Chapter 45 - The Resurrected Enemy
"Keep moving!" Evelyn urged, pushing me forward down a long, vaulted tunnel carved directly through solid granite.
The walls were reinforced with iron arches, illuminated by flickering fluorescent strips. Ahead of us, the sound of heavy industrial drilling echoed through the stone corridor like the grinding teeth of a subterranean monster.
We rounded a blast-resistant bulkhead and stepped into the central rotunda of Vault Zero.
The room was vast—a subterranean cathedral of Cold War architecture. Towering racks of vacuum-tube servers humming alongside modern fiber-optic arrays rose into the shadows, surrounding a spherical reactor core suspended over a pool of heavy water.
At the base of the reactor, clustered around the primary console, stood half a dozen heavily armed operators surrounding a man in a bespoke charcoal-gray trench coat. He was unbothered by the alarms, calmly sipping coffee from an insulated thermos as his technicians burned through the vault's final biometric lock.
When he heard our boots on the steel catwalk, he slowly turned around.
The breath died in my chest. My heart slammed against my ribs like a trapped animal.
The man had Grandpa Arthur's square jaw, his piercing blue eyes, and the distinct, aristocratic tilt of his head. But he was barely fifty years old, unwrinkled, sleek, and utterly devoid of the warmth that had defined the old man who raised me.
"Hello, Julian," the man said smoothly, his voice carrying an uncanny echo of my grandfather's cadence. "I see you brought my old colleague Evelyn along for the family reunion."
"You..." I choked out, my knuckles turning white against the titanium cylinder. "You're dead. My father said you died in the car accident when I was four."
The man smiled thinly. "Your father was an idiot, Julian. A pathetic, drunken failure who couldn't stomach the scope of his father's ambition. Richard was content to die in poverty while sitting on the greatest repository of sovereign leverage ever conceived."
"He's not your grandfather, Julian," Evelyn snarled, raising her rifle, though three laser sights instantly snapped onto her chest from the mercenaries flanking the console. "This is Arthur Vance Jr. The son Arthur disowned. The one who sold the blueprints to the highest bidder."
"Disowned?" Arthur Jr. scoffed, taking a slow step forward. "My father was a coward who spent fifty years digging holes in the dirt because he was afraid of power. He built a machine capable of commanding global finance and shadow warfare, and then locked it away like a miser hiding gold coins under his mattress."
May you like
He pointed a gloved finger at the cylinder in my hands.
"Hand it over, nephew. Or I'll have my men put a hole through Evelyn's skull, and then take it off your corpse anyway."
