“You were going to stage Elena’s car crash on Alligator Alley on Friday!”
“You were going to claim the four million dollars!”
“And Arthur Vance’s private appellate lawyers were scheduled to execute the master conveyance deed at zero-two-hundred hours tonight in Washington, permanently deeding Conduit Ten to a Swiss private consortium for sixty billion dollars in carried interest!”
CHAPTER 4: THE DISARMAMENT OF THE VANCE FAMILY
Brenda Vance let out an un-human, animalistic shriek from the corner of the room:
*“CALL ARTHUR!
CALL MY BROTHER-IN-LAW!
HE IS THE CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES!
HE HAS THE SUPREME IMMUNITY!
HE CONVENES THE COURT AT ZERO-TWO-HUNDRED HOURS!”*
She lunged toward the hallway, clawing for her leather handbag to reach her phone:
*CLACK.*
Two SOG tactical operators did not draw their sidearms.
The two-hundred-and-twenty-pound tactical operators stepped forward in fluid, synchronized, terrifying mechanical velocity:
Their gloved hands caught Brenda Vance by her silk blouse and her right forearm in mid-lunge, spun her sixty-eight-year-old frame one hundred and eighty degrees against the laminate wall, and drove her face down onto the floorboards with three hundred pounds of linear downward kinetic leverage:
*SLAM.*
Her cheek struck the laminate, her cultured pearls snapping along the silk threading and scattering across the floorboards like hail:
