Chapter 69 - The Fracture of Alliances
We crested the final ridge at eleven forty-five.
The summit of Mount Washington was an alien landscape of blue-tinted rime ice and brutal, horizontal winds that screamed like jet engines. The Old Weather Observatory stood like a battered concrete fortress against the howling gale, completely encased in three feet of solid ice.
Arthur killed the engine inside the covered vehicle bay beneath the main weather tower. As the roar of the diesel died, the only sound left was the laboured, rattling gasp of his breath.
Blood was trickling from his nose, freezing instantly against his upper lip. The climb and the altitude had pushed his failing body past the point of endurance.
"Arthur," I said, kneeling beside him as he struggled to unbuckle his harness.
"We have... nine minutes," he wheezed, his eyes cloudy, his hands shaking so violently he couldn't grasp the door release. "Take the case from the footwell. Help me out."
Lily and I supported his weight between us, dragging him through the reinforced blast door into the interior of the observatory.
Inside, the complex was dead quiet, save for the rhythmic, low-frequency hum of a deep-well geothermal turbine. We dragged him down a spiral staircase into the granite sub-basement, where a single, monolithic server rack glowed with a lattice of amber indicator lights.
In the center of the console were two key slots, separated by three feet of brushed aluminum.
*COUNTDOWN TO ZERO: 00:07:42.*
Arthur fell into the operator’s chair, his head rolling back against the steel headrest. He reached into his pocket and placed the silver flash drive on the console.
"Slot one," he whispered, pointing a trembling finger. "Insert it."
I took the drive. The silver casing was warm from my pocket. I aligned the pins and pushed it firmly into the left terminal.
The amber lights on the console flared brilliant green. A prompt flashed on the CRT monitor:
*TOKEN 1 ACCEPTED. ENTER BIOMETRIC TERMINATION KEY.*
Arthur looked up at me. His face was gray, the shadow of death already creeping across his sunken cheeks. He reached inside his coat, unclipped the portable medical harness, and exposed the sealed port above his collarbone.
"Pull the blue lead," he whispered. "It breaks the circuit to the internal pump. The machine will register my cessation of life within sixty seconds and transmit the kill sequence."
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I froze. "Arthur, no. There has to be another way. Julian—we have to expose them legally!"
"There is no law for men who write the currency, Claire," he rasped, his vision fading. "Pull the lead. Let me rest."
