Chapter 10 - The False Victory
Inside the fifty-second-floor boardroom, the twelve FBI SWAT agents froze in their tracks as Julian Mercer pressed his thumb tightly against the red dead-man’s trigger in his left hand while keeping his nine-millimeter pistol jammed beneath Vivian’s chin against the panoramic glass wall.
Vivian shrieked in raw terror, her thirty-eight-thousand-dollar white lace wedding dress trembling against the glass fifty stories above the glittering traffic of Fifth Avenue as she realized the lover she had betrayed Nathaniel for was ready to blow them both into dust to buy his escape back to the helipad.
Julian shouted across the mahogany table for the federal agents to drop their rifles and clear a path to the roof stairs, boasting that if his thumb slipped off the detonator switch for even half a second, the thermite charges packed around the fifty-first-floor central load columns would melt the structural steel and drop the entire executive suite into the street.
Nobody in the room knew how to bypass a hardwired structural demolition line from inside the boardroom—except the man whose father had poured every ton of concrete in that skyscraper thirty years ago.
Keeping his eyes locked on Julian’s sweating face while pretending to raise his hands in slow surrender beside the head of the conference table, Nathaniel slid his right shoe two inches backward beneath the mahogany pedestal and pressed the recessed brass maintenance pedal that controlled the exterior window-washing rig parked just above the fifty-second-floor cornice.
With a sudden, thunderous metallic clank right behind Julian’s back on the other side of the glass, the two-ton steel window-washer cradle dropped three feet and slammed its rubber bumper squarely against the exterior tempered pane behind Julian’s head while its high-intensity halogen work floodlights flared straight into Julian’s eyes.
Startled by the blinding flash and the violent vibration of the glass behind his skull, Julian flinched and swung his pistol barrel half an inch away from Vivian’s neck toward the window.
That half-second was all Nathaniel and Clara needed.
While Clara dove across the polished mahogany table and slid her heavy titanium laptop case straight into Julian’s ankles to knock his boots out from under him, Nathaniel closed the fifteen feet between them like a freight train, catching Julian’s left hand in a crushing two-handed grip before his thumb could release the dead-man’s switch and driving a brutal right elbow squarely into the bridge of Julian’s nose.
As Julian collapsed unconscious onto the carpet in a spray of blood with Nathaniel’s fingers holding the detonator switch safely depressed until the FBI bomb technician clamped a steel safety pin through the mechanism, two federal marshals dragged a sobbing, broken Vivian Caldwell off the floor and locked both conspirators into heavy steel chains.
By dawn the next morning, as the golden autumn sun rose over the Manhattan skyline, the nightmare appeared to be completely, triumphantly over: the one-point-two billion dollars was restored to Whitfield Holdings’ accounts, every corrupt board member was in federal custody, Clara’s name was officially cleared by the SEC Director along with the full deed to her Millbrook diner, and when Nathaniel pulled Clara into his arms on the quiet private terrace outside his office and kissed her deeply, he knew he had finally found the one woman on earth who wanted him without a single dollar attached to his name.
Yet ten minutes later, as Nathaniel and Clara walked back into his private founder’s study so he could press his biometric thumbprint onto the master restoration tablet to permanently unlock the global Whitfield defense and shipping trusts, his private desk telephone rang with a frantic emergency call from the Chief of Trauma Surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
The surgeon’s terrified voice echoed over the speakerphone, warning Nathaniel not to touch any corporate computer terminals because the police had just discovered that Howard Ellis had never been in a coma at all—his ninth-floor ICU room was completely empty, his medical chart had been faked with synthetic blood, and the two federal marshals guarding his door had just been found dead with their throats slit.
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Before Nathaniel could snatch his thumb back from the glass biometric scanner on his desk, the eighty-inch wall monitor across the study flickered to life with a live, encrypted satellite feed from the Sovereign Clearinghouse in Geneva, where a completely uninjured, smiling Howard Ellis stood in a bespoke suit beside Nathaniel’s supposedly dead third stepmother, Victoria Whitfield, watching the final green transfer bar hit one hundred percent.
And as the reinforced steel blast doors of Nathaniel’s private study slammed shut automatically under a remote lockdown protocol and thick, odorless white sleeping gas began to hiss from the ceiling vents around them, Howard looked straight through the camera at a horrified Clara Vance and thanked her warmly for doing her job—revealing that Howard’s shell company had secretly purchased the Bluebird Diner in Millbrook six months ago and hired Clara specifically to lure Nathaniel back to Manhattan so he would use his founder thumbprint to hand them the entire four-billion-dollar empire before he and Clara died together inside his father’s sealed vault.
