“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 granddaughter whose eight-year-old child had to dig her project out of a classroom garbage can, completely blind to the fact that we were using her own teacher to extract her grandfather’s safe 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 third-grader in Oceanside, gentlemen.”
“May she read her apologies 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.
It was cleaved off its structural bronze rollers by an eighty-pound linear hydraulic breaching ram, the steel latch pins shearing clean out of the concrete jamb with an explosive, concussive roar that shattered three overhead light fixtures into a blizzard of incandescent glass:
