Chief Justice Arthur Vance did not sign immediately.
He smiled—a slow, razor-thin, terrifying line of white porcelain that had charmed forty congressional hearings:
“Arthur Mercer was an exceptional surveyor, gentlemen,” Arthur purred, his voice a deep, resonant velvet cello that echoed off the acoustic baffles of the vault:
“He bored forty miles of subterranean granite with naval sweat, and he left the master deed to an unsuspecting daughter who spent thirty years tending marigolds and dusting china, completely blind to the fact that my brother was paving over her boundary line while we prepared to seize the defense bedrock from beneath her boots.”
Arthur dipped the gold nib of his pen toward the parchment:
“To the compliant widow in North Carolina, gentlemen.”
“May she weep over her dead flowers in silence while we manage the Republic.”
KABOOOOM.
The four-inch-thick steel blast door of the West Conference Room did not slide open on its automated tracks.
