Chapter 10 - Blood on the Snow
"They aren't here to negotiate," I said, slamming the heavy reinforced oak door of the penthouse suite and locking the manual deadbolt. "Marcus knows the second this gene therapy is authorized and the Vance assets transfer to Lily, he faces twenty years in prison with zero leverage. He's here to destroy the patient and the paperwork."
"There is a service lift at the end of the private corridor that leads to the underground snowcat garage," Eleanor said, rising from her chair with remarkable agility, leaning lightly on a brass walking stick. "Marcus designed this retreat himself. He always kept an escape route for when his debts caught up with him."
"We move now!" I commanded.
I swept Lily up into my left arm, racking the slide of the .38 revolver with my right. Grace stayed locked at my side, her eyes fierce and determined, carrying the medical file and the signed Swiss documents in a waterproof pouch against her chest. Carter took point, his assault rifle raised, kicking open the side door that led to the private service stairwell.
The air in the concrete stairwell was thick with choking white smoke and the smell of cordite. Down below, heavy combat boots were thundering up the metal stairs, four steps at a time.
"Contact below!" Carter shouted, leaning over the handrail and firing a controlled three-round burst.
A muffled cry and the clatter of a dropping rifle echoed up from the second-floor landing.
"Take Eleanor and the elevator!" Carter yelled, reloading on the fly. "I'll hold the stairwell and blow the junction box behind you!"
"Carter, no!" Grace cried.
"Go! Nathan, get my niece out of this slaughterhouse!" Carter roared, turning back to the stairwell as a hail of return gunfire chewed through the drywall around him.
I shoved Eleanor, Grace, and Lily into the industrial service elevator and slammed the metal cage shut. I punched the button for the sub-basement. The hydraulic cables groaned as the elevator descended rapidly through the concrete core of the facility, leaving the sounds of the firefight echoing far above us.
CLANG!
The elevator hit the sub-basement with a violent shudder. The steel gates slid open to reveal a massive, cavernous garage carved directly into the granite bedrock of the mountain. Inside sat three heavy tracked snowcats and two high-speed snowmobiles, surrounded by fuel drums and maintenance racks.
The sub-basement garage doors were open to the howling blizzard outside. Whirling white sheets of snow blew across the concrete floor.
Standing in the center of the garage, his cashmere coat soaked in sleet, holding a sleek matte-black submachine gun, was Marcus Vance.
His eyes were sunken, bloodshot, and wild with the frantic madness of a man who had lost everything in forty-eight hours. Beside him stood two remaining private mercenaries, their rifles leveled directly at our chests.
"End of the line, Nathan," Marcus rasped, the freezing wind whipping his silver hair across his face. "Give me the ledger. Hand the child over to my men, and I might let you and Grace walk out into the storm."
"You're a monster, Marcus," Eleanor said, stepping forward from behind me, her voice echoing clearly over the howling blizzard. "You betrayed your family, you sold your soul to cartels, and now you stand here threatening your own granddaughter."
Marcus flinched for a fraction of a second when he saw Eleanor standing upright and sharp-minded. "Eleanor... you should have stayed asleep. You were happier when you didn't know what the world was."
"I knew what you were the day I married you," Eleanor replied with cutting disgust. "A petty, greedy thief with delusions of royalty."
Marcus's face twisted into an expression of pure, murderous hatred. He raised his weapon straight toward Eleanor’s chest. "Kill them all. Burn the garage."
Before the mercenaries could squeeze their triggers, the overhead service elevator's emergency counterweight snapped with a deafening screech of sheared steel.
The heavy elevator cage plummeted down the shaft, crashing into the sub-basement floor like a meteor and triggering a massive secondary explosion as it crushed the auxiliary fuel tanks behind Marcus’s mercenaries.
A wall of roaring fire and black smoke erupted across the garage.
The shockwave knocked Marcus and his men off their feet.
"Run for the snowcat!" I roared, grabbing Grace's hand and sprinting through the thick curtain of smoke toward the nearest tracked vehicle.
I threw Lily and Eleanor into the heated cabin of the snowcat. Grace vaulted into the passenger seat as I slammed the starter button on the dashboard. The massive diesel engine roared to life with a deep, guttural vibration.
Marcus scrambled out of the burning rubble, his face blackened by soot, his eyes wild with fury. He raised his submachine gun and sprayed the snowcat’s windshield.
Crack-crack-crack!
The reinforced ballistic glass spiderwebbed under the impact, but held.
I slammed the heavy dual-track throttle forward. The massive steel tracks gripped the concrete, churning forward with crushing momentum, smashing straight through the heavy perimeter gates of the garage and bursting out into the blinding white fury of the Alpine blizzard.
Behind us, Marcus screamed in incoherent rage as the burning garage collapsed into a mountain of snow and twisted steel.
Lily curled into Grace's lap in the warm cabin, looking out the back window at the fading flames.
"Are we safe now, Daddy?" Lily asked softly.
May you like
I looked at the digital navigation screen on the dash. We were ten miles from the Swiss Red Cross emergency air-evac station, where a medical transport team was already waiting with the cleared gene-therapy protocol.
"Yes, Lily," I said, reaching out to take Grace’s hand in mine. "We're finally going home."
