“Sebastian,” Marcus said softly.
“Yes, Marcus?”
“Eleanor is awake at Saint Anthony’s.”
“She asked me to tell you that the Apex Health Logistics pitch… was never a pitch for a marketing campaign.”
I turned my head.
“What was it?”
Marcus Vance looked out through the panoramic windows toward the Rocky Mountains rising sharp and purple against the western sky:
“Apex Health Logistics isn’t a pharmaceutical client, Sebastian.”
“Apex is the primary covert medical extraction and sovereign asset recovery wing of the **Department of Defense’s Special Operations Logistics Command**.”
“Eleanor was the founder.”
“And that pitch deck you spent all night polishing… was your technical entrance examination.”
Marcus tapped the titanium key on the table:
“She has an operational briefing for you at two o’clock.”
“And she told me to tell you…”
A heavy, five-second silence hung in the air:
“…that Carter Holbrook wasn’t working alone.”
***
CHAPTER 9: PROLOGUE TO PART 3: THE CIPHER IN THE VAULT
The private elevator at the end of the executive executive suite did not chime.
It gave a low, seismic, subterranean shudder that rattled the brass drafting compass resting on my desk:
*CLATTER-SHOCK.
*
The floorboards beneath our feet seemed to drop two inches.
Inside the locked server vault at the rear of the production room, sixty feet down the hall, the automated high-voltage alarms began to chirp with rapid, rhythmic, synchronized warning codes:
*BEEP… BEEP… BEEP.
*
`ALERT: REMOTE SATELLITE BREACH DETECTED`
`ORIGIN: ZURICH // FINANCIAL CLEARING INTERFACE`
`TARGET: THE VANCE-STERLING COMMERCIAL REPOSITORY`
`MESSAGE: “THE FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK WAS AN ENCRYPTED BEACON.”
`
`”THE EXTRACTION IS IN MOTION.”
`
`”AND THE MAN WHO PLANTED THE SYNTHETIC GAS IN ELEANOR’S CAR…”`
`”IS CURRENTLY SITTING IN YOUR LIVING ROOM IN LAKEWOOD.”
`
The room seemed to lose its gravitational center in a fraction of a second.
The blood on my shirt cuff grew cold as mountain ice.
My phone in my coat pocket began to vibrate—a frantic, continuous, violent pulse that rattled against my ribs:
*BZZZZT.
BZZZZT.
BZZZZT.
*
I pulled out the phone.
The caller identifier on the glowing screen was not a corporate extension.
It was my home landline in Lakewood.
I swiped the screen.
I brought the phone to my ear.
A voice answered—smooth, cultured, terrifyingly reasonable, accompanied by the faint, background sound of my seven-year-old daughter Chloe practicing her scales on our upright piano:
*”Sebastian, my dear boy,”* the man said through the earpiece.
