Chapter 44 - Blood on the Snow
The sound of an angle grinder screeching against the steel door of the wine cellar ended our brief reprieve. The Black Sand mercenaries weren't going to wait for negotiations. They were cutting the hinges.
"We have two minutes before they drop a breach charge," Castiglione muttered, pulling a tactical flare and an emergency breathing regulator from a maintenance compartment near the drainage grate. "The wine cellar has an old water drainage flue that runs beneath the terrace, emptying two hundred meters down the mountain into the pine forest."
"Can she fit?" I gestured toward Eleanor.
"If she doesn't, she dies here," Castiglione said flatly. "And frankly, Vance, she’s a dead weight on your balance sheet."
Eleanor began to sob, muttering incoherently about family legacies, high-society galas, and how ungrateful I had been since the day I learned to talk. I pulled a utility knife from my contractor’s tactical vest, sliced her bonds until her hands were free, and shoved her toward the narrow, rusted iron grate in the floor.
"Move your own legs, Mother," I said coldly. "The maid isn't coming to carry you."
With Castiglione kicking the corroded iron bars loose, we dropped into the pitch-black mountain run-off conduit just as a thunderous explosion blew the wine cellar door inward, showering the chamber in shrapnel.
The descent was brutal. Wet stone, freezing glacial meltwater soaking through our clothes, the roar of the mountain wind whistling up from the precipice below. Eleanor slipped twice, tearing her fingernails against the slimy rock, weeping like a broken child, but fear of death kept her crawling.
When we finally tumbled out of the culvert into the knee-deep snow of the alpine ridge, the fortress above us was already fully engulfed in flames, black smoke billowing against the jagged silhouettes of the Swiss peaks under the moonlight.
Below on the switchback logging road, an unmarked Mercedes G-Wagon sat idling with its headlights switched off—my backup extraction unit, arranged by the private intelligence firm I had hired with my first draw from Vault 404.
"We have visual," a voice crackled in my earpiece. "Emily, we tracked the IP satellite relay from that video feed. It wasn't bounced from Frankfurt. It originated from an unmapped subterranean grid inside the Altaussee mountain range in Austria. Sector Seven. The old Nazi art cache territory."
"Sarah Sterling's black site," I replied, climbing into the passenger seat while Castiglione shoved Eleanor into the back.
Eleanor huddled against the leather seat, clutching a torn mink stole, her face smeared with black soot and blood. "Richard is insane, Emily," she stammered, grabbing my arm through the partition. "He blames you for the stroke. He blames you for the bankruptcy. He’s going to execute Marcus to punish me for letting you take the assets!"
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I slapped her hand off my sleeve.
"He isn't punishing you, Eleanor," I said, looking her dead in the eyes in the rear-view mirror. "You were never important enough to punish. He's doing this because he knows I’m the only one who can match him move for move. And before the sun comes up over Austria, I’m going to bury him in the very vault he thinks will save him."
