Chapter 48 - The Zurich Extraction
Vance didn't wait for Leo to fire. With a subtle flick of his hand, the two armored operatives stepped forward, unleasing a deafening barrage of heavy shotgun fire. The heavy slugs tore into the steel catwalk, throwing chunks of shredded decking into the churning waters twenty feet below. Leo reacted instantly, diving behind a reinforced electrical transformer as sparks showered over his shoulders like fireworks.
He didn't return fire with his sidearm; bullets would shatter against their heavy ceramic plates. Instead, Leo unclipped a concussion grenade from his tactical belt, pulled the pin, and threw it not at the shooters, but into the bank of cooling pipes running along the ceiling above them. The blast detonated with an ear-splitting crack, instantly rupturing the high-pressure superheated steam lines.
A blinding wall of scalding white steam engulfed the catwalk. The operatives screamed as the steam penetrated their unsealed suits, their weapons firing erratically into the ceiling as they stumbled backward. Leo surged forward through the vapor, ignoring the blistering heat against his face. He closed the distance in three strides, driving his combat knife into the unarmored neck seam of the first operative, spinning the dying man around to absorb a wild blast from the second shooter’s shotgun. Dropping the shield, Leo drew his sidearm and put two rounds cleanly through the second operative’s exposed eye slit.
Both men hit the deck heavily. Leo turned toward the glass chamber, but Vance had already retreated inside, the reinforced blast doors sliding shut with a heavy vacuum lock. Behind the bulletproof glass, Vance stood before a glowing biometric interface, his fingers resting on a scanner that glowed an ominous obsidian black.
"It is too late, Leo!" Vance shouted through the intercom, his voice cracking with a mixture of terror and exhilaration. "The transatlantic data feed has bridged. The Zurich hub has taken command of the Black Code. Maine is offline forever!"
"Not while I'm still breathing," Leo snarled. He looked at the circular mechanical apparatus beneath the room—the core that his father’s notes had described as the analog dampener. Leo raised his sidearm, empty of standard ammunition, and loaded his final, specialized magazine: high-density armor-piercing sabot rounds he had stolen from the Antwerp cache.
He didn't shoot the glass. He shot the central hydraulic stabilizing arm holding the entire server array suspended over the river’s raw water intake. One shot. Two shots. Three. The high-density rounds punched deep into the hydraulic cylinder, rupturing the pressurized fluid. The entire thousand-ton glass structure groaned, tilting violently as the support strut collapsed.
Vance lost his footing inside the chamber, crashing against the glass wall as alarms screamed in three languages. Leo leaped across the widening gap, catching the edge of the catwalk as the octagonal room plunged five feet down, jamming itself precariously in the intake sluice gate. Leo kicked through the cracked emergency viewport, dragging Vance out of the wreckage by his lapels.
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"Where is the master key?" Leo demanded, his weapon pressed hard under Vance's chin.
Vance coughed blood, laughing weakly through his teeth. "You fool. Zurich wasn't the secondary hub. Zurich is just the bank. The protocol doesn't live in the servers anymore, Leo. It's already in the ocean."
