Chapter 54 - The Sea Hunter
The blinding beam of the searchlight carved a brilliant circle of daylight into the pitch-black waves, pinning us in its glare. The downdraft from the approaching helicopter whipped the sea into a frenzy of stinging spray, driving needles of salt into my eyes.
"Mom, who is that?" Lily screamed against the deafening roar of the rotors.
I couldn't answer. I reached into my pocket beneath the water, checking frantic fingers against the seam of my coat. The flash drive was still there, tucked safely into the zipped inner lining, but it wouldn't matter if we were dragged into the sky by Victoria’s private security.
The helicopter hovered fifty feet above the swell, its sleek, unmarked black fuselage gleaming under the moonlight. The side door slid back with a mechanical clack.
A figure in a heavy tactical harness stepped onto the skid, holding an assault rifle across his chest. Through the blinding glare, I couldn't make out a face—only the dark outline of a combat helmet and the silhouette of a heavy rescue winch being prepped for deployment.
*They found us too fast,* I thought, despair rising like bile in my throat. *Victoria had an extraction unit on standby.*
A heavy cable descended from the winch, splashing into the water twenty feet from where we were struggling to stay afloat. Attached to the harness was a rescue diver in a black wetsuit. The moment he hit the sea, he cut through the waves with powerful strokes, closing the distance between us in seconds.
I pushed Lily behind me, baring my teeth, prepared to fight with fingernails and teeth against whatever mercenary was sent to finish us.
The diver surfaced three feet away, ripping off his dive mask and goggles.
"Claire! Don't fight me!"
The voice was rough, choked with saltwater, but intimately familiar.
"Julian?" I gasped, the cold receding for a heartbeat under the shock of recognition.
Julian Mercer. Arthur Vance’s former head of personal security—the man who had vanished three days after Arthur’s alleged death, the man the news claimed had fled to Switzerland with thirty million dollars in embezzled bonds.
"Arthur’s failsafe pinged my terminal the second the melody locked into the mainframe," Julian shouted over the rotor wash, wrapping a heavy rescue sling under my arms and reaching for Lily. "We have less than three minutes before Consortium interceptors scramble out of Bangor. Grab the line!"
"Victoria was down there, Julian! She had a lift—"
"I know! My team tracked her private transport heading inland toward the airstrip," he said, cinching the straps around Lily’s waist and locking the heavy steel carabiners to the central winch cable. "She’s not running. She’s mobilizing the rest of the Board. The broadcast you triggered disrupted their nodes, but it didn't kill the central antenna. We have to finish it from the sky!"
Julian signaled the crew above with a high-intensity strobe attached to his shoulder.
The winch groaned, and the cable tightened. In an instant, the crushing weight of the ocean fell away as we were hoisted upward through the freezing gale, the black expanse of the Atlantic shrinking beneath our dangling boots.
Hands reached out from the open bay of the helicopter, dragging Lily and me over the diamond-plate threshold and into the warm, kerosene-scented interior of the cabin.
We collapsed onto the metal floor, gasping, shaking uncontrollably as a technician threw thermal blankets over our shoulders.
The side door slammed shut, cutting off the worst of the wind, and the helicopter banked hard to the west, climbing steeply into the storm clouds.
Julian hauled himself inside, dripping wet, and unclipped his helmet, revealing the weathered, scarred face of a man who had been fighting a quiet war in the shadows for a decade. He looked down at Lily, then at me, his eyes wide with a mixture of reverence and terror.
"You really did it," Julian murmured. "Arthur’s little girl sang the song."
"We haven't won anything yet," I said, my teeth chattering as I clutched Lily against my chest. I pulled the silver drive from my pocket and held it out. "The files are in here. But Victoria said there's an antenna. What did she mean?"
Julian’s face darkened, the cabin’s red tactical lights casting deep hollows beneath his cheekbones.
"The Consortium knew Arthur might try a subterranean purge," he explained, walking over to a mission terminal mounted to the bulkhead. "So Victoria built a redundancy on the highest point along the eastern seaboard: Mount Katahdin. A microwave relay tower disguised as a NOAA weather observatory. In forty minutes, that tower will transmit the master encryption key to their orbital satellites, overriding Arthur’s shutdown and locking the global banking sector permanently under their private ledger."
Lily looked up from beneath the thermal blanket, her face pale. "Can we stop it?"
May you like
"Only if we get to that tower before Victoria does," Julian said grimly. "And she’s already ten miles ahead of us."
***
