She was still kneeling in the center of the court, right over the faded blue paint of the school’s Patriot emblem. Her knees were pressed into the hardwood, her left hand still clamped like an iron vise over Victor Vance’s trembling fist, holding the red contact switch down against the plastic housing of the radio-frequency transponder. The serrated steel teeth of the surgical hemostat remained locked through the bloody web of flesh between Victor’s thumb and forefinger, mechanically ensuring that the circuit stayed unbroken.
Victor was weeping softly, his forehead resting against the polished wood, his cashmere scarf soaked in sweat, snot, and plaster dust. The arrogance that had fueled thirty years of corporate plunder had completely dissolved into the pathetic, animal whimpering of an old man whose nervous system had surrendered to pure agony.
“Clear!” Cole roared, dropping to one knee beside Rachel. “Federal agents! Scene is secure!”
“The switch is active, Nathan,” Rachel said, her voice eerily calm despite the crimson stain seeping through the bandage on her right forearm. “The radio-frequency relay is broadcasting on four-thirty-three megahertz. It’s a closed-circuit fail-safe. If this switch opens by half a millimeter, the receiver in the boiler room triggers an electrical impulse to the blasting caps. Get your EOD lead down there right now.”
The senior EOD technician, a master sergeant on loan from the Pennsylvania National Guard’s hazardous devices unit, lumbered forward, kneeling beside Victor’s pinned hand. Through the thick glass of his visor, the technician’s eyes widened as he examined the surgical clamp.
“Jesus, Sergeant Morgan,” the tech muttered, his voice muffled through his suit’s internal comms. “You locked the muscular tissue down with an arterial clamp? That’s some field-expedient madness.”
“It gave you twenty minutes, Master Sergeant,” Rachel replied without looking up. “The receiver is patched into the main electrical junction behind the nineteenth-sixty-eight heating vault. There are three ten-pound blocks of commercial composition C-4 or military RDX strapped to the primary load-bearing pillar directly beneath Room 204. Go.”
“On it! Team Two, with me to the basement!” the tech shouted, lumbering toward the maintenance hatch by the bleachers with his diagnostic equipment cases.
Cole reached into his tactical vest, pulled out a thick roll of electrical friction tape, and knelt directly in front of Victor. “Hold steady, Rachel. I’m going to secure the housing.”
With meticulous, surgical care, Cole wrapped forty layers of heavy industrial tape around Victor’s clamped hand and the plastic trigger casing, binding the switch down into a permanent, immovable brick of rubberized adhesive. Once the final layer was sealed, Rachel slowly, carefully began to release the tension in her fingers.
The switch didn’t move. The tiny red LED light on the faceplate remained steady, solid, and unbroken.
Rachel stood up. Her legs were stiff, her lower back aching from the sustained combat crouch, but her spine immediately straightened into its familiar, rigid military alignment. She stepped away from Victor Vance as if he were nothing more than a pile of discarded refuse on the gym floor.
Two federal agents immediately hauled Victor to his feet. The old man gasped in pain as the taped hand hung heavily at his side, the hemostat still biting through his flesh.
“You’re making a mistake, Rachel,” Victor rasped, his voice raw, spitting bloody saliva onto the floorboards. “You think you’ve won? You think pinning me down saves anything? The moment the wire service runs the story on Turner Precision, the entire supply chain collapses! The Pentagon will bury this investigation to protect their own procurement chiefs! They’ll classify your whole life, girl! They’ll lock you in a federal witness protection cell until you die of old age!”
“They won’t have to bury anything, Victor,” Rachel said, walking over to the bleachers and retrieving her leather portfolio case. “Because the original physical files aren’t in Washington. They’re thirty feet beneath our feet.”
She looked at Cole. “Where are the keys to the fallout shelter?”
Victor’s eyes widened with sudden, frantic terror. “No! You can’t go down there! The ventilation system is linked to the boiler circuit! If the EOD team cuts the wrong wire—”
“He’s lying,” Rachel interrupted coldly. “Victor never links his own insurance policy to a self-destruct mechanism. He wanted to blow the school to bury the vault, not destroy the documents inside. He needed the paper trail intact so he could blackmail his partners in the state legislature if they ever tried to cut him loose.”
Rachel didn’t wait for permission. She grabbed a high-powered tactical lantern from an agent’s gear bag and headed straight for the rusty iron hatch behind the bleachers.
Cole signaled two operators to follow him, and together they descended the narrow, circular steel staircase that wound down into the subterranean belly of Liberty Falls High School.
