Chapter 78 - The Bloodline in the Stone
"I told you on the phone, Amanda," Arthur Vance’s voice echoed through the cavern, amplified by the natural acoustics of the stone. "You have your grandfather's stubborn blood."
He didn't turn around immediately. He was busy working a heavy electric drill against the secondary brass dial of the console, sparks flying around his bare hands. When he finally looked back at us, his face was a grotesque canvas of third-degree burns from the lighthouse fire on Devil's Island, his left eye swollen shut, his hair singed down to the scalp.
Yet his remaining eye burned with a feverish, triumphant mania.
Behind him stood three surviving mercenaries, their automatic weapons trained directly on our small group as we emerged onto the catwalk above the basin.
"Drop your weapons, Sarah," Arthur said calmly, nodding toward Agent Lin. "Or my men drop you where you stand. And Amanda... if you make a sound, I will ensure that Donald’s granddaughter joins Julian at the bottom of the Apostle trench."
Lin, Miller, and Thomas slowly lowered their sidearms to the concrete grate. Captain Halloway stayed silent, his eyes locked on the ventilation valves along the wall.
"Julian is dead, Arthur," I said, stepping forward onto the lower platform, keeping Ruby shielded beneath my coat. "Your heir died in the freezing water while you fled in a submarine. You used your own son as a decoy."
Arthur let out a dry, rasping laugh that turned into a wet cough. "Julian was never my son. Julian was the child of a deckhand Donald paid off forty years ago. Donald raised him to be weak, soft, easily manipulated by women and cheap luxury. But you, Amanda... you were born of Eleanor's true bloodline. You survived the ambush at Presque Isle, you survived the fire on Devil's Island, and you walked into the federal courtroom with the ledger in your hands."
"You killed Donald," I said, my voice trembling with ice.
"Donald killed himself the day he signed Isle Royale over to the federal government!" Arthur snarled, his voice suddenly rising into a furious shriek that echoed off the damp basalt. "He wanted to bury our family's sovereign right! For eighty years, the Vance family held the keys to the continent's richest strategic reserves! We held the heavy water that built the first nuclear weapons! We held the bearer paper that backed the currency of the Western world! And he wanted to hand it over to bureaucrats in St. Paul so he could die with a clean conscience!"
"He didn't hand it to bureaucrats," Marilyn said boldly, stepping up beside me. "He handed it to the Department of the Interior to protect it from thieves like you."
"The Department of the Interior has no jurisdiction inside Vault Zero," Arthur smiled, his scarred face stretching hideously. "Look at the seal on the floor, Marilyn. You’re an auditor. You should know international maritime law."
I looked down at the concrete floor. Chiseled into the rock was not an American eagle, nor a Canadian crest.
It was an international sovereign boundary line: **54th PARALLEL JURISDICTION - NEUTRAL MARITIME ENCLAVE**.
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"This cavern isn't in Michigan, and it isn't in Ontario," Arthur whispered, turning back to the vault console. "It is a neutral international coordinate established under the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty. And now that Amanda has dissolved the American patent, this vault belongs entirely to the sole surviving bearer who holds the physical acoustic key."
He tapped the console. "Give me Donald’s cylinder, Amanda. Or I trigger the drainage charges and drown us all in five minutes."
