Chapter 65 - The Mother Who Never Died
The storm hit us like a wall of broken glass. The wind howled through the narrow French pass, tearing at our coats, wiping out our footprints within seconds of taking a step.
Behind us, the veterinarian's clinic erupted in a blinding orange fireball as the breachers breached the front door with thermite charges, realizing too late that we had rigged the remaining oxygen tanks with a tripwire.
The shockwave rolled across the snowfield, knocking us to our knees.
I scrambled up, pulling Khloe with me, dragging her into the dense cover of the black alpine pines. Above us, the road carved through the rock face toward the suspended steel suspension bridge of the Pont de la Caille—the only passage connecting the mountain ridge to the private airfield in Annecy.
Through the whiteout, twin headlights cut through the swirling snow on the upper road.
A massive, armored Mercedes Maybach limousine, escorted by two matte-black G-Wagons, was idling in the center of the suspension bridge. The wind swayed the massive steel structure gently over the terrifying, thousand-foot gorge of the Usses River below.
"Look," Khloe breathed, pointing through the frozen branches.
Inside the rear passenger compartment of the Maybach, visible through the tinted, heated glass, sat a baby's medical incubator—a high-tech, battery-powered neonatal transport pod glowing with soft blue ambient light.
And standing outside the Maybach, braving the howling gale in a full-length sable fur coat, was a woman who should have been in federal custody in Boston.
Catherine Vance.
She held an encrypted satellite phone to her ear, her face cold, aristocratic, and completely devoid of human warmth.
Beside her, two guards unloaded a heavy titanium medical case onto the bridge’s steel grate.
Then, the rear door of the second G-Wagon opened.
Anthony Vance stepped out, leaning heavily on his cane, his scarred, bandaged face wrapped against the biting cold. He limped toward his mother.
We were twenty yards away, concealed in the snowbanks at the base of the bridge’s support cables. Grace was silent against Khloe's chest, breathing steadily, protected from the lethal storm.
Khloe raised the shotgun, resting the heavy barrel across a concrete anchor block, centering the bead directly between Catherine Vance’s cold, lifeless eyes.
"Khloe, wait," I whispered, reaching for her wrist. "Look at the perimeter. Look under the bridge."
Khloe paused, her finger poised on the trigger.
Under the steel girders of the bridge, attached to the main suspension cables, were six rectangular blocks of military-grade C4 demolition charges, their digital timers blinking in synchronized, rhythmic unison:
*03:00... 02:59... 02:58...*
Catherine hadn't brought Anthony here to save his life with the baby's bone marrow.
Catherine had brought Anthony, the baby, and every witness to the edge of an abyss.
May you like
She wasn't running an extraction.
She was cutting the final loose end of the Vance dynasty—and her own son was walking straight into the slaughter.
