His large, manicured hands, flat on the granite table, began to tremble with that spastic, involuntary tremor of an embezzler whose vault door has just been blown off its hinges by an artillery shell:
*tick-tick-tick-tick.*
“The… the Mercer Charter…?”
Arthur gasped, his voice cracking into that thin, pathetic squeak:
“Mark…
Mark swore to me that the daughter was completely broken!
That you were an ordinary, exhausted housekeeping supervisor who could be starved out of her inheritance with a three-year contract in Qatar!”
“Elena was the Director of Special Infrastructure Interdiction and the master fiduciary auditor who uncovered your entire Persian Gulf factoring network twelve years ago, Arthur,” Vice Admiral David Mercer spoke from behind our shoulders.
His voice was sixty decibels of mountain quarry explosive:
“She audited your enterprise while Mark was buying Italian slacks.”
“She protected this nation’s bedrock while your family was plotting to starve a seventy-one-year-old woman to steal the access shaft of Conduit Ten.”
