Chapter 76 - Blood on the Steel Gantry
The dredge drifted to within ten yards of the submarine’s rust-pocked superstructure. The massive iron hull rose like an island of dead steel out of the churn.
"You staged it all," I said, stepping onto the dredge's bow rail, oblivious to the icy spray freezing on my eyelashes. "The mortgage defaults. The grocery debts. Hannah’s endless medical emergencies. It wasn't incompetence. It was an extraction budget."
"A hundred thousand dollars a year to buy specialized military coolant on the black market," Eleanor said calmly, looking down at me from the railing of the gantry. "Hannah played her part. She was the anchor that kept you working, kept you feeding the machine without asking questions. You had the Vance mind for numbers, Clara. You were the only one capable of balancing twenty-four secret shell corporations while working a nine-to-five desk job."
"And what was it for?" Caleb shouted from the wheelhouse, his gun drawn, leveled at Eleanor. "You turned your own daughters into pawns for Cold War salvage?"
"Not salvage, young man," Eleanor replied, her voice cutting through the wind. "Sovereignty. The Vance family didn't steal this submarine to sell it to the highest bidder. We stole it because the payload inside this hull contains the master cryptographic keys to every offshore holding of the Federal Reserve’s emergency continuity protocol. Four hundred billion dollars in bearer assets, frozen in an EMP-shielded mainframe. Harold died trying to keep the consortium from taking it. And now Clara has brought the acoustic key straight to the hatch."
Arthur struggled up from the deck behind me, his voice a frantic scream. "Eleanor! Don't listen to her! The girl transferred forty-eight million to Reykjavik! She’s gutting the estate!"
Eleanor barely glanced at him. She raised the flare gun and pulled the trigger.
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The magnesium round arced through the night and struck Arthur full in the chest. The old man shrieked as white-hot flame engulfed him, stumbling backward off the stern of the dredge into the black, freezing waters of the Sound. The hiss of boiling seawater swallowed his final agony.
"One less mouth to feed," Eleanor said coldly, lowering the weapon. "Now come aboard, Clara. Or I vent the ballast tanks and take this boat—and everything your father died to protect—back down to the bottom of the trench."
