Chapter 60 - The Thames at Midnight
I escaped through the service elevator shaft, descending into the Victorian drainage tunnels beneath Highgate and vanishing into the London rain before the clean-up squads could seal the block.
By two in the morning, the rain had turned the River Thames into a churning, black serpentine mirror. The city was unusually dark; the cyber-attack initiated by the Board's protocol had triggered rolling blackouts across London's financial district, leaving the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf standing like monolithic tombstones against the weeping sky.
Warehouse 44 sat decaying along the forgotten industrial bends of the river, its corrugated iron rusted through with decades of salt mist and neglect.
Inside, the air smelled of damp earth, mildew, and eighty years of rotting parchment.
Unlike the high-tech sterility of Vault 404 in Altaussee, this was where the Sterling dynasty had begun before the advent of fiber optics, mainframes, and digital ledgers. Row upon row of floor-to-ceiling iron shelving stretched into the darkness, packed with leather-bound volumes, hand-written bank balance sheets, and real estate charters bearing the original wax seals of post-war European ministries.
I carried a single halogen lantern, its beam cutting through the floating dust motes.
In the center of the warehouse stood a massive, circular mahogany table. And sitting at the table, illuminated by the soft flame of a single kerosene lamp, was a man in an immaculate charcoal three-piece suit.
He was pouring amber liquid from a crystal decanter into two glasses.
He didn't look like a mercenary, nor did he carry an assault rifle. He had silvering hair at the temples, cold, calculating blue eyes, and the quiet, terrible presence of a man who moved armies with a signature on a cocktail napkin.
"You have your mother's speed, Emily," he said, speaking without looking up from the glass he was filling. "Though, thankfully, not her intellectual deficiencies."
I kept my gun leveled at the center of his chest. "You're the Seventh Family."
May you like
"I am the Chairman of the Sovereign Board," he replied calmly, sliding the second glass of scotch across the mahogany table toward an empty chair. "And forty years ago, before she went into hiding, your grandmother was my wife."
***
