Chapter 27 - The Flash Point
The valve wheel had not been turned since the Korean War.
Its iron spokes were encrusted with layers of lead paint and corrosion, but the heat from the ruptured steam line was already expanding the brass collar inside the housing. Marcus lunged forward, throwing his weight against the left spoke while I locked my boots against the masonry and hauled upward on the right.
The metal groaned, a sickening shriek of tearing rust, and then gave way with a violent shudder.
Above us, forty feet in the air through the ventilation shafts that snaked up into the belly of the Rosetta, a massive pneumatic actuator clunked into position.
Down on the floor of Sub-Level 4, the three surviving tactical contractors were retreating through the blinding steam toward the reinforced steel bulkhead of Sub-Level 5, where Jonathan Vance stood guarded by two personal bodyguards. They were moving in tight formation, their rifles raised, their boots splashing through an inch of scalding water that had collected on the floor.
"Move! Move!" the team leader shouted through his radio headset. "Set the thermite blocks against the primary lintel! We have three minutes before the pressure breaches the line!"
They reached the heavy steel doors of Sub-Level 5. The contractor carrying the demolition satchel knelt, pulling out two bricks of gray, clay-like compound wrapped in military-grade incendiary strips.
Then the siphon engaged.
It didn't sound like an explosion. It sounded like a colossal intake of breath—a deafening, hollow *WHUMPH* that sucked the air straight out of the corridor.
The superheated steam that had blinded the gallery was instantly drawn down into the floor sumps by the massive vacuum generated by the kitchen's drainage siphons. And directly behind that vacuum, flowing downward through the gravity-fed lines from the mezzanine freezers, came eighty gallons of pressurized liquid nitrogen.
The transition was violent, terrifying, and mathematically absolute.
The temperature in the corridor dropped from one hundred and fifty degrees to fifty below in a matter of six seconds.
The scalding water on the concrete floor froze into an instantaneous sheet of black, brittle ice. The moisture in the air crystallized into a dense, blinding blizzard of white frost that coated the walls, the tactical gear, and the weapon barrels with razor-sharp rime.
The contractor setting the thermite dropped the compound with a bloodcurdling scream. His tactical gloves, soaked with hot water seconds before, had flash-frozen to the steel casing of the charges, tearing the flesh from his palms as he jerked backward.
"Retreat! Fall back to the hoist!" Vance roared, his aristocratic composure shattering as the ivory head of his walking stick shattered against the frozen floor like spun glass.
The mercenaries turned, slipping violently on the black ice, their heavy combat boots finding zero purchase on a floor that had become slicker than an oil slick on frozen glass. One man went down hard, his rifle clattering across the ice, the composite stock snapping in half from the extreme thermal shock.
Marcus and I stepped out from the coal alcove.
We were wearing the heavy wool coats from the archive, our breath billowing out in thick, white plumes that mingled with the freezing fog. Marcus raised his sidearm, the slide held steady in two hands, his sight picture locked squarely on the chest of the contractor who was struggling to draw a secondary sidearm from his hip.
"Drop it," Marcus said, his voice flat, terrifyingly cold, echoing through the frost-crusted gallery. "Drop it, or I let the next valve purge the ammonia lines from the cooling towers."
The contractor looked from Marcus’s steady eyes to the frozen floor beneath him. He released his grip on the holster, slowly raising his frostbitten hands into the air.
Beside him, Jonathan Vance stood leaning against the icy brickwork, his charcoal overcoat stiff with white frost, his silver hair plastered against his forehead. He looked at Marcus, then turned his gaze slowly, venomously, to me.
"The attic girl," Vance wheezed, his chest rattling as the frozen air seared his lungs. "Julian Sterling’s mongrel daughter. You think you’ve won a legal battle, child? You think this building is a trophy?"
"I don't think it's a trophy, Lord Vance," I said, stepping across the frozen floor with the careful, measured gait I had perfected when carrying trays across the grease-slicked line of the kitchen. "I know it's a fortress. And you are trespassing on private property."
Vance began to laugh—a thin, reedy, dying sound that echoed mockingly off the frozen bricks.
"You fool," he coughed, his gloved hand reaching into his coat not for a weapon, but for a small, brass radio transceiver with a flashing amber diode. "You think I came down here with six men to hold an archway? Look at your cameras, Nina Sterling. Look at who walked through your front doors while you were playing plumber in the basement."
A cold dread, far more terrifying than the liquid nitrogen, seized my chest.
I whipped out my tactical tablet, linked directly to the Rosetta’s surviving upper security grid.
On the screen, walking through the shattered glass of the grand lobby—surrounded by twenty uniformed officers from the State Department of Financial Regulation and thirty armed private bailiffs—was my mother’s sister.
Eleanor Vance.
May you like
And in her hand, raised high for the news cameras that were already flashing outside the grand limestone entrance on Fifth Avenue, was an Emergency Federal Conservatorship Order, signed by the Chief Justice of the Appellate Division thirty minutes ago.
***
