Chapter 96 - The Citadel of Whispers
Victoria shrieked in pain as the impact threw her against the vault door, clutching her mangled, bleeding hand.
I looked up through the crimson glare of the emergency strobes. Descending rapidly from the overhead service gantry was Liam, clad in black tactical gear, his rifle raised and locked onto Victoria’s chest. Behind him, emerging from the shadows of the ventilation catwalks, moved four heavily armed operatives bearing the insignia of the Federal Maritime Enforcement Taskforce.
"Liam!" I gasped, pulling myself up against the railing.
"Told you not to go anywhere without me," Liam said, his voice taut with suppressed fury, though his eyes softened for a fraction of a second as he confirmed I was breathing. He stepped onto the main deck, his rifle never wavering from Victoria.
"How... how did you find this platform?" Victoria wheezed, sliding down the steel wall of the vault, her face pale from shock and blood loss. "The locator was scrambled! The tender was untraceable!"
"You underestimated Eleanor," Liam replied coldly, motioning for the tactical agents to secure Victoria’s perimeter. "You thought you broke your sister when you left her to take the blame for Arthur’s offshore network. But Eleanor kept a backup of Arthur’s personal travel logs from 1999—including the coordinates of the decommissioned fuel station he bought under a Panamanian shell company."
Liam stepped forward, kicking the remnants of Victoria’s destroyed sidearm over the edge. "When Maya left that note on the nightstand, I didn't get into my car. I put a remote-piloted dummy transponder in the front seat and called the maritime unit we’ve had on standby since Zurich. We shadowed your tender by air using thermal radar through the storm."
Victoria began to laugh—a broken, hysterical sound that reverberated off the steel bulkheads. "You think you've won? You foolish, self-righteous children! This facility is wired to Arthur's central ledger. If the lockdown protocol isn't reset from the master terminal in the core within fifteen minutes, the platform’s scuttling charges will ignite! We will all sink to the bottom of the Atlantic!"
The federal agents froze, their radios crackling with frantic warnings from their support chopper outside: *Team Leader, seismic sensors are detecting high-pressure venting in the platform’s lower ballast tanks! The structural integrity is failing!*
"She's telling the truth," Liam said, checking the flashing digital readout on the vault’s emergency panel. "Arthur built this place as a tomb for his secrets. If he couldn't have it, nobody could."
"Where is the master override?" I demanded, grabbing Victoria by the collar of her tactical vest and pulling her upright. "Where is it, Victoria?!"
May you like
Victoria looked at me with cold, dead eyes. "In the central sanctuary. At the heart of the core. But you won't survive the descent, Maya. Arthur left a guardian down there. A ghost you never saw coming."
***
