Chapter 24 - The Midnight Confrontation
The sound of the diamond-blade saw biting into the reinforced concrete sent dust raining down between the cedar beams. Fine white powder coated my hair and clothes as I scrambled across the subterranean room.
Julian Montgomery was cutting his way in. In less than ten minutes, they would breach the ceiling, and no iron bolt would save me.
I looked around the vault. A bunker built in the 1970s wouldn't have a single exit. My grandfather was a military engineer; he never designed a fortification without an emergency egress.
I scanned the brick walls with the flashlight beam. Behind the rusted steel cabinet, the mortar pattern shifted. The bricks were stacked dry, without cement, marked with a faded yellow circle of spray paint near the floor.
Dropping the ledger into the Pelican case alongside the original sovereign deeds, I grabbed an iron pry bar leaning against the workbench and drove it into the dry-stacked brick wall.
The mortar gave way easily. With five desperate thrusts, three bricks tumbled outward, revealing a dark, corrugated metal drainage pipe that slanted upward toward the ravine behind Maplewood Court.
Behind me, the scream of the concrete saw stopped abruptly. A heavy chunk of slab crashed into the vault floor with a thunderous boom.
"Get a rope down there!" Julian’s voice echoed sharply through the hole. "Don't let her burn the documents!"
I squeezed myself into the drainage culvert, dragging the heavy Pelican case behind me. The pipe was narrow, damp, and smelled of decaying cedar needles and wet soil. My elbows scraped against the corrugated steel, but I pushed forward, inch by inch, fighting the claustrophobic dread that threatened to paralyze my lungs.
Ten yards ahead, a sliver of starry sky appeared through the iron drainage grating at the bottom of the ravine.
Behind me, flashlight beams cut through the culvert. "She’s in the overflow pipe! Circle around the perimeter to the ravine! Now!"
I reached the rusted iron grating. It was secured by a rusted padlock, but moisture had corroded the hasp over decades. I swung the pry bar with every ounce of strength remaining in my body, striking the rusted clasp twice. On the second blow, the iron snapped.
I tumbled out onto the wet ferns and muddy slope of the greenbelt, gasping for air.
Maplewood Court sat above me, lit up like a stadium by flashing alarm strobes. But down here in the dark ravine, headlights suddenly swept through the trees.
A sleek black SUV came tearing down the service access road at fifty miles per hour, tires spraying gravel as it drifted to a halt ten feet from where I lay in the mud.
The driver’s door flew open.
"Lauren! Get in!"
It wasn't Julian’s men.
Stepping out into the glare of the high beams was Marcus Vance, accompanied by two armed private security operators wearing dark tactical vests with the emblem of the State Attorney General’s Special Investigations Unit.
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"Marcus!" I choked out, clutching the Pelican case to my chest as the security team helped me to my feet.
"We picked up the cellular jammer signature from our downtown monitoring hub twenty minutes ago," Marcus said, his eyes scanning the ridgeline where Julian’s men were already descending the slope. "We brought the state warrants, Lauren. It's time to end this."
