“YOU BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELF, EMILY,” My Mother Said After Watching My Father Beat Me at Thanksgiving Dinner, Never Realizing Her Six Words Would Be the Last She Ever Got to Say to the Daughter Who Kept Their Family Afloat. / Chapter 88 / 161

Chapter 88 - Infiltration of the Strait

The journey south was made beneath sixty fathoms of slate-gray ocean.

The *Nautilus-II*, a decommissioned Swedish *Gotland*-class attack submarine retrofitted for black-budget corporate reconnaissance, slipped through the Bay of Biscay without surfacing. The interior was cramped, smelling of stale sweat, diesel exhaust, and the sharp bite of recirculated oxygen.

I spent eighteen hours in the forward weapons bay, stripping, cleaning, and reassembling a suppressed MPX submachine gun until the muscle memory was burned into my fingers. Every click of the receiver, every snap of a full magazine locking home, sounded like the final countdown to an execution.

On the third day, the submarine’s deck tilted downward.

"Approaching the Strait of Gibraltar," the pilot announced over the low-frequency intercom. "Depth: four hundred feet. Thermal thermocline established. We are running silent on electric drive."

Vance stepped into the weapons bay, carrying a tactical drysuit and a combat harness fitted with twin rebreather tanks.

"The Gibraltar Node is not an ordinary bunker, Emily," Vance said, setting the gear down beside me. "It was originally built during the Cold War as a joint NATO-Archon submarine surveillance station, anchored directly into the underwater shelf of the Alboran Sea. It sits two hundred feet below the surface. The only entry point is an underwater umbilical airlock used for deep-sea maintenance."

"Security?"

"Two dozen private military contractors. High-grade autonomous defense turrets. And whatever private guard Julian managed to pull together from his surviving network." Vance checked his watch. "The liquidation countdown starts in fifty minutes. If the master terminal completes the cycle, the servers will purge themselves permanently, locking the global financial kill-switch into an immutable loop."

"I'm not going there to stop the money," I said, pulling the neoprene suit over my shoulders and zipping the thermal seal up to my throat. "I'm going there to kill Julian."

"If you kill him before you abort the cycle, the system will assume an unauthorized breach and execute the purge automatically," Vance warned, his voice hardening. "You must reach the core terminal first. Use your genetic key to revoke the Sovereign Protocol. Only then can you end him."

"Understood."

I adjusted the dive mask over my eyes, biting down on the rebreather mouthpiece. The taste of synthetic rubber and dry air filled my mouth.

The submarine came to a hover. Outside the small acrylic porthole, the Atlantic water was pitch-black, illuminated only by the faint, eerie glow of red floodlights mounted on the massive, barnacle-encrusted concrete structure rising from the seabed like a submerged tomb.

I stepped into the flooded airlock chamber. Vance stood at the hatch window, his hand resting against the reinforced glass. He didn't offer good luck. In this business, luck was an amateur's excuse for poor planning.

The outer hatch ground open. The freezing Atlantic surged into the chamber, slamming against my chest like an iron plate.