My stepmother thought I was broke, so she treated me like her personal baggage handler and laughed as she sent me to Economy / Chapter 15 / 53

Chapter 15 - The Cold Flight

The twin-engine Beechcraft King Air sat squat and invisible inside an overgrown hangar tucked deep into the Maine pine forests. Its fuselage was painted matte charcoal, stripped of all exterior registration numbers.

Marcus bypassed the external power unit, throwing the master battery switch on the instrument panel. The glass cockpit flickered to life in an eerie emerald glow.

"Can you fly this?" I asked, strapping myself into the copilot seat while strapping my tactical jacket tight.

"I didn't spend five years in black-ops aviation just to drive limousines for your father, Emily," Marcus replied, his jaw tight as he fired the starboard turbine. A high-pitched whine rose into an ear-splitting roar, the propeller biting into the freezing night air.

Before the hangar doors were even fully retracted, Marcus throttled forward. The plane lurched onto the frost-heaved tarmac, accelerating through the darkness without runway lights. Behind us, through the rearview mirror, two black tactical SUVs tore through the perimeter fence, their high beams flashing as rifle barrels leaned from the passenger windows.

"Hold on!"

Marcus pulled back hard on the yoke. The aircraft shuddered violently, the tires scraping the tops of the pine branches before the landing gear retracted with a heavy thud. We banked sharply toward the Atlantic, skimming less than five hundred feet above the white-capped ocean to stay beneath civilian radar sweeps.

I pulled the brass key from my collar and held it under the dim red cabin light.

"Look at this," I said, pointing to the shank of the key.

Etched along the microscopic grooves were not standard tumbler notches, but laser-engraved numeric sequences: latitude and longitude coordinates paired with an encrypted alphanumeric hash.

"It’s not just a physical lock," Marcus said, glancing over from the flight controls. "It’s a hardware decryption cipher. Northstar’s sovereign vault in Geneva isn't just full of bearer shares, Emily. It houses the sovereign flight data archives—the black box logs of every illicit shadow flight the Atlantic Alliance ever ran. If that information goes public, half the European transport ministry goes to prison."

Suddenly, the encrypted satellite phone in my pocket vibrated again.

I answered without hesitation. "Dad?"

A cold, mocking woman's laugh echoed through the static.