Chapter 8 - The Vault Protocol
Magnus didn't drop his weapon.
Instead, a slow, terrifying smile spread across his blood-stained face.
Arthur’s eyebrow twitched slightly. "You think I'm bluffing, nephew?"
"I know you aren't bluffing, Arthur," Magnus said, his voice ringing through the concrete corridor with absolute clarity. "You've been a sociopath since the day you squeezed your brother out of the family foundry in 1994. But you forgot one detail about this house."
Arthur’s thumb hovered over the remote button. "And what detail is that?"
"I built it," Magnus said flatly.
With his left hand, Magnus reached behind his back and pressed a heavy red manual override button mounted on the generator room wall.
KL-KL-KL-KLUNK.
The estate’s industrial fire-suppression system—designed to protect the sub-basement server farms from electrical fires—activated instantly.
Four massive high-pressure halon gas nozzles mounted in the ceiling ceiling erupted with a deafening, roaring shriek.
PSSSSSSSSSSSSHHH!
A dense, freezing white fog of pressurized halon gas flooded the narrow corridor in less than two seconds, instantly displacing the oxygen in the room and dropping the temperature to twenty degrees below zero.
The mercenaries choked instantly, dropping their weapons, clawing at their throats as their lungs were starved of air. Arthur dropped his silver remote, stumbling backward toward the stairs, gasping wildly, his eyes bulging behind his wire-rimmed glasses.
Magnus—who had taken a massive lungful of clean air the microsecond before hit the button—moved through the white fog like a wraith.
He closed the distance to Arthur in three long strides, his boot smashing into the chest of the nearest mercenary, sending the armed guard crashing into the stone wall.
He grabbed Arthur by his silk lapels, slamming the older man against the reinforced concrete pillar with enough force to shatter the glass in his spectacles.
Arthur gasped, his hands clawing uselessly at Magnus’s iron forearms, his face turning blue in the oxygen-deprived air. "Magnus... please..."
Magnus leaned in until his face was inches from his uncle's.
"The board meeting is adjourned, Arthur," Magnus growled into his ear.
With a single, powerful sweep of his arm, Magnus drove his fist into the side of Arthur’s jaw, knocking the older man unconscious instantly. Arthur slumped onto the concrete floor like a suit of empty clothes.
Magnus turned, his lungs burning for oxygen, his vision darkening around the edges.
He scrambled back through the white haze toward the safe room, grabbed the iron manual valve on the outer wall, and heaved upward with every ounce of remaining strength in his body.
CLANK-CLANK-CLANK.
The massive three-inch steel bar lifted out of its brackets. The pneumatic seals on the safe room door released with a heavy hiss.
The door swung open.
Sabina burst out of the bunker, grabbing Magnus under his shoulders as he collapsed onto his knees in the doorway, pulling him into the clean, oxygenated air of the safe room suite.
"Magnus!" she screamed, holding his head against her lap as he gagged, taking deep, desperate gulps of clean air. "Magnus! Breathe!"
Lottie ran forward, throwing her arms around her father’s neck, weeping hysterically. "Daddy! Daddy!"
Magnus pulled his daughter into his lap, coughing violently, his large hands holding her tightly against his chest.
He looked up through his watering eyes at Sabina, who was kneeling beside them, her cream dress ruined, her blonde hair messy, her hands covered in grey dust and blood.
She looked at him with an expression of pure, unadulterated relief—the cold, calculating operative completely gone, leaving only the woman who had spent three years walking through hell to keep his daughter alive.
"The halon gas... will clear in five minutes," Magnus choked out, his hand reaching out to grab Sabina’s wrist. "The feds... have Arthur’s server records."
Sabina looked down at his hand gripping hers, then up into his eyes.
May you like
"I know," she whispered, a small, tearful smile touching her lips. "I sent the Zurich files to the Department of Justice three minutes ago from the bunker terminal."
Down the hall, the faint, rising wail of police sirens began to echo through the reinforced concrete walls of the estate.
