Chapter 9 - The Sister on the Run
The rain over the Blue Ridge Parkway was not mist; it was a blinding, torrential downpour that turned the asphalt into a black mirror.
Bethany Voss clutched the steering wheel of her silver sedan with knuckles that had turned dead-white. In her rearview mirror, the high-intensity LED light bars of two unmarked black Chevrolet Suburbans were less than thirty yards behind her, cutting through the swirling mountain fog like the eyes of stalking wolves.
*Crunch.*
The lead Suburban rammed her rear bumper. The impact sent her sedan fishtailing toward the sheer rock wall to the right. Bethany screamed, fighting the steering wheel with everything she had, her tires shrieking against the wet pavement until the car snapped back into the center of the narrow two-lane road.
Her phone, sitting on the passenger seat, buzzed incessantly. The caller ID flashed: *MOM.*
She didn't answer. She knew what Constance would say in that smooth, calm, terrifying voice: *Pull over, Bethany. Don't make this untidy. Think of the family name.*
*Boom.*
The second hit was harder. The Suburban had pulled up along her left flank, deliberately boxing her toward the flimsy steel guardrail that separated the roadway from a vertical drop into the pitch-black canopy of the gorge below.
Through the tinted glass of the truck, Bethany caught a glimpse of the driver—one of Marcus Kane’s senior tactical enforcers, a man named Vance Keller. His face was cold, dispassionate, like he was checking off an item on an industrial punch list.
Keller wrenched the heavy steering wheel to the right.
The Suburban’s three-ton frame slammed into the sedan’s driver-side door. Bethany’s side window shattered inward in an explosion of tempered glass, raining sharp cubes over her lap. Her head bounced off the steering wheel, hot blood immediately flooding her left eyebrow.
The sedan spun. The rear tires caught the gravel shoulder. The guardrail screamed, buckling under the lateral kinetic force, the steel bending until it groaned like a dying beast.
The sedan came to a halt wedged sideways across the guardrail, its rear wheels spinning uselessly over the abyss.
Bethany sat dazed in the dark cabin, the smell of deploying airbag powder and steaming radiator fluid choking her lungs.
Through the spider-webbed windshield, she watched the two Suburbans brake to a stop forty feet up the road. Four men stepped out into the pouring rain. They were dressed in black tactical rain gear, holding heavy crowbars and silenced semi-automatic pistols.
Keller walked forward slowly, pulling a pair of heavy leather gloves tight over his fingers.
“Bethany,” he shouted through the roar of the rain, his voice flat. “Turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle. Let’s not make this difficult.”
Bethany scrambled for her door handle, but the frame was crushed shut. She clawed at the passenger seat, kicking her way between the consoles, her breathing coming in jagged, hysterical sobs.
“Help me!” she screamed into the empty mountain air, knowing there was nobody within twenty miles to hear her. “Someone please!”
Keller reached the passenger door. He raised an iron wrecking bar, aligning the point with the lock cylinder.
Then, from the clouds directly above the mountain pass, the night tore open.
A deafening, ground-shaking roar obliterated the sound of the rain. The treetops along the cliffside bent double under an unnatural, violent hurricane of down-draft.
A single, blinding spotlight snapped on from three hundred feet in the air, instantly bathing the wet asphalt in two million lumens of searing white brilliance.
Keller and his three men froze, shielding their eyes against the sudden, daylight-bright glare.
Above the tree line hovered an AH-6 Little Bird, its black skid landing gear skimming the telephone poles. Mounted beneath its stub-wings, the twin barrels of an M134 Minigun whined as their electric drive motors spun up to operational speed.
A voice cut through an external tactical loudspeaker, vibrating the very rock of the mountain:
*“DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND STEP AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE. YOU ARE IN ENGAGEMENT TARGETING BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.”*
Keller didn't drop the crowbar. In a moment of panic and adrenaline, he raised his sidearm toward the sky and fired two useless rounds into the spotlight.
The response was instantaneous.
The Little Bird didn't fire its minigun—the kinetic spray would have torn Bethany’s car to shreds. Instead, from the dark perimeter of the trees beside the road, two flashbang grenades exploded in deafening, concussive thunder.
Before the smoke could clear, three shadows descended from fast-ropes dropped from a second helicopter hovering just beyond the asphalt.
I hit the wet road running.
Keller was still blinking away the white spots in his vision when my forearm caught him across the throat, driving his skull backward into the hood of his own Suburban with an impact that dented the steel. The crowbar clattered to the asphalt. His pistol flew across the wet road.
I twisted his right arm behind his back until the shoulder socket popped with a sickening, wet crunch, pinning his face against the hot engine grille.
“Who sent you, Keller?” I snarled into his ear, the rain running cold down my jaw.
“Screw... you, Major,” Keller wheezed through bloody teeth. “Constance... already moved the money... you’re too late...”
I drove his face down once more into the metal, knocking him unconscious, and turned toward the sedan.
My operators had already neutralized the other three men, pinning them face-down in the mud with plastic flex-cuffs secured around their wrists and ankles.
I stepped up to the shattered window of the sedan.
Bethany was curled into a ball on the floorboards, hyperventilating, her hands clamped over her ears.
“Bethany,” I said, softening my voice as I reached through the broken frame.
She jumped as though struck by lightning, but when her eyes found mine, the terror broke into a flood of ragged tears. “Wesley... Wesley, they were going to push me over. They were going to throw me off the bridge...”
“I know,” I said, pulling open the bent passenger door with a single, violent wrench of my hands. “Get out. You’re coming with me.”
I helped her out onto the wet asphalt. She was shaking so violently she could barely stand; I supported her by her elbow as she looked back at her crumpled car.
She reached into her soaked jacket, pulling out a small, metallic object wrapped in waterproof plastic.
“Adeline hid it in my glove compartment three weeks ago,” Bethany sobbed, pressing the cold drive into my hand. “She said if anything happened to her... if Constance ever made the move... I had to give this directly to you. Not the police. Not the FBI. Only you.”
I looked down at the drive.
“What’s on it, Bethany?”
She looked up at me, her eyes hollow, the rain washing the blood down her cheek.
“It’s not just the Icarus flight logs, Wesley,” she whispered. “It’s the security footage from our father’s study five years ago. Constance didn't just falsify the government contracts. She poisoned our father because he was going to turn her in to the Department of Justice.”
A cold, absolute silence fell over the mountain road.
The matriarch of Brookhaven hadn't just attacked her daughter.
She was a serial killer wrapped in pearls and defense contracts.
“Miller,” I called out to my team leader.
“Sir!”
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“Load these four into the extraction bird,” I said, pocketing the drive. “And call General Harrison. Tell him to wake up the Attorney General of the United States.”
***
