Chapter 8 - The Vault in the Clouds
Julian’s heart seized in his chest, the freezing wind blowing into the jet cabin suddenly feeling like liquid ice in his veins.
He dropped the aluminum briefcase into Marcus’s hands, whipped out his smartphone, and tapped the direct satellite line to Vance Tower’s medical security bay.
The encrypted line rang once, twice, and then clicked open into a terrifying cacophony of blaring alarms and shattered glass.
"Mother! Eleanor, can you hear me?" Julian shouted into the microphone, sprinting down the metal boarding stairs into the pouring rain.
Over the phone, the frantic voice of Clara Higgins cut through the deafening background sirens, breathless and terrified.
"Mr. Vance! There's a man dressed in a tactical paramedic uniform, he took out the hallway guard with a pneumatic stun baton!" Clara cried out.
"Clara, barricade the inner recovery suite immediately, the electronic doors have manual steel bolts behind the medicine cabinet!" Julian ordered while running.
"I already pushed the heavy stainless steel cart against the door, but he's cutting through the electronic hinges with an industrial torch!" Clara yelled back.
Marcus ran alongside Julian toward the idling helicopter, shouting urgent tactical commands into his radio to the Manhattan ground team.
"Commander Reyes, scrambled two NYPD aviation interceptors to Vance Tower immediately, we have an active hit team on the seventy-ninth floor!" Marcus roared.
Julian threw himself into the helicopter passenger seat, screaming at the pilot through the intercom before the door had even fully latched.
"Full throttle, north pad, push the turbines to maximum continuous power!" Julian commanded, the veins on his neck bulging with pure adrenaline.
The helicopter lifted instantly, tilting violently forward as its main rotor blades bit into the storm clouds, hurtling back toward the glittering spire of Vance Tower.
Seventy miles per hour turned into one hundred and forty as the aircraft skimmed low over the illuminated asphalt of Queens.
Meanwhile, on the seventy-ninth floor of Vance Tower, inside the private executive medical wing, thick white smoke poured from the ceiling vents.
Clara Higgins stood in the center of the dimly lit recovery room, her bandaged hands trembling as she held an aluminum oxygen tank like a battering ram.
Behind her on the hospital bed, Eleanor Vance was struggling to sit upright, her face pale from the lingering effects of the thallium poisoning.
"Clara, child, leave me," Eleanor pleaded, her voice weak but filled with maternal desperation.
"There is a service lift behind the linens closet, take it to the subterranean garage and save yourself," the matriarch insisted, reaching out with a bruised hand.
"I didn't hold you over an eighty-story drop just to let some coward finish you off in a hospital bed, Mrs. Vance," Clara replied fiercely, refusing to back down.
A shower of bright orange sparks erupted along the seam of the heavy recovery room door as an oxyacetylene torch sliced through the upper steel bolt.
The heavy smell of burning metal and ozone filled the sterilized air, followed immediately by a heavy, brutal kick against the reinforced panel.
The stainless steel medicine cart rattled backward against the floor tiles, screeching under the sheer force of the assault.
A tall, broad-shouldered man wearing black tactical fatigues and a mirrored respirator mask forced his way through the narrowed opening.
In his gloved right hand, he held a pressurized pneumatic syringe filled with a colorless, lethal dose of potassium chloride.
"Step away from the old woman, girl, and you might walk out of this building alive," the assassin growled, his voice muffled by the filter mask.
Clara didn't hesitate for a microsecond; she swung the heavy aluminum oxygen tank in a violent, desperate arc straight into the assassin's side.
The heavy cylinder connected with the man's ribs with a hollow, sickening crunch that forced him sideways against the wall.
He cursed violently, swinging his heavy left arm and striking Clara across the jaw with the back of his tactical gauntlet.
The blow sent Clara crashing against the linoleum floor, her vision exploding into bursts of white light as her lip split open against her teeth.
Eleanor screamed from the bed, ripping the heart monitor leads from her chest and hurling a glass pitcher of water at the attacker's head.
The pitcher shattered against his shoulder, barely slowing his forward momentum as he shook his head and advanced toward the bed.
"You're decades past your expiration date, old woman," the man sneered, raising the syringe to plunge it directly into Eleanor's carotid artery.
From the floor, Clara rolled onto her knees, ignoring the searing agony in her injured palms, and grabbed the severed high-voltage cord of the cardiac defibrillator.
She jammed the exposed copper wire into the puddle of water spreading beneath the assassin's heavy combat boots.
A blinding arc of blue electricity exploded through the water with a deafening crackle, sending ten thousand volts surging straight into the man's legs.
The assassin let out a strangled, agonizing scream as the high-voltage current locked his muscles, his entire body convulsing violently in the flash.
The syringe flew from his paralyzed grip, shattering against the far wall and spraying the lethal neurotoxin uselessly across the sterile tiles.
The man collapsed onto his hands and knees, smoking and gasping for breath, his tactical mask cracking open against the floor.
Before he could recover, Clara lunged forward with the empty oxygen cylinder, driving the heavy base down onto his shoulder with everything she had left.
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He slumped sideways into the corner, unconscious, his breath rattling weakly beneath his shattered jaw as the room fell into sudden, ringing silence.
Outside the shattered panoramic window of the recovery suite, the searchlight of Julian’s helicopter pierced through the driving rain.
