*TINK.*
“You told me yesterday afternoon, Bradley, looking down at my garden, that it was just dirt,” Eleanor Mercer-Vance whispered softly.
Every syllable fell like an un-appealable decree that sealed twelve years of neighborhood arrogance into solid rock forever:
“You told me that nobody cared about an old woman’s memories.”
I leaned down until my clear slate-gray eyes filled his entire field of vision:
“You were right about one thing, Bradley.”
“It was dirt.”
“My father’s dirt.”
“My husband’s dirt.”
“The Republic’s bedrock.”
“The flowers will be planted again.”
“The mansion will be demolished.”
“The sixty billion is secured.”
“And around here…”
I pointed toward Uncle David:
“…nobody ever, ever… rides across a Mercer’s line.”
CLICK-CLACK.
The two federal marshals hauled Bradley Vance and Harold Vance to their feet by their armpits, marching them down the center aisle of the suburban street in waist-chains and leg-irons toward the armored tactical transport BearCats waiting at the intersection:
*SCREEECH.*
Behind them were marched the seized hard drives, the forged land patents, and the foreign banking tokens, sealed inside forensic evidence drums:
*CRASH-ROAR-PANT.*
The neighborhood returned to silence.
The only sound left was the sixty-cycle hum of the ventilation flues humming beneath my garden, the steady breathing of Admiral Mercer beside me, and the rhythmic *tack… tack… tack* of my grandfather’s chronometer watch on my wrist.
CHAPTER 6: PROLOGUE TO PART 3: THE HIGH CAPITOL AUDIT (THE HOOK TO PART 3)
`23:45:12 EST.`
The subterranean command continuity bunker eighty feet beneath the foundations of the United States Naval Medical Center in Bethesda—accessible only through the high-security hydraulic blast hatch beneath the research laboratories—was completely dark except for the amber glow of thirty encrypted tactical monitors.
Outside, the cold Maryland sleet had turned into heavy, silent snow, cloaking the naval helipads and the dark expanse of the National Mall in three inches of pristine, un-trodden white velvet.
I sat at the head of a twelve-foot reclaimed chestnut drafting table—the table Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior had constructed with his own hands in 1944—wrapped in his twenty-ounce Scottish tweed hacking jacket, sipping a steaming ceramic mug of dark-roast chicory coffee that Marcus Cooper had poured from an insulated field thermos.
The civilian apron had been replaced by my immaculate, tailored naval auxiliary uniform, the golden seal of a Master Chancery Conservator gleaming on my lapel. Pinned to the left lapel of my grandfather’s tweed jacket was his unpolished bronze surveyor’s transit pin, its miniature brass vernier catching the amber instrument glow.
