Chapter 7 - The Ghost in the Morphine Drip
For five seconds, the only sound in the master bedroom was the patter of cold autumn rain lashing against the tall French windows overlooking the dark gardens.
Nathaniel stared at the three-year-old hospice nursing license displayed on Evelyn's tablet screen—showing the unmistakable face of the woman standing before him with darker hair and the legal name Valerie Cross—and then he looked back at Vivian.
He remembered walking into his seventy-one-year-old father's bedroom two nights before the funeral, finding his father gasping and disoriented under a sudden, massive wave of morphine while a blonde nurse in the hallway hallway hurriedly pulled her surgical mask up and walked away toward Evelyn's wing.
Do you think anybody ever wanted just me, his dying father had whispered, clutching Nathaniel's wrist with bruised fingers because Charles Whitfield had just woken up while Evelyn and the night nurse were injecting his IV bag and laughing about how quickly his heart would give out once the forty-million-dollar life insurance policy cleared!
You murdered my father while he lay helpless in that bed across the hall, and then you put on a dead heiress's name and let Evelyn bring you into my house to do the exact same thing to me, Nathaniel whispered, a rage so cold and absolute rising inside him that Vivian shrank back against the mirror in sheer terror.
You can't prove a single thing from a three-year-old file when your father was already cremated, Nate! Vivian hissed, her voice cracking with panic as she glanced toward the hallway door.
And in about thirty seconds, Julian's armed security team is going to walk up those stairs, shoot you dead as an armed intruder breaking into a receiver's estate, and claim you murdered me too if you don't let me walk out that door!
Actually, Valerie, your accomplice Evelyn was so paranoid that you and Julian would cut her out of the twelve-billion-dollar Millbrook corridor deal that she kept an encrypted audio diary of every meeting you three had—including the night you poisoned Charles Whitfield's IV bag, Clara said coldly, holding up a tiny silver flash drive she had just pulled from Evelyn's laptop port.
Downstairs in the main foyer, a shrill security bell suddenly clanged to life as one of the catering managers discovered the two unconscious guards in the basement coatroom and shouted that an intruder was on the second floor!
Heavy booted footsteps thundered up the marble grand staircase toward the master wing, accompanied by Julian Sterling's voice barking orders for his private security contractors to shoot on sight.
Nathaniel didn't waste a second.
He grabbed Vivian by the arm of her crimson gown, marched her straight into the soundproof walk-in cedar dressing closet, stuffed a silk scarf neatly between her teeth so she couldn't scream, and locked the heavy brass deadbolt from the outside before pocketing the key.
Wait—the cold-storage cryptographic key is behind the hearthstone in the study next door, Nathaniel told Clara, pulling her through the connecting door into his father's oak-paneled library and bolting the heavy hallway doors just as the guards' fists slammed against the outside wood!
Nathaniel dropped to one knee beside the massive stone fireplace and pressed the hidden spring latch beneath the carved stone mantel, sliding back a six-inch block of granite to reveal a recessed titanium cylinder locked with a mechanical four-pin keyhole that only opened with his late father's gold pocket watch.
My father's pocket watch isn't in my desk—Evelyn must have moved it! Nathaniel cursed as bullets splintered the upper oak panels of the library door.
Look in the oilskin pouch from my grandfather's safe in Millbrook! Clara shouted, pulling a heavy gold Patek Philippe pocket watch on a braided leather fob out of her backpack and pressing it straight into Nathaniel's palm.
Your father mailed that watch to my grandfather four days before he died and told him to guard it with his life until you came to Millbrook!
Nathaniel's heart leaped as he inserted the watch stem into the titanium cylinder lock, turned it ninety degrees, and pulled out the gleaming steel cryptographic ledger drive that controlled all four billion dollars of the Whitfield empire!
With the hallway doors giving way behind them, Nathaniel kicked open the latched French doors leading out onto the second-floor conservatory roof, wrapped his arm tightly around Clara's waist, and guided her down the copper rain-gutter trellis into the dark rhododendron hedges just as Julian's gunmen burst into the empty room above.
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Five minutes later, soaking wet and breathing hard inside the cab of the pickup truck hidden in the woods, Nathaniel plugged the steel cryptographic key into Evelyn's stolen tablet to broadcast the emergency override signal to Zurich and clear Howard Ellis's name—only for the screen to flash red with an incoming live video stream that made both of their hearts stop dead!
On the screen sat a grainy, real-time camera feed from the sub-basement boiler room beneath the Maple Leaf Diner in Millbrook, where a bruised and bleeding Howard Ellis—who had never been in federal custody at all—was chained to the main cast-iron steam pipe beside forty pounds of industrial blasting gelatin and a digital timer counting down from fourteen minutes!
