Chapter 38 - The Velvet Guillotine
Vance frowned, a shadow of uncertainty flickering across his aristocratic face. "What are you talking about?"
"When you recruited Arthur in Hawaii, you had him install a proprietary Trojan into the Kensington family trusts—a back-door program designed to harvest my biometric authorization the moment I logged into my trust fund."
"Naturally," Vance said smoothly. "A flawless piece of financial architecture."
"It was," I agreed, taking another step forward. "Until Julian and I intercepted Arthur’s hardware in Honolulu. We didn't just delete his files, Caspian. We reverse-engineered the Trojan. We turned it into a self-replicating logic bomb. For the last six months, every time you used the Iron Registry’s back-channels to spy on us, that worm was quietly embedding itself into your Council’s sovereign root servers."
Vance’s eyes widened. He spun around to look at the primary console.
The cascading green lines of financial transfers suddenly turned blood-red. A single crimson graphic appeared on every monitor across the glass citadel: the shattered labyrinth, overlaid with the Kensington seal.
*CRITICAL SYSTEM COMPROMISE.*
*LIQUIDITY REDIRECTION ACTIVE: ALL ASSETS DIVERTED TO KENSINGTON CHARITABLE SOVEREIGN ESCROW.*
"What have you done?!" Vance screamed, slamming his fists onto the console. "This is three centuries of sovereign collateral! You’ve routed it to an open public ledger!"
"I liquidated you, Caspian," I said, the words dripping with absolute finality. "Just like I liquidated Arthur. Just like I liquidated Sterling Enterprises. You thought you were playing chess with pawns, but you forgot that when a queen crosses the board, she takes everything in her path."
With a roar of unbridled rage, Vance lunged at me, pressing the release switch on his walking stick. A gleaming ten-inch rapier blade slid from the ebony shaft, whistling through the air toward my throat.
I dropped beneath the blade, sweeping my foot across the slick floor to take out his supporting leg. Vance staggered, but his aristocratic training kept him upright. He whipped the blade downward in an arc meant to sever my collarbone.
I rolled across the glass floor, grabbing a heavy crystal data drive from the desk and hurling it with all my strength.
The heavy block of leaded crystal struck Vance’s wrist. The rapier clattered against the glass partition.
Before he could recover, I was on my feet, driving an open-palm strike directly into his sternum. Vance gasped, his breath tearing from his lungs as he slammed backward into the floor-to-ceiling glass panel overlooking the rotunda.
The reinforced glass spider-webbed beneath the impact.
Below us, the gunfire had ceased. Julian and Eleanor stood at the base of the tier, their weapons trained upward. The surviving mercenaries, seeing their financial routing fail on their wrist-mounted tactical displays, were already fleeing toward the sea tunnels. The money was gone. Their contract was void.
Vance slumped against the cracked glass, blood dripping from his nose onto his immaculate charcoal tie. He looked at me with a mixture of horror and awe.
May you like
"You’ve ruined us," he choked out. "The Labyrinthine Council held the balance of power in the Mediterranean... in Europe... in the West... Without us, the market will collapse into chaos."
"No, Vance," I said, leaning down until my lips were inches from his ear. "The market won't collapse. It will simply belong to me."
