Chapter 3 - The Cover-up and the Golden Child
Chaos is an environment where the disciplined thrive and the arrogant perish.
The moment the light died, muzzle flashes ripped through the warehouse as Kaspian’s two security guards blind-fired into the shadows. Gunfire cracked against concrete, throwing up plumes of dust and deafening ricochets.
"Contact! Catwalk!" one of them screamed.
I shifted positions before the muzzle flashes even illuminated my previous perch. Dropping through an access hatch, I caught an iron pipe with one hand, swung down, and landed silently on top of a shipping crate twelve feet above the floor.
Julian was screaming on the ground, curled into a fetal ball beneath the folding table, hands locked over the back of his neck.
I brought the M17 up. Two controlled rounds into the chest of the guard on the left. The man dropped like cut timber.
Kaspian was already moving, his tactical instincts razor-sharp. He didn't fire blindly; he snatched the velvet pad with the titanium chain off the table, shoved the technician toward the rear bay door, and backed into the shadows of an idling forklift.
"Kill him!" Kaspian barked into his throat mic. "Flush the perimeter!"
The second guard swept his weapon toward my crate. I kicked off the edge, dropping feet-first onto his shoulders. The impact drove him into the concrete with a bone-jarring thud. I rolled off his chest, disarmed his rifle with a sweep of my forearm, and drove the heel of my boot into his jaw, putting him out cold.
The technician bolted toward the rear exit. I didn't pursue him. The asset was with Kaspian.
A bullet snapped through the air inches from my cheek, punching a hole through the metal barrel beside me. Kaspian was behind the forklift, firing around the hydraulic lift with disciplined, rhythmic double-taps.
"Captain Vance!" Kaspian called out, his voice smooth despite the cordite hanging thick in the air. "I must congratulate you! Your brother claimed you were a glorified IT specialist. Clearly, he does not read Pentagon operational reports."
"Drop the chain, Kaspian," I said, my voice echoing off the corrugated walls from behind a four-ton lathe. "Federal teams are on approach. You have roughly three minutes before this entire sector is locked down under military jurisdiction."
"Then I have three minutes to kill you and take your thumb with me to calibrate the sensor," Kaspian replied.
I pulled a flashbang from my tactical belt. I pulled the pin, cooked it for one second, and banked it off the far wall behind the forklift.
*BANG.*
A blinding white flash and a deafening concussive wave ripped through the warehouse. Even with my eyes averted and my ears compressed, the shockwave rattled my teeth.
Kaspian cried out, stumbling backward from the forklift, temporarily blinded, his pistol discharging wildly into the ceiling.
I closed the distance in two seconds. I struck his gun hand down, stripping the weapon, followed by a crushing elbow strike to his sternum. Kaspian hit the ground hard, gasping for breath, the titanium chain spilling from his fingers onto the oily concrete.
I pinned his throat with the knee of my boot, pressing down until his eyes bulged.
"Starlight Meridian is finished," I whispered.
I reached down and snatched my chain from the ground. The titanium was cool against my skin. The micro-LED on the third link flashed green the moment it registered my dermal pulse through my fingertips. The system was secure.
Behind me, whimpering cut through the silence.
I turned my head. Julian was crawling out from beneath the folding table, his three-thousand-dollar suit shredded at the knees, his face streaked with tears, mucus, and industrial dust. He looked up at me with wide, terrified eyes—not seeing the brother he had mocked twenty minutes ago, but an operative he couldn't comprehend.
"L-Logan?" Julian choked out. "You... you shot them. You killed them..."
"Get up," I ordered, my voice like cold steel.
"Logan, please—I didn't know!" Julian scrambled forward on his knees, reaching for the hem of my tactical pants. "I swear to God, I didn't know who they were! They told me they were foreign venture capitalists! They said they just wanted to inspect the network protocols for a competing software suite! They were going to pay off the bank! They were going to save Vance Bio-Tech!"
"Shut up," I said, stepping back so his hands fell to the floor.
Suddenly, Julian’s phone rang from the table. The screen lit up in the dim light.
*FATHER.*
Julian froze. He looked at the phone, then looked at me, trembling uncontrollably.
I reached over, picked up the phone, and slid the green bar across. I held it to my ear.
"Julian?!" Arthur Vance's voice thundered through the speaker, arrogant, demanding, and utterly oblivious. "Where the hell are you? The Senator has arrived, and you're not here to give the toast! And Chloe says your brother walked out in a huff because of that stupid uniform. You get back here right now and fix this! Do you hear me? Arthur Vance doesn't wait on his own children!"
I took a slow, deep breath, looking down at my whimpering, ruined brother.
"Arthur," I said calmly into the phone.
The other end went dead silent for a long moment. "Logan? Why do you have your brother's phone? Did you follow him? If you are making another scene—"
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"Julian won't be giving any toasts tonight, Father," I said. "And you need to stay in your dining room. Because in about thirty minutes, the United States Government is coming to your front door."
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