“Your driver was twenty seconds too late, Marcus,” Ethan Vance whispered softly.
Every syllable fell like an eighty-pound iron anvil dropped from thirty feet onto clean glass:
“Because a five-year-old boy ran faster than your surveillance net.”
I reached out with my left hand, caught the reinforced steel handle of the armored door, and wrenched it open with an unyielding, hydraulic leverage that sheared the pneumatic lock bolts clean out of the frame:
*ROAR-SNAP.*
Marcus Sterling dropped the thermite igniter into the slush, scrambling backward across the steel diamond-plate floorboards, his hands clawing at his tactical vest:
“DON’T SHOOT! I HAVE TITLE FIFTY IMMUNITY! I WORK DIRECTLY FOR THE CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES!”
Two SOG tactical operators stepped into the breach behind me.
Their gloved hands caught Marcus Sterling by the lapels of his body armor, spun his frame one hundred and eighty degrees, and drove his face down onto the frozen concrete of the alley with three hundred pounds of linear kinetic leverage:
*SLAM.*
His cheek struck the ice, his nose breaking with a sharp, wet *crunch*, his blood pooling across his forged corporate conveyance briefs:
*SNAP-SNAP.*
A pair of heavy-duty, double-locking, high-security stainless-steel military transport restraints ratcheted around Marcus Sterling’s wrists with two sharp, definitive snaps:
