Chapter 34 - The Flight to the Riviera
Cruising at forty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic, the cabin was dead silent except for the dull roar of the twin Rolls-Royce engines. This was the same jet where Julian had once insolently sprawled, feeding truffles to his secretary while telling me to learn my place. Now, the stakes were no longer millions of dollars or real estate; the currency on the table was Astrid’s life.
Astrid lay reclined on the leather sofa, hooked up to an onboard telemetry scanner we had scavenged from Henry's Arctic med-bay. Every twenty minutes, the pulse spiked, sending erratic shockwaves through her heart rhythm.
"It’s an electromagnetic micro-capsule," Henry said, examining the three-dimensional scan floating on my tablet. "Implanted directly against the pericardium. It reacts to a localized microwave frequency generated by Eleanor’s satellite relay. If we try to operate conventionally, any disruption in the bio-sync will rupture the coronary artery."
"Which means we can't cut it out with a scalpel before noon tomorrow," I said, leaning over the screen. My mind raced through the lines of code I had deciphered during the Arctic breach. "What about the Genesis drive? You designed the architecture, Henry. Is there an override?"
Henry hesitated, his eyes darting toward the cockpit partition. "There is. But it wasn't built as a medical protocol. Genesis is a total financial wipeout code. It was designed to detonate Eleanor’s offshore shadow accounts by scrambling their cryptographic keys. If I reconfigure it to broadcast a counter-frequency, it will short-circuit her satellite uplink for approximately four minutes."
"Four minutes," Astrid murmured from the sofa, opening her heavy eyes. "Is that enough time to stop my heart from exploding?"
"Four minutes to jam the signal, isolate the transmitter, and force Eleanor to give us the master deactivation cipher," I said, sitting beside my sister and gripping her hand. "She expects me to arrive terrified, crawling on my knees with Dad in chains. She expects a wounded daughter. She has no idea what kind of monster she created when she abandoned us."
I pulled out my phone and dialed a secure, heavily encrypted Swiss number. On the third ring, a smooth, familiar voice answered.
"Vance Global Crisis Management. Speak."
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"Christian," I said coldly. "Cancel my morning meetings in Manhattan. I need twelve Tier-1 tactical operators on the ground in Nice within eight hours, and buy out every penthouse suite overlooking Port Hercule in Monaco. We’re going hunting."
***
