“Arthur Vance did not order Marcus Sterling to poison Claire with succinylcholine and stage that vehicular ambush on Fifth Avenue merely out of territorial greed, Ethan,” Cooper continued:
“The assassination plot and the faked accidental hit-and-run were operational necessities for their timeline. Arthur needed Claire dead, her body buried in an unmarked potter’s grave, and your life terminated before sunrise this morning—the statutory deadline when your grandfather’s sovereign trust reverted into Leo’s unencumbered fee-simple possession under naval admiralty chancery. The historic archival vaults beneath the Brooklyn Navy Yard sat directly atop Valve Station Ten—the primary surface access hatch and emergency hydraulic ventilation manifold for Conduit Ten beneath the New York harbor command sector.”
“Arthur Vance knew that under the original nineteen-forty-four charter, Conduit Ten was protected by an automated, self-sealing hydrodynamic scuttle protocol.”
“If an unauthorized engineering crew attempted to breach the casing from the surface with diamond drills, the system would register a structural pressure drop and flood forty miles of the tunnel with sixteen million gallons of seawater, permanently sealing the cryptographic vault from below.”
