Chapter 19 - The Vault of the Cumberland
The call went dead with a sickening click.
I looked at David, and without exchanging a single word, our instincts took over. We left Marcus in charge of the rotunda, gathered our chief of security, Frank, and took the industrial freight elevator down into the sub-basement beneath Bay 22.
The air grew cool and damp as we descended past the modern electrical conduits, stepping into the forgotten brick foundation of the original nineteenth-century depot.
Using the surveyor's map, David pried away an old sheet of corrugated iron covering an arched brick doorway. Behind it lay a heavy, cast-iron vault door, rusted around the edges but locked with an antique brass triple-tumbler mechanism.
"Your father’s initials are engraved on the brass plate," David noted, shining his tactical flashlight across the lock. "S.T. 1994."
"1994 was the year our father broke off his partnership with Arthur Sterling's father," I remembered, my heart pounding against my ribs. "Everyone thought it was a dispute over shipping rates. But it was never about shipping."
Using the emergency master key my father had secretly hidden inside his old dispatch desk, I aligned the brass dials to the date of our terminal's founding. With a heavy, metallic clunk that echoed through the dark tunnels, the heavy vault door gave way.
Inside, resting on a pedestal of reinforced stone, sat a sealed steel strongbox. Beside it lay an unaddressed ledger labeled: *THE STERLING CONSPIRACY — EVIDENCE OF FORGERY, BRIBERY, AND RAIL EMBEZZLEMENT.*
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My father hadn't been a victim of the Sterling empire. He had been their judge, keeping the evidence of their crimes hidden safely under the ground he owned, waiting for the right moment to strike.
"This is what Arthur Sterling has been hunting for thirty years," David murmured, running a hand over the steel box. "If this gets to the federal prosecutors, Sterling loses everything."
