Chapter 58 - The Cleansing Fire
I walked toward the mahogany desk, the barrel of the weapon smoking in the frigid, red-lit air.
Constance did not flinch. She sat in her wheelchair, her hands folded serenely over the velvet lapels of her robe, watching me approach as if I were nothing more than an insolent servant arriving to clear the dinner plates.
"They are fifty yards away," she said, nodding toward the corridor. "They will kill you, Evelyn. They will cut your throat, take the biometric key from your severed thumb, and finish what I started. You have won nothing."
"I didn't come here to win your empire," I said.
I reached out and grabbed the edge of the glass pedestal housing the Seventh Horizon terminal. With a savage wrench of my arms, I tore the unit from its mounting bolts, ripping the fiber-optic conduits from the floor in a shower of brilliant blue sparks.
Constance’s eyes widened in sudden, absolute terror. "What are you doing?! That is the only link to the primary trust!"
"The primary trust is dead," I replied.
From my tactical vest, I pulled the two military-grade thermite grenades I had requisitioned from Julian’s Arctic cache. I pulled the pins on both, slamming them directly into the exposed guts of the pedestal's wiring harness and the primary processor rack beneath the desk.
"Stop!" she screamed, her voice finally breaking into the frantic, shrill screech of an old woman who realized her immortality was made of plastic and glass. "Evelyn, no! The assets! The centuries of work—!"
"Silence is the kingdom," I whispered.
The thermite ignited with a blinding, white-hot flash of four thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
The heat was instantaneous, scorching the skin of my face and instantly vaporizing the delicate circuit boards, melting the steel frames of the server banks into glowing slag. The primary mainframe screens shattered, their liquid crystal displays boiling away into black smoke.
A horrific siren began to wail—a deep, pneumatic horn that shook the bedrock beneath our feet.
`CRITICAL FAILURE: PRIMARY CORE DESTROYED`
`SAFETY PROTOCOL ACTIVATED: LIQUID NITROGEN DEPLOYMENT IN 60 SECONDS`
Through the smoke of the elevator hall, the Syndicate assault team burst into the rotunda.
The point man raised a suppressed assault rifle, the red laser dot settling directly on my breastplate. I didn't wait. I dropped behind the burning carcass of the server racks, lobbed my final smoke canister into the center of the hall, and bolted toward the secondary utility shaft—the emergency funicular track marked on the 1968 blue-line schematics I had memorized before leaving the chalet.
Gunfire erupted behind me. High-velocity rounds chewed through the antique tapestries, shattering granite pillars into clouds of stinging shrapnel.
The Syndicate commandos didn't just fire at me; they fired at Constance Duncan.
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As I plunged into the dark mouth of the funicular tunnel, I caught one final glimpse of the rotunda through the billowing white chemical smoke: the wheelchair tipped over, the emerald velvet robe riddled with dark holes, and the blinding white fire of the thermite consuming the Sovereign Charter until nothing remained but ash.
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