Chapter 35 - The Bloodhound on the Shore
"Run!" Christian screamed, the arrogance instantly evaporating from his voice.
He didn't try to shoot Elena. The sheer, instinctual terror of three thousand degrees of burning chemical heat overcame every predatory impulse. He turned and dove backward toward the iron doorway, throwing himself flat against the flooded floor.
Elena rolled behind the solid steel frame of the open vault door just as the thermite ignited.
A pillar of blinding white-violet flame erupted from the floor shaft, vaporizing the remaining oxygen in the room with a hollow, concussive *THUMP*. The heat was instantaneous and terrifying, blistering the paint on the walls and turning the steel gurneys into glowing cherry-red skeletons. The safe’s contents—the sovereign bearer bonds and false identities—were consumed in a fraction of a second, but Elena had already pulled the carbon-fiber data core into her chest.
Victoria’s motorized chair shrieked as its tires melted against the boiling floor. "Christian! Get me out! *Get me out!*"
Christian scrambled to his feet, coughing violently through the thick, toxic smoke, grabbed the back handles of his mother's wheelchair, and violently dragged the screaming, smoking apparatus out through the vault entrance, disappearing back into the spiral stairwell.
Elena didn't follow them up toward the house. Up was suicide; the mansion was already surrounded by Christian’s hired coastal mercenaries.
She turned toward the back of the surgical room. Behind the shattered incubation units was a low drainage hatch, five feet in diameter, used for flushing chemical waste directly into the sea caves below the cliffs.
Elena kicked the rusted iron grate. The corroded metal gave way with a screech, tumbling into an empty vertical shaft.
Clutching the carbon-fiber case to her ribs with one arm and keeping the Glock clenched in her teeth, Elena swung her legs into the drainage chute and dropped into the abyss.
She slid through thirty feet of slimy, algae-slicked concrete, the friction burning through her tactical pants and tearing at her palms. The air turned brutally cold, smelling of open salt water and rotting kelp.
With a violent splash, she hit the black water of the sea cave below.
The shock of the freezing ocean took her breath away, driving cold needles through her lungs. She fought her way to the surface, breaking through the foam, coughing and gasping for air.
She was inside the Cathedral Cave—a massive, vaulted sea cavern beneath the northern cliffs of the Montgomery estate. Outside, the storm was reaching its crescendo; five-foot swells surged through the cave mouth, slamming against the jagged black basalt rocks.
Tied to an iron mooring ring fifty yards away, bobbing violently in the surging tide, was Christian’s black-ops infiltration boat: a rigid-hull inflatable vessel with twin five-hundred-horsepower silent-outboard engines.
Elena began to swim toward it with steady, rhythmic strokes, fighting the undertow. Every muscle in her body burned, her abdomen felt heavy and strained, but the cold water cleared her mind.
Just as her hand reached for the inflatable boat’s rubber pontoon, a heavy green laser dot danced across the churning foam in front of her face.
It stopped directly over her left collarbone.
Elena froze in the water, treading slowly to keep her head above the swells.
Standing on the rocky ledge above the mooring platform, silhouette framed against the stormy mouth of the cave, stood a man in full tactical maritime gear. He held a suppressed sniper rifle aimed down at her skull.
"Don't move, Mrs. Montgomery," a voice said over the roar of the surf.
It wasn't Christian. It wasn't one of the private security guards.
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The man lowered his thermal night-vision goggles, revealing the weather-beaten, scar-crossed face of Marcus Vance—the chief of maritime security whom Victoria had supposedly executed in the yacht’s engine room three days ago.
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