Chapter 4 - The Cutting Wheel
For the next six hours, Vance was no longer the exhausted clerk with dark circles under his eyes. He was a god of geometry.
He worked with absolute, terrifying focus. The world outside the vault ceased to exist. There was only the high-frequency whine of the diamond saw and the continuous drip of cooling water.
Cutting a fifty-carat emerald is a gamble. One microscopic flaw in the stone’s crystalline structure, one millimeter of miscalculated pressure, and the gem would shatter into a million worthless shards.
Elena watched him in silent fascination. His hands, previously clumsy with the cash register, moved with the grace of a concert pianist. He used lasers to map the stone's internal fault lines, marking the precise cleavage points with a specialized ink.
Then came the cuts.
With surgical precision, Vance brought the massive gem to the spinning diamond blade. Sparks of green light seemed to fly from the wheel. The tension in the room was palpable. If Silas’s men found them now, Vance wouldn't even hear them over the scream of the saw.
Crack.
The sound was sharp, definitive. Vance stepped back, wiping his brow.
The Verdean Eye was gone. On the felt-lined tray lay three smaller stones. Two cushion cuts and one exquisite teardrop. They were magnificent, brilliant, and completely untraceable. The micro-engravings containing the two billion dollar ledger had been ground into dust, washed away by the cooling water. Silas’s empire was now locked away forever.
"It's done," Vance exhaled, taking off his magnification loupe.
Elena walked over, picking up the teardrop emerald. "They're beautiful. But how do we sell them? We're stuck in a bunker."
"I have a contact," Vance said, moving toward an old encrypted terminal in the corner of the room. "An old friend named Julian. He caters to private collectors who don't ask questions. But we have to move fast. Silas knows you were in my neighborhood. He'll be tearing the blocks apart."
Vance typed a brief, coded message into the terminal. The response came back three minutes later.
The Watchmaker is listening. Midnight. The old shipyard on Pier 44. Bring the merchandise.
May you like
Vance shut down the terminal, walking over to a locked steel cabinet. He opened it, revealing not jeweler's tools, but a sleek, matte-black Glock 19 and several spare magazines. He racked the slide, the metallic clack echoing in the vault.
"Let's go get paid," Vance said.
