Chapter 60 - The Architect Unmasked
I blew the locking bolts of the auxiliary bay with a high-pressure breaching charge.
The steel door flew inward, filling the cramped, high-tech server room with dense gray smoke. Through the haze, a lone figure stood calmly before a glowing wall of monitors, his back turned to me.
"You always were remarkably resilient, Marcus," Victor said without turning around. He held a small tablet in his hands, watching lines of green data stream into an off-site cloud repository. "Father used to call it thick-headedness. I called it an irritating lack of ambition."
"Turn around, Victor," I commanded, my sights locked on the center of his skull. "Hands where I can see them."
Victor slowly turned.
He had aged five years, his sharp jawline lined with faint scars, but the arrogant, condescending smirk was identical to the day he supposedly died. He was dressed in a dark tactical turtleneck, exuding the effortless calm of a man who believed he held every card in the deck.
"You think you’ve won because you sank an obsolete Cold War submersible and raided my yacht?" Victor chuckled softly, shaking his head. "Tartarus wasn't an operational platform, little brother. It was a decoy."
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My finger tightened on the trigger. "A decoy for what?"
"For the payload," Victor said, his eyes glittering with cold madness. "Tartarus didn't just dive to eighteen thousand feet to die. It deployed an autonomous seismic cavitation array directly into the Mendocino Fracture Zone. Whispering Pines was the relay. This yacht was the command link. And while you were playing the hero, the countdown initiated."
