearing marked by a rusted cast-iron post bearing the faded coat of arms of Canada.
The moment Emma’s boots crossed the survey line, high-intensity xenon floodlights snapped on from three tactical vehicles parked across the clearing. Men in the dark green uniforms of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian Border Services Agency emerged from behind armored panels, carbines raised, surrounding the clearing in a wall of steel and authority.
"Drop your weapons and identify yourselves!" a voice boomed through an exterior bullhorn in both French and English.
Julian collapsed to his knees, gently lowering Mercer onto the snow. "Officer down! We have an officer down! And non-combatant civilians requesting political asylum under the cross-border emergency accord!"
A tactical medic rushed forward, kneeling beside Mercer, while two officers took defensive positions around Emma and Maya, shielding them with ballistic shields.
Emma turned back to look down the slope into the dark ravine they had just escaped.
Down in the creek, Thomas Vance had clawed his way onto a flat granite boulder, dripping with black water, the lower half of his coat already freezing into solid sheets of ice. His revolver was gone, lost in the current. He stood there, shivering uncontrollably, his pale face illuminated by the glare of the Canadian searchlights from across the international boundary.
In his right hand, dripping with slush, he held the titanium cylinder. He had saved the key.
He looked up at Emma across the hundred yards of snow, his eyes burning with an ancient, venomous hatred. He raised his arm, shaking the cylinder toward her.
"It's mine!" he screamed, his voice cracking against the wind, thin and reedy like a dying crow. "The Vance estate belongs to me! You have nothing! You're penniless, Emma! Penniless!"
Emma looked down at Maya, who was tucked securely beneath an officer’s thermal blanket. Then Emma reached into the inner lining of her heavy down coat, her fingers sliding over the smooth, cold surface of the true secondary key—the brass cylinder stamped with her aunt Claire’s original 1978 seal, which she had swapped in the boathouse while Julian created the diversion.
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What Thomas held in his frozen, dying hand was an empty decoy loaded with lead fishing weights and fifty-year-old water damage.
"Let him have the cylinder," Emma whispered to Julian as the Canadian officers guided them toward the warmth of the transport vans. "Let him freeze with it."
