Chapter 13 - The Bridge
I grabbed Margaret and pulled her behind the SUV.
A shot struck the pavement.
Mason had hidden shooters on the riverbank.
Grant’s teams moved early.
Sirens rose from both ends of the bridge.
Mason pressed the remote again.
The explosives did not detonate.
His smile vanished.
Grant’s bomb squad had intercepted the wireless frequency thirty seconds earlier.
But Mason still had a backup.
He pulled a dead-man switch from his coat.
“Come closer,” he said.
“Or I release it.”
Margaret began shaking.
“You promised me immunity.”
I looked at her.
“You believed him?”
Mason laughed.
“She spent her entire life believing monsters would honor agreements.”
A car appeared beyond the south gate.
Lily’s car.
It accelerated toward the bridge.
“Stop her,” I shouted into the wire.
Grant answered.
“We’re trying.”
The car struck the barrier.
Once.
Twice.
The gate bent inward.
Lily was not driving.
A man sat behind the wheel.
Lily was in the passenger seat with her hands bound.
Daniel Mercer drove the car.
Richard’s attorney.
The man who had coached witnesses.
Protected the network.
And pretended to be frightened.
He had been Mason’s inside contact from the beginning.
Daniel stopped fifty feet away.
He held a gun against Lily’s side.
“Drop the case, Arthur.”
I placed it on the ground.
Mason nodded toward Margaret.
“Open the maintenance hatch.”
She stared at him.
“I don’t know the code.”
“You set the code.”
“That was twenty years ago.”
“Then remember.”
Margaret approached a panel near the bridge support.
Her hands shook over the keypad.
She entered six digits.
Nothing happened.
Mason raised the switch.
“Again.”
She tried another sequence.
A steel hatch opened beneath the roadway.
Cold air rose from below.
Mason motioned toward it.
“Everyone inside.”
Daniel forced Lily from the car.
She stumbled.
I moved toward her.
Daniel pressed the gun against her neck.
“One more step.”
Lily looked at me.
Her face was calm.
Too calm.
Then I noticed her right hand.
She was holding something small behind her leg.
A piece of broken mirror from the car.
She had cut through part of the plastic restraint.
Mason ordered us down the ladder.
The maintenance chamber was larger than expected.
Steel cabinets filled the room.
Servers blinked along the walls.
The original archive.
Every secret.
Every payment.
Every crime.
Mason wanted the damaged drive because it contained Rachel’s copy.
He intended to destroy both at once.
Daniel pushed Lily beside me.
Margaret stood near the server controls.
Mason placed explosives across the central cabinet.
“You could have killed me years ago,” he told me.
“When you arrested my father.”
“You were a child.”
“And mercy made me this.”
“No.”
“Victor made you this.”
“You just kept choosing it.”
His expression hardened.
He raised the dead-man switch.
Lily moved.
She sliced Daniel’s wrist with the mirror.
He screamed.
The gun fell.
I drove into Mason before he could release the switch.
We struck the floor.
The device rolled away.
Margaret reached it first.
She picked it up.
Everyone froze.
Mason stared at her.
“Give it to me.”
Margaret looked at the explosives.
Then at Lily.
For the first time, shame crossed her face.
“I destroyed one mother.”
“I will not destroy another.”
She crushed the switch beneath her heel.
Nothing happened.
Mason smiled.
“That wasn’t the detonator.”
A timer lit up on the main server.
01:00.
00:59.
The archive doors locked.
May you like
Water began pouring into the chamber from the river.
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