Chapter 23 - The Judas Mirror
I buried my face in David’s collar, breathing in the scent of cedar shavings, gun smoke, and the rain-damp wool of his coat. All the doubts that Vivian had planted in my mind over the past four weeks—the stolen looks, the whisper of adultery, the insidious idea that my husband had been bought by our enemies—evaporated against the frantic, ragged beating of his heart against my cheek.
"They brought six men in two black Suburbans," David spoke quickly into my hair, his arms locking around my waist with desperate strength. "They cut the phone lines at the main road before I even reached the gate. I disabled their lead vehicle's radiator with the rifle from the tree line, but they’re sweeping the orchard grids on foot with night-vision gear. We have maybe twenty minutes before their perimeter dogs pick up our scent from the culvert."
"They won't bring the dogs into the old Vance orchard," Arthur stated flatly from the kitchen counter, where he was calmly assembling the components of a shortwave radio from an ammunition tin hidden beneath the floor.
David looked up, his jaw tightening. "With all due respect, Mr. Sterling, those aren't private security guards out there. Those are contract mercenaries out of Idaho. They have infrared sensors and dogs trained to hunt cougars."
"And the Vance family has mined these seven acres with non-lethal ammonium nitrate det-cord and bear traps since nineteen-eighty-four," Arthur replied without looking up. "The dogs will refuse the scent within fifty yards of the tree line. The sulfur in the topsoil confuses their nasal passages. We have time. But not much."
Suddenly, a sharp, rhythmic ping sounded from inside David’s jacket pocket.
He froze.
Slowly, David reached inside his lapel and pulled out an encrypted satellite burner phone. The screen was flashing with an unlisted international dial-code.
"Where did you get that?" I asked, stepping back, the old phantom of suspicion flaring up despite myself.
"Vivian slipped it into my pocket when she left your house in Mercer Island," David said, holding the screen toward me so I could see the incoming text prompt. "She told me if I wanted you to live past the thirty-day probate deadline, I had to keep this charged and answer it only when it pinged twice."
The phone chimed a second time.
David pressed the speaker toggle and laid it on the wooden table between us.
"David? Claire?" Vivian’s voice cut through the tiny speaker, thin and breathless, competing with the roar of a jet turbine in the background. "Tell me you’re out of the vault. Tell me you’re with Arthur."
"Vivian," I said, my voice hardening. "Where are you?"
"I’m at Boeing Field, sitting in Croft’s Gulfstream on the auxiliary tarmac," she spoke in a rapid, hushed whisper. "Listen to me very carefully, Claire. Croft doesn't have the legal right to execute the probate claim yet. He forged grandfather’s signature on a supplemental lien filed in Thurston County yesterday, but he needs the original physical deed from the 1954 land grant to validate the transfer before the probate judge at ten o’clock tomorrow morning in Olympia."
"We have the ledger," I said, clutching the leather-bound book tighter against my ribs. "Arthur has the Supreme Court envelope."
"Croft doesn't care about the Supreme Court envelope anymore!" Vivian hissed, her voice trembling with sheer terror. "He’s not trying to win in court, Claire! He’s using the court filing as a distraction to declare the estate abandoned! He has a federal extraction warrant signed by a compromised magistrate stating that Arthur Sterling is an escaped psychiatric patient who murdered his wife thirty years ago and has now kidnapped his daughter!"
A heavy silence dropped over the room.
Arthur’s hands paused over the radio wires. His grey eyes went cold and completely dead.
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"He inverted the narrative," Arthur muttered, a terrible, grim smile touching the corner of his mouth. "He’s using my own cover story against me."
"If Croft’s team finds you in that cottage," Vivian whispered, tears bleeding into her words, "they won't arrest you. They will execute Arthur for 'resisting,' they will sedate Claire, and they will declare me the sole surviving conservator of the Vance estate. And within two hours of my appointment... they will stage my suicide in a hotel room in Tacoma. That was Croft’s plan from the very beginning."
