Chapter 46 - The Secret Mother
Pendelton wasn't smiling anymore. His glasses were gone, his silver hair plastered across his forehead by the freezing spray. His eyes held the desperate, manic fury of an elite insider who realized his forty-year web of lies was collapsing beneath his feet.
“Step away from the winch, Ryan,” Pendelton hissed, aiming the weapon directly at Ryan’s head. “You think you understand what Charles was doing? You think this was about an inheritance?”
“I know what it was about, Arthur,” Ryan said, his hands remaining inches from the release lever, his voice terrifyingly calm. “It was about control. Charles couldn't control Helena, he couldn't control Julian, and he knew he’d never break me. So he stole Sarah’s child and put him on ice like an insurance policy.”
“You don't know half of it!” Pendelton screamed over the roaring ballast water. “Sarah Sinclair didn't die from surgical failure! Helena found that clinic in Zurich twenty-two years ago! Helena paid the anesthesiologist to turn off the oxygen during the cesarean!”
Inside the launch boat, CJ’s head jerked up, his eyes widening in horror through the plexiglass window.
“Helena killed her own sister?” Emily gasped from the boat's open hatch.
“She wanted Sarah’s family shares,” Pendelton shouted, his hand trembling on the trigger. “And Charles arrived twenty minutes too late to save Sarah! He took the newborn, brought him out here, and forged the death certificates to keep Helena from hunting the boy down! I helped him do it! I spent twenty-two years keeping Helena’s bloodhounds away from this coordinates! And now that Charles is dead, that boy is *my* pension! He inherits thirty percent of Sinclair Holdings the day he turns twenty-five! I control him, I control the Sinclair trust!”
“You’re not controlling anyone, Arthur,” Ryan said softly.
“Back away from the lever or I put a bullet through Emily’s throat!” Pendelton snarled, shifting the weapon toward the launch boat’s open door.
A single, suppressed report cracked from the gantry shadows above.
A neat, round hole appeared in Pendelton’s right shoulder. The lawyer screamed, his gun spinning out of his hand, clattering through the diamond grate into the churning sea below.
Thorne stepped down from the iron crossbeam, his tactical rifle lowered, his expression devoid of mercy. “You talk too much, counselor.”
Ryan slammed the emergency winch release.
The davits screamed. The black launch boat dropped thirty feet through the freezing chemical foam, hitting the crest of an eight-foot swell with a bone-jarring crash. Ryan and Thorne slid down the recovery ropes, landing on the aft deck in a shower of spray.
Ryan vaulted into the cockpit, threw the dual diesel throttles forward, and engaged the waterjets.
The black boat surged through the foam-covered swells at forty-five knots, cutting directly through the blinding surfactant haze. Behind them, Pendelton’s two patrol cutters fired blind into the white chemical fog, their heavy tracer rounds streaking harmlessly hundreds of yards behind the fleeing launch.
On the gantry above, the listing platform groaned a final, structural death-knell as its internal bulkheads collapsed, plunging the lower three decks into the cold, forgiving depths of the North Atlantic.
Inside the bouncing cabin, Ryan turned to look at CJ. The young man was shivering uncontrollably, wrapped in a survival thermal blanket Emily had wrapped around his shoulders.
“Are we safe?” CJ asked, his voice small, terrified, like a boy who had closed his eyes in 2002 and opened them in a nightmare.
Ryan looked over at Emily, who was holding the boy’s trembling hand with maternal tenderness.
“Not yet,” Ryan said, checking the tactical GPS. “Arthur Pendelton wasn't lying about Helena. She’s escaped detention. She’s running for the Canadian border. And she doesn't know CJ survived.”
Ryan reached into his pocket, pulled out his satellite phone, and dialed the private line of United States Marshal Marcus Vance—his paternal uncle who had spent ten years waiting for an excuse to put Helena Vance in an orange jumpsuit.
May you like
“Marcus,” Ryan said into the receiver as the launch boat cut through the darkness toward the Maine coast. “Mobilize the northern interdiction teams. Helena’s moving toward New Brunswick. And tell them to bring enough handcuffs for her entire legal board.”
***
