Julian didn’t freeze. The adrenaline bleeding through his veins burned away the pain in his shoulder, replaced by a raw, instinctual fury. Instead of raising his hands, he dropped his weight to the right, driving his elbow backward into the throat of the man standing behind him.
A wet gasp tore from the assailant’s throat. Julian spun, wrapping his good arm around the man’s forearm, wrenching the weapon free just as a suppressed round thudded into the soft dirt beside his boot. He slammed the butt of the heavy Glock into the attacker’s jaw. The man collapsed onto the rotting timber, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Julian snatched the silver key from the wet wood, his breath coming in ragged, shallow bursts.
Your father.
The words echoed in his head like a physical blow. Thomas Vance had been buried a decade ago in a closed-casket funeral after an explosion at his research facility in Geneva. Julian had stood in the pouring rain, watching the bronze casket lower into the dirt. Everything he had suffered over the last ten years—the betrayals, the dark money trails, the hunted existence—had been built on the ashes of his father’s ruined legacy.
If Thomas Vance was alive, every lie Julian had ever unraveled was just a single thread in a much larger, darker web.
He scrambled up the bank, slipping through the dense tree line away from the flashing red and blue strobe lights of the Interpol tactical team. Sirens wailed across the harbor behind him as emergency craft swept the bay, but Julian moved like a phantom through the rain-soaked forest, driven by a desperate, single-minded focus.
He pulled Marcus’s encrypted phone from his coat. The cracked screen still glowed faintly. Julian pressed the speaker icon on the incoming text chain and dialed the unlisted international number.
It rang once. Twice.
«I told you to wait until the Zurich vault was secured,» a woman’s voice rasped over the line. It wasn’t Clara. The voice was older, gravelly, and tight with cold authority. «Interpol is crawling all over the marina. Is the boy secured?»
Julian kept his breathing silent, pressing the receiver tight against his ear.
«Marcus?» the woman demanded, her tone sharpening. «Answer me.»
«Marcus is dead,» Julian said, his voice dropping into a lethal register. «And if anything happens to Leo, there isn’t a vault in the world that will keep you safe from me.»
Silence hung heavy on the line for three agonizing seconds. Then, a chilling chuckle spilled from the speaker.
«Hello, Julian,» the woman said softly. «You always were so quick to jump to conclusions. Just like your father.»
Julian’s chest tightened, the air suddenly cold in his lungs. «Who are you?»
«Look inside the battery compartment of the phone, Julian. Before you decide to burn down the world, you should probably figure out who actually set the fire.»
The line went dead with a sharp tone.
Julian pulled the phone away from his ear, his fingers trembling as he popped off the back casing. Taped to the underside of the lithium battery was a micro-microfilm chip, no larger than a fingernail. Below it, scratched into the casing with a razor blade, were six digits: 48-12-09.
A vault combination.
A sudden beam of light cut through the trees forty yards away. Heavy boots crunched through the underbrush, accompanied by the eager, strained breathing of a tactical canine unit.
A sudden beam of light cut through the trees forty yards away. Heavy boots crunched through the underbrush, accompanied by the eager, strained breathing of a tactical canine unit.
«Sweep the tree line! He couldn’t have gone far on foot!» an officer shouted.
Julian shoved the phone back into his pocket, gripped the captured Glock tight in his good hand, and sprinted deeper into the woods toward the access road where Marcus had parked his getaway car.
Two minutes later, he broke through the perimeter fence, hot-wiring the dark blue sedan tucked behind a abandoned boathouse. The engine roared to life just as flashlight beams breached the treeline behind him. Julian threw the vehicle into reverse, tires screeching against the asphalt as he peeled out onto the dark highway heading west.
He checked his rearview mirror, his heart hammering against his ribs. The road behind him was empty for now, but he had less than six hours before Miller’s team locked down every transit hub in the country.
He needed a secure reader for the microfilm, and there was only one place within a fifty-mile radius that possessed the outdated intelligence hardware required to decrypt it—his father’s old, abandoned safehouse hidden beneath the cliffside estate in Blackwood Cove. The very place Thomas Vance had supposedly died.
An hour later, the sedan glided up the winding, overgrown driveway of the ruined Vance estate. The black, jagged frame of the mansion loomed against the stormy sky, a burnt-out husk destroyed by fire ten years ago.
Julian stepped out into the pouring rain, holding his wounded shoulder. He navigated the overgrown courtyard, stepping down the crumbling stone steps that led to the sub-basement beneath the ruined wine cellar.
He approached the heavy steel blast door hidden behind a fake brick wall. He punched the six-digit code into the mechanical keypad: 48-12-09.
With a heavy, pneumatic hiss that sent a cloud of decade-old dust into the air, the deadbolts retracted. The massive door swung open into the pitch-black abyss.
Julian pulled out his small penlight, stepping inside. The air was stale, smelling of ozone, machine oil, and old paper. As the narrow beam of light swept across the room, Julian froze.
The safehouse wasn’t abandoned.
Surveillance monitors covered the far wall, their screens flickering with real-time live feeds of Interpol headquarters, Clara’s boat, and a high-security hospital room in Zurich. On the central desk sat a fresh mug of steam rising from hot coffee, a half-smoked cigarette smoldering in an ashtray, and a sleek, modern tablet displaying a live GPS tracker.
The red blinking dot on the screen was labeled LEO.
Julian’s blood ran cold. He lunged toward the desk, grabbing the tablet. The tracker showed Leo’s location moving fast—not toward open water, and not toward Zurich.
The signal was stopped right outside this very house.
A floorboard creaked softly in the room behind him.
Julian spun, raising his weapon toward the shadow standing in the doorway.
The light from the monitors illuminated the figure’s face. It was Clara, her clothes soaked, a bleeding cut on her forehead, holding a small silver remote in her hand.
«Put the gun down, Julian,» Clara whispered, her eyes wide with terror. «You don’t understand. We were followed.»
Before Julian could speak, the floor beneath them violently shuddered as a deafening explosion blasted open the steel door above, raining concrete and fire down into the bunker.