Chapter 44 - The Face of Douglas Sterling
"Stop right there, Beatrice!" Hayes barked, leveling his sidearm squarely at the man standing beside her. "Drop the detonator!"
The man resembling my grandfather did not flinch. He slowly stepped out from the shadow of the colossal steel hatch, folding his hands behind his back. The resemblance was uncanny, almost supernatural, yet up close, the differences were horrifyingly clear. His skin was paler, laced with faint surgical scars along the jawline, and his eyes lacked the gentle warmth that Douglas had possessed. Arthur Sterling's eyes were twin voids of absolute, calculating cruelty.
"Put the gun down, Commander Hayes," Arthur spoke. His voice was a rasping tenor, an echo of my grandfather filtered through decades of bitterness and subterranean exile. "You are trespassing on sovereign Sterling ground. My brother spent half a century pretending to be the sole master of this bloodline. But Douglas was weak. He wanted to hoard the Great Lakes sovereign rights for philanthropy, for trust funds, for... domestic peace."
Arthur spat on the steel grate. "He locked me in the dark. He buried the master manifest of 1929—the original charter that grants the owner of this vault total regulatory monopoly over every shipping lane, pipeline, and hydroelectric channel connecting the Saint Lawrence to the Mississippi."
"You weren't locked away, Arthur," I said, stepping past Hayes, my voice ringing clear and steady in the cavernous space. "My grandfather told me about you before he died. He didn't tell me your name, but he told me of a brother whose greed was so bottomless, he tried to sell our family’s fleet to foreign cartels during the war. Douglas didn't bury you to be cruel. He buried you to protect the world from you."
Beatrice lunged forward, her nails digging into the air, restrained only by Arthur’s cold arm. "Shut up! Shut your mouth, you worthless little brat! You were an accident of birth! Douglas gave you the four million because he knew you were timid! He knew you wouldn't look closer! But I saw through it! I spent my whole life being denied my birthright by that miserable old man, and now you think you can walk in here with your soldier and take what is mine?!"
"Look around you, Beatrice," I said, feeling pity mix with righteous indignation. "Julian Vance is in an English dungeon. The high courts have stripped the Vance syndicate of every asset. You have no lawyers. You have no allies. All you have is a broken old man and a pit in the dirt."
"I have the key!" Beatrice screamed, lifting the detonator and waving a glass biometric vial filled with an amber reagent. "Arthur designed the failsafe sixty years ago! Douglas changed the cipher to your blood, Lenora! But blood can be taken from a corpse just as easily as a living girl!"
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Arthur’s gaze chilled. "She speaks the truth, niece. Hand over your biometric key, or this entire bluff will be collapsed into Lake Michigan. The water will flood the vault, the seismic charges will destroy the city's water table, and you will die here, buried in the grave Douglas built for us all."
***
