Chapter 34 - The Black Box of the Montgomery Dynasty
*CRACK. CRACK.*
The hollow-point 9mm rounds severed the brass fitting of the high-pressure manifold. A deafening, screaming roar of compressed pure oxygen violently erupted into the confined room, creating a hurricane of freezing vapor and deafening white noise. The sheer force of the expanding gas shoved Victoria’s motorized chair forward three feet, throwing the matriarch against the steel armrests.
"Christian! Fire! Blind fire!" Victoria shrieked, her voice swallowed by the hiss of the ruptured tank.
Christian spun back toward the center of the room, spraying automatic fire in a wide, desperate arc. Bullets ripped through the stainless steel gurneys, shattered the glass incubation pods into millions of glittering fragments, and punched holes through the walls.
Elena was already moving.
Dropping low, she crawled along the floor beneath the cloud of freezing white vapor. The submachine gun fire chewed up the cabinets above her head, showering her back with broken ampoules and surgical instruments. A stray bullet grazed the leather strap of her duffel bag, violently jerking her backward, but she twisted out of the harness, grabbed the bag’s handles, and slammed her shoulder against the auxiliary power breaker on the eastern wall.
She pulled the master lever down with all her weight.
The fluorescent lights died instantly. The room plunged into absolute, pitch-black chaos, illuminated only by the intermittent strobe of Christian’s muzzle flashes.
"Hold your fire, you idiot!" Victoria’s screech was muffled by the roaring gas. "You’ll ignite the room!"
Elena didn't wait for him to reload. She lunged forward in the dark, using the sound of Victoria’s mechanical wheezing as her acoustic compass. She didn't aim for the mother; she aimed for the heavy steel safe embedded in the concrete floor beneath the central surgical station—the safe whose dial she had seen marked with the family crest.
Julian’s ring. The ring wasn't just a cyber-transmitter. The signet had an eight-sided irregular base.
Kneeling in the freezing mist, Elena slammed the face of the ring into the circular indentation in the center of the floor vault.
*CLICK.*
A mechanical counter-weight groaned. A heavy circular steel hatch sprang upward four inches, venting a cloud of dry, nitrogen-cooled air.
Elena reached inside blindly. Her hands closed around a heavy, rectangular carbon-fiber case—the Montgomery dynasty’s black box. It held the non-circulating sovereign bonds, the biometric kill-switches for the European accounts, and the original, un-redacted birth certificates that proved Victoria Montgomery was legally dead twenty years ago under a different identity in South America.
"Elena!" Christian’s voice came from five feet away, the heavy clatter of his wet combat boots splashing through the water. He pulled an emergency flare from his tactical vest and struck it against his hip.
A blinding, sulfurous red light exploded through the smoke.
The crimson glare revealed Christian standing directly above Elena, his face twisted into an expression of murderous triumph. The submachine gun was leveled straight at her forehead. Behind him, Victoria sat trapped in her tilted chair, frantically trying to realign her oxygen mask, her one organic eye burning with pure, unadulterated hatred.
"End of the line, bride," Christian snarled, his finger whitening on the trigger.
Elena looked up at him through the blinding red smoke. She didn't flinch. She didn't plead.
"Julian wasn't the weak one, Christian," Elena whispered.
With her free hand, she reached behind her and pulled the pin on the magnesium thermite grenade she had lifted from Julian’s vest before she dragged him into the closet.
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She dropped the grenade directly into the open vault at Christian’s feet.
***
