Beside me walked Barnaby, his amber eyes fixed on the truck’s windshield, his fangs bared in a continuous, sixty-cycle subterranean thrum: *whirrr-grrr.*
I stopped two paces from the armored truck’s driver-side door.
I did not draw my Colt .45.
I did not shout a command.
I reached into my pocket, pulled out a small, circular, hand-machined piece of tarnished naval ordnance brass:
The master **1944 United States Navy Admiralty Foundation Die**—the physical die used by Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior to stamp the red wax on the original wartime sovereign deeds eighty years ago:
*CLINK.*
I tapped the heavy brass die against the driver-side ballistic glass:
*CLINK.*
The vibration was not acoustic. It was structural.
The high-frequency resonance of the naval brass die interacted with the acoustic laminated core of the armored glass, sending a spiderweb of hairline fractures radiating across the three-inch-thick polycarbonate pane:
*CRACK-CRACK-SHATTER.*
The lead mercenary inside—a scarred, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound former corporate operative named Marcus Sterling—froze, his thermite igniter hovering half an inch above his satellite terminal.
His eyes widened until the whites showed completely around his dilated pupils:
“The… the Admiralty Foundation Die…?” Marcus gasped through the broken seal:
“Ethan Vance… you were supposed to be dead on Fifth Avenue! The truck was scheduled to T-bone your car at forty miles an hour!”
