“You were waiting for the Mercer children to enter this school!”
“And at zero-two-hundred hours tonight in Washington…”
Cooper’s voice dropped into a terrifying, sub-zero register:
“…your great-uncle, Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance, was scheduled to convene an extraordinary emergency midnight session of the Supreme Court to execute the master conveyance deed—transferring forty miles of nuclear defense bedrock to The Valkyrie Trust for sixty billion dollars in carried interest!”
***
CHAPTER 5: THE DISARMAMENT IN ROOM 3B
Ms.
Harrow let out an un-human, animalistic shriek from the whiteboard:
*“CALL ARTHUR!
CALL THE CHIEF JUSTICE!
HE HAS THE APPELLATE IMMUNITY!
HE CONVENES THE COURT AT ZERO-TWO-HUNDRED HOURS!”*
She lunged toward her designer handbag resting on her desk, clawing for her encrypted satellite transceiver:
*CLACK.*
Scout did not wait for a command.
The eighty-four-pound Belgian Malinois moved in an explosive, two-hundred-millisecond linear blur:
His jaws clamped around the leather strap of Ms.
Harrow’s handbag with one hundred and forty pounds of crushing hydraulic force, ripping the bag from her grip and pinning it flat against the floorboards beneath his paws with a deep, menacing, sixty-cycle subterranean growl:
*grrrrrrr.*
Before Ms.
Harrow could pull back, two armed federal marshals stepped through the doorway in fluid, synchronized mechanical velocity:
Their gloved hands caught Ms.
Harrow by her tweed lapels and her right wrist in mid-flight, spun her frame one hundred and eighty degrees against the whiteboard, and drove her face down onto the chalk tray with three hundred pounds of linear kinetic leverage:
*SLAM.*
Her tortoiseshell hair clip snapped under the impact, forty-eight pieces of plastic popping across the linoleum:
*click-clatter-roll.*
A pair of heavy-duty, double-locking, high-security stainless-steel military transport restraints ratcheted around Ms.
Harrow’s wrists with two sharp, definitive snaps that sounded like twin rifle shots across the silent classroom:
*SNAP.*
A second set of chains clamped around her ankles—the identical stainless-steel irons used for capital traitors at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth:
*SNAP-CLINK.*
The twenty-two third-graders sat with their eyes wide, completely silent.
Ben Reed stepped to the front of the room, holding eight-year-old Clara in his arms.
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