Chapter 19 - The Confrontation at Mayfair
Vincent stood alone in the dark wine cellar of Blackwood Manor.
He had removed his coat. His linen shirt was rolled to the elbows. On the stone floor behind him lay his Colt .45, his tactical knife, and his backup ankle revolver. He was completely unarmed—at least to the eyes of the two armed guards standing on either side of the open secret archway behind the third wine cask.
The guards patted him down roughly, finding nothing. One of them drove the butt of his rifle into Vincent’s ribs, a brutal blow meant to double him over.
Vincent took the strike without a sound. He didn't even blink. He merely registered the sound of the guard's wrist joint—a slight cartilage tear in the right arm—and the cadence of the man’s breathing. In Vincent’s mind, that man was already dead.
"Move," the guard grunted, shoving him down the narrow, damp stone corridor that sloped steeply beneath the earth.
The air grew progressively colder, smelling of ancient river mud, sulfur, and burning kerosene. After fifty yards of descent, the tunnel opened into a vast, vaulted subterranean chamber built of heavy Victorian red brick and supported by massive cast-iron pillars.
In the center of the chamber sat a massive spherical safe made of riveted manganese steel—ten feet in diameter, covered in four enormous brass acoustic horns that flared out like the bells of monstrous trumpets.
Tied to an iron chair directly in front of the sphere was Emily, her mouth gagged with linen, her eyes wide with terror as she struggled against thick hemp ropes.
Suspended above a dark, bubbling pool of chemical lime twenty feet to the right was a steel cage.
Inside the cage was Lily.
Lord Alistair Sterling stood before the spherical vault, dressed immaculately in a gray three-piece morning suit, holding a silver pocket watch in his left hand and a heavy Webley revolver in his right. Behind him stood eight heavily armed mercenaries, their rifles trained squarely on Vincent’s chest.
"Precisely eight minutes and forty seconds," Sterling said, closing the pocket watch with a sharp click that rang out in the subterranean vault. "You always were an obedient boy when family was on the line, Vincent."
Vincent walked forward, stopping ten paces from the edge of the lime pit. His eyes met Emily’s, silently pouring every ounce of his strength into her trembling gaze. Then he looked up at Lily.
The little girl was bruised, her princess dress from her birthday party torn and stained with soot. But when she saw Vincent, her chin came up. Her small hands gripped the bars of the cage.
"Let them go, Sterling," Vincent said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion, echoing off the damp brick vault. "You have the manor. You have the access. Clara is in your custody. You have the bloodline."
"The bloodline is worthless without the harmony, Vincent!" Sterling roared, his polished facade cracking for the first time, revealing the raving, obsessive madness beneath. "For forty years I worked beside Marcus Turner! I built his shipping lines! I laundered his blood money! And when he died, he left the master trust—the bearer bonds worth four hundred million pounds—locked behind this damned acoustic monstrosity!"
Sterling slammed his cane against the steel sphere. The metal rang out with a hollow, mocking drone.
"He told me only his true heirs would ever hear the song of the vault," Sterling spat. "He told me that a deaf son and an illegitimate daughter would hold the keys, while I would be left with scraps! For five years I tried every sonic drill, every frequency generator in Europe! Nothing works! The safe will only disengage if the frequencies are introduced by living human vocal cords possessing the exact cranial bone density of the Turner line!"
Sterling turned his mad, bloodshot eyes toward Lily, then toward Vincent.
"The girl knows the four notes," Sterling whispered, raising the Webley revolver and pointing it at Emily’s temple. "You will sing the harmony, Vincent. You will stand before the brass horns, and you will harmonize with your niece. You will open this safe for me... or I will blow your wife's brains across this stone floor and drop the girl into the lime."
Vincent didn't move. He closed his eyes.
In the darkness of his own mind, his hearing expanded to encompass every square inch of the vault.
He heard the tension in the winch cable holding Lily’s cage—three strands of the five-strand steel rope were frayed near the pulley.
He heard the mercenary to the far left shifting his weight, his finger resting improperly on the hair-trigger of his FN FAL rifle.
He heard the rhythmic, subterranean rushing of the Thames tributary running through the drainage pipes directly beneath the stone floorboards.
And, most importantly, he heard the faint, high-frequency hum within the manganese steel vault itself.
It was not a safe.
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His father had not built a vault to store bonds.
Marcus Turner had built a sonic resonance bomb.
