“And through my womb… unto Julian!”
“Your family syndicate—**Mitchell Propulsion Dynamics**—could not buy Conduit Ten.”
“Your patron, former **Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance**, could not seize it through commercial factoring without triggering an automatic military inquest.”
“So your family deployed you!”
“You married me to position Mitchell Defense over the surface access hatch.”
“And when you shoved Julian into that ravine fifteen years ago, you realized that a disabled, dependent son would give you perpetual legal justification to control our family’s sovereign estate!”
I leaned down until my clear slate-gray eyes filled his entire field of vision:
“Tonight is Julian’s eighteenth birthday, Richard.”
“Midnight, October second, twenty-twenty-six!”
“The seventy-year spendthrift restriction on Arthur Mercer’s charter expires in precisely four hours!”
“Under civilian probate law, an incapacitated minor issue defaults to his father’s conservatorship upon his eighteenth birthday.”
“You brought thirty-four corporate executives to this dinner tonight because you had an emergency plenary conservatorship deed hidden in your briefcase!”
“You intended to have Julian sign a power of attorney over his birthday cake!”
“And at zero-two-hundred hours tonight in Washington…”
I bared my teeth in a razor-thin, cold line of white bone:
“…Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance was scheduled to convene an extraordinary emergency midnight session of the Supreme Court to execute the master conveyance deed—transferring forty miles of nuclear defense bedrock to **The Valkyrie Trust** in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, for sixty billion dollars in carried interest!”
CHAPTER 4: THE BREACH AT BLOOMFIELD HILLS
Richard Mitchell let out an un-human, animalistic shriek from the floorboards:
*“SECURITY!
SEIZE THEM!
BRADLEY, GET THE SATELLITE PHONE!
CALL ARTHUR VANCE!
CALL THE CHIEF JUSTICE!”*
Richard’s brother Bradley lunged toward the sideboard where his briefcase lay, clawing for his encrypted satellite transceiver:
*CLACK.*
*KABOOOOM.*
The heavy, four-inch-thick quartered-oak and iron-strapped double front entrance doors of the Bloomfield Hills mansion did not swing open on their brass hinges.
They were cleaved clean off their structural steel jambs by an eighty-pound
