Chapter 63 - Evasion at Four Thousand Feet
The road climbed steeply into the western foothills, leaving the Atlantic fog behind and plunging into thick, frost-laden forests of pine and spruce. Snow had begun to fall, fat flakes sticking to the cracked windshield as the sedan’s wipers groaned against the ice.
"Where are we going, Arthur?" I asked, checking the mirror every thirty seconds. There were no headlights behind us yet, but the silence felt worse than pursuit. It felt like an ambush waiting to spring.
"The kill switch cannot be accessed remotely," Arthur said. His voice was growing weaker, punctuated by long pauses where he seemed to struggle for breath. "The original server cluster wasn't built on a ship or in an underground bunker. Those were relay nodes. Decoys designed to draw the fire."
"Then where is it?"
"Mount Washington," he said. "The Old Weather Observatory on the summit. Built in 1932. Rebuilt during the Cold War as a hardened electromagnetic pulse redoubt. It’s the only installation on the eastern seaboard that operates completely off the civilian grid, insulated by sheer rock and sixty feet of reinforced granite."
"That summit is over six thousand feet high," I said, staring at the swirling blizzard outside. "The access road is closed in the winter. No one drives up there in conditions like this."
"You aren't driving to the peak," Arthur replied. "Drive to the base cog railway depot at Marshfield. There is a maintenance snowcat inside the secondary freight shed. The keypad code is the year Lily was born, reversed."
I gripped the wheel tighter. "And you? Where are you speaking from?"
"From a room where the air smells like formaldehyde and the walls are lead-lined," Arthur whispered. A grim, self-deprecating chuckle hitched in his chest. "I have not seen the sun in eight years, Claire. When the syndicate discovered I was building the ledger, they poisoned my water supply with polonium-210. They thought they had buried me. But a man with enough capital can build an intensive care unit beneath a mountain and buy thirty years of silence."
Suddenly, the dashboard radio hissed with static, cutting over Arthur’s transmission.
A high-pitched tone sounded, followed by the synthetic pulse of an automated emergency broadcast. But instead of weather warnings, a series of coordinates began scrolling across the digital screen of my dashboard:
*LAT 44.2705 N, LON 71.3032 W. INTERCEPT IN PROGRESS. TARGET LOCKED.*
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Above us, cutting through the heavy snowclouds, the deep, thrumming vibration of twin turboprop engines shook the frame of the sedan.
They weren't on the road behind us. They were already in the sky.
