Emma’s grandmother smiled and told her they had “run out” of Disney tickets, but she had no idea what I was about to cancel from my phone. / Chapter 96 / 111

Chapter 96 - The Syndicate's Envoy

"Lower the weapon, David," Cole said, stepping into the dim light of the vault. His bespoke Italian suit was immaculate, even down here in the grease-stained bowels of the terminal. His gold cufflinks gleamed under my flashlight beam. "You fire that nine-millimeter, and the spark will ignite the pressurized methane lines running along the ceiling behind you. We all burn together in this hole."

I kept the front sight post aligned dead center on his forehead. "You knew. You set this up eight years ago."

"Beatrice set it up," Cole corrected smoothly, motioning with his chin toward the briefcase in the locker. "Your grandmother was a monster of rare organizational genius. When your true child died in that clinic in Baltimore—a tragic respiratory failure that you were never told about while you were deployed overseas—Beatrice didn't mourn. She saw an asset failure. The trust required an unbroken bloodline heir to prevent the foreign underwriters from seizing the Blackwood timber reserves. So she replaced the asset."

"Emma is my daughter," I snarled, my voice shaking with an unholy rage that threatened to snap my control. "I don't care whose blood is in her veins. She is *my daughter*."

"The Siberian Syndicate disagrees," Cole said, taking a slow step forward. "To them, she is simply a living bearer bond. And as of midnight, the bond was called. Hand over the briefcase, David. Arthur is already dead. We intercepted his vehicle on the George Washington Bridge twenty minutes ago. He died the way he lived—in the back of a black van, begging for an offshore wire transfer."

A cold sweat broke out across my ribs. Arthur was dead? If Cole had already eliminated him, then the perimeter at the cottage in Maine was...

"Don't bother checking your satellite phone," Cole sneered, noticing my left hand twitching toward my pocket. "Our strike team hit the bluff at three in the morning. Marcus and his little militia put up a commendable defense for about four minutes. But you can't stop night-vision optics and fragmentation grenades with deer rifles."

"You're lying," I whispered, though my heart was hammering against my ribs like a caged beast. "Marcus had the cellar bunker. He had the escape slipway."

"He had an old wooden dock and a dead-end cove," Cole replied coldly. "Emma is currently in a climate-controlled transport container heading toward the Port of Newark. The freighter *Odessa Star* clears American waters at sunrise. You have precisely sixty seconds to hand over the master cipher before my men put two holes in your kneecaps and drag you out to the third rail."

The two armed men behind Cole stepped forward, raising their weapons, their suppressors pointing directly at my chest.

I looked at Cole. I looked at the briefcase in Locker 84. And then I looked at the amber vial Arthur had left in the steel box—the vial I had tucked into the tactical bandolier across my chest.

*Handwritten Russian script: METHYL-CHLORO-BROMIDE.* A military-grade aerosol nerve agent used for tunnel clearing during the Chechen war.

"You're right about one thing, Cole," I said softly, my thumb quietly slipping the rubber seal off the glass vial.

"What's that?" Cole asked, his eyes narrowing in sudden suspicion.

"I inherited my mother's temper."