Chapter 120 - The Obsidian Protocol
He was faster than any normal man, but he was driven by panic, and panic is the death of precision.
As he lunged, Marcus Vance’s shotgun roared.
A heavy slug struck the duplicate in the right shoulder, spinning him halfway around and spraying black, viscous preservation fluid across the marble floor. Before he could hit the tiles, I closed the remaining distance, driving my shoulder hard into his chest, tackling him into the glass wall of the security kiosk.
The glass shattered into ten thousand safety pebbles.
Specimen 02 hit the concrete substrate with a sickening thud. The black detonator flew from his grip, sliding across the slick floor straight to Eleanor’s feet.
Eleanor didn't hesitate. She didn't scream. With a feral, motherly instinct, she stomped her heavy winter boot down on the electronic receiver, crushing the circuitry to plastic dust, before diving into the elevator cabin and pulling Clara into her arms, ripping the duct tape from the child's mouth.
On the floor beneath me, the duplicate coughed, dark fluid leaking from his lips. He looked up at me with eyes that were already beginning to cloud over as the synthetic neural inhibitors failed.
"Thomas... is not... on thirty-eight," the duplicate rasped, a horrific, bloody grin spreading across his face.
I froze, my hand still pinned to his chest. "Where is he?"
"The LaSalle building... was never the bank, Julian," he choked out, his fingers weakly clawing at my lapel. "It was... the distraction. The same way Eleanor was the distraction. The same way Arthur was the distraction."
Behind me, the freight elevator’s hydraulic cables suddenly screamed under an immense, un-commanded strain.
The master terminal on my laptop flickered violently. The emerald light died, replaced by an ominous, flashing purple prompt that I had never seen in any Vance family architecture.
*ALERT: OBSIDIAN PROTOCOL ENGAGED.*
*INITIATED BY: ADMINISTRATIVE TERMINAL 00.*
*LOCATION: SUB-BASEMENT LEVEL 4 — 410 NORTH MORGAN (WEST LOOP).*
"The condo," Beatrice whispered, stepping forward, her eyes wide with unadulterated horror as she read the scrolling telemetry. "The seventy-two-thousand-dollar condo... he was never trying to drill down to the vault. He was building the uplink terminal directly into the Federal Reserve subterranean fiber ring."
Suddenly, the lobby’s main power grid didn't just flicker—it died completely.
Outside, the distant hum of the Chicago skyline began to shut down section by section. The streetlights along LaSalle vanished. The glowing corporate logos atop the high-rises went dark. A rolling blackout of unprecedented scale was ripping through the downtown core, expanding outward from the West Loop like a digital shockwave.
My satellite phone vibrated.
A single video feed connected automatically, overriding the encrypted interface.
The screen did not show Thomas Vance.
It showed the interior of a dimly lit, high-security underground bunker beneath the Morgan Street property. Sitting behind a pristine glass desk, her silver hair perfectly coiffed, her sharp, aristocratic features completely unmarred by age or illness, was a woman wearing a triple-strand pearl necklace.
Margaret Vance.
She took a slow sip from a porcelain teacup, looking directly into the camera lens with the chilling, dismissive smile she had given me the day she told me I would never be enough to carry the family name.
"Good evening, Julian," my mother’s voice came through the speaker, crisp, perfectly modulated, and undeniably, terrifyingly alive. "Thank you for cleaning up your father’s mess in Switzerland. And thank you for bringing my server home."
Behind her, standing in the shadows of the bunker with his hands resting behind his back like a disciplined soldier, stood a man whose face made the blood freeze solid in my veins.
It was not Thomas.
It was another duplicate—Specimen 03. And beside him stood three more, their eyes glowing faintly in the dim red emergency lights of the subterranean vault.
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"Did you really believe an accountant only kept two copies of the ledger, my dear?" Margaret murmured.
Then the elevator doors behind Marcus began to slide open once more, and from the blackness of the shaft, the heavy, synchronized footsteps of armed men began to advance.
