Chapter 25 - The Fall of Vance
Vance shrank back against the splintered wood, his eyes darting frantically between me and General Hayes. The pompous, condescending smirk that had defined his entire life—the face that had looked down at me from family portraits in the Georgetown mansion while I was bleeding in military field hospitals—had completely collapsed into an ugly mask of terror.
"I didn't have a choice," Vance stammered, pulling his knees up to his chest. "They came to me after my firm lost the defense logistics contract in Qatar. They said if I didn't route the equipment manifests through the Al-Qaim supply line, they'd ruin me! They would have seized the trust fund, Marcus! The family would have been bankrupt!"
"Bankrupt?" I stepped closer, my combat boots ringing hollow against the concrete. "You traded three hundred serial-numbered crates of night-vision systems and heavy machine guns to an insurgent militia so you wouldn't lose your polo club membership?"
Eleanor stepped forward, her voice trembling with an unnatural, desperate fury. "Don't you look at him like that! You don't understand the pressures he was under! You were just a soldier, Marcus! You had a salary, you had orders! Vance had to carry the family name! He had to protect our standing!"
I turned to her slowly, the sheer madness of her words ringing in the damp air. "He carried our name into the dirt, Eleanor. In Al-Qaim, my unit drove into an ambush because the militia had our exact route, our radio frequencies, and our drone coverage windows. Seven men died in the first ninety seconds of that fight. Lieutenant Davies burned to death inside an overturned Stryker while calling for his wife. And you're telling me about polo clubs?"
"Marcus..." Eleanor’s voice dropped, trying to summon that old, aristocratic authority she had used to control me as a child. "I am your mother. You will not speak to me with that tone. You owe everything you are to the pedigree I gave you."
"Your pedigree gave me nothing but a target on my back," I said.
A sharp, metallic grinding noise echoed from the far corner of the hangar floor. The hydraulic freight elevator—the primary conduit leading down to the deep Cold War command shelter beneath the facility—groaned as its indicator lights flickered from amber to green.
Someone down below had just activated the lift.
Hayes brought his weapon up instantly, moving to the edge of the elevator pit with his back against a support beam. "Marcus. We have company coming up from Sub-Level 2. It’s not the assault team from outside."
I looked down at the elevator shaft. The thick, grease-covered cables were humming, straining under a heavy load.
"Miller, watch the blast doors," I ordered. "Hayes, cover the platform. Vance, Eleanor... get behind those steel containers. If you make a sound, I won't need Cleanslate to finish this."
The elevator cage rose through the floor with a slow, clanking groan. Through the steel mesh of the cage, the silhouette of a single figure became visible in the dim emergency lighting.
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It wasn't a tactical operator. It was a man in a rumpled three-piece suit, his tie undone, holding a secure satellite terminal in one hand and a silenced automatic pistol in the other.
Undersecretary Sterling.
