Chapter 111 - The Final Gate
I slammed my shoulder into the nearest contractor, knocking him off balance as the blinding rotor light filled the room. The second contractor panicked, diving through the shattered rear window into the oleander bushes outside.
Chloe reached into her purse for a small silver revolver, but I caught her wrist, twisting it until the weapon dropped clattering onto the heart-pine floor.
"It's over, Chloe," I yelled over the deafening roar of the helicopter overhead. "Your mother's gone. Arthur's gone. And you just ran out of family to sacrifice."
Clara stood frozen against the wall, her hands over her face, weeping uncontrollably as armed federal agents in tactical gear breached the front and rear doors of the cottage, their laser sights painting the room in sharp green lines.
"Federal agents! Hands where we can see them! On the floor!"
I dropped my weapon immediately, stepping back with my hands raised high as the agents swarmed Chloe, forcing her face-down onto the floor and pinning her arms behind her back with flex-cuffs. She shrieked, cursing my name, spewing threats that held no power anymore.
"Mr. Vance?" a commander in a tactical vest shouted over the noise, lowering his weapon as he recognized me from the briefing coordinates. "Where is the child?"
"In the marsh," I answered, my heart pounding in my throat. "Behind the live oak. Fifty yards north."
I didn't wait for permission. I pushed past the agents, bursting out of the cottage door into the humid, salt-tinged air. The downwash from the Sikorsky Jayhawk helicopter whipped the live oak branches into a frenzy, scattering gray Spanish moss across the manicured lawn.
I sprinted toward the hedge, leaping the stone drainage ditch, my boots tearing through the pluff mud toward the tree where I had left Emma.
"Emma!" I screamed. "Emma, it's safe! Come out!"
No one answered.
I rounded the massive, gnarled trunk of the oak tree. The depression where she had been sitting was empty.
Lying in the damp mud was her small, worn stuffed mouse—its fabric soaked with marsh water.
And pressed into the trunk of the oak, held in place by a single, stainless steel surgical pin, was a third VIP Magic Kingdom ticket.
On the face of this ticket, printed in mechanical, embossed capital letters that did not belong to Chloe, Arthur, or Beatrice, was a single phrase:
May you like
*THE GUEST OF HONOR HAS ALREADY ENTERED THE PARK.*
Fifty yards away, cutting through the tidal creek at the edge of the marsh, the low rumble of a high-speed black interceptor boat echoed across the water, its wake slicing toward the open Atlantic before disappearing into the thickening ocean fog.
