*SCREEECH.*
Behind them were marched their forged notary logs, their encrypted offshore banking tokens, and the twelve-million-dollar factoring ledgers, sealed inside heavy forensic evidence drums:
*CRASH-ROAR-PANT.*
The front doors of the house closed behind them with an authoritative, airtight, pneumatic *THUD*.
The bedroom returned to silence.
The only sound left was the sixty-cycle hum of the portable oxygen concentrator, the steady, peaceful breathing of Mom sleeping in Uncle David’s arms, and the rhythmic *tack… tack… tack* of my grandfather’s chronometer watch on my wrist.
CHAPTER 5: PROLOGUE TO THE CAPITOL AUDIT
`23:45:12 EST.`
The subterranean command continuity bunker eighty feet beneath the foundations of the United States Naval Medical Center in Bethesda—accessible only through the high-security hydraulic blast hatch beneath the research laboratories—was completely dark except for the amber glow of thirty encrypted tactical monitors.
Outside, the cold Maryland sleet had turned into heavy, silent snow, cloaking the naval helipads and the dark expanse of the National Mall in three inches of pristine, un-trodden white velvet.
I sat at the head of a twelve-foot reclaimed chestnut drafting table—the table Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior had constructed with his own hands in 1944—wrapped in his twenty-ounce Scottish tweed hacking jacket, sipping a steaming ceramic mug of dark-roast chicory coffee that Marcus Cooper had poured from an insulated field thermos.
