Chapter 75 - Echoes in New York
"Get my mother on the line," I snapped, leaping to my feet so fast the heavy wooden chair screeched against the floorboards. "Now, Valerie!"
Valerie rapidly typed a command into the encrypted terminal, routing the call through four separate satellite proxies to bypass the Aegis Consortium's interception relays. The line clicked twice, a low burst of static humming through the speaker, before connecting.
"Sarah?"
It wasn't my mother's voice.
It was Julian.
His voice was strained, breathless, and laced with genuine, frantic panic.
"Julian?" I demanded, gripping the edge of the desk. "Why do you have my mother’s secure phone? Where is she? Where are the kids?"
"Sarah, thank God," Julian panted, the sound of screeching tires and wet rain echoing behind him. "Listen to me! Two black Suburbans pulled up outside the Tribeca building twenty minutes ago. Men in federal badges—or what looked like federal badges. They bypassed the lobby security. I was two blocks away doing the supply delivery for the pediatric clinic like Valerie asked me to, and I saw them going in."
"Julian, where is my family?!" I yelled, terror clawing at my throat.
"I called your mother right as the lobby glass shattered," Julian rushed out, his voice cracking. "I told her to take the freight elevator to the underground tunnel connecting to the subway substation—the one you showed me last summer! She got little Sarah and Jonathan out, but they’re on foot in the middle of a blizzard, and these guys have drone sweeps running over the lower west side. They’re hunting them, Sarah!"
My vision blurred with a mix of fury and sickening fear. Julian—the arrogant, lazy ex-husband who had once thrown my belongings onto the rain-soaked sidewalk to appease his mother—was now the only thin line standing between my children and Arthur’s hit squad.
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"Julian," I said, forcing absolute steel into my voice. "Listen to me very carefully. If you save my children, every sin you ever committed is forgiven. Do you hear me?"
"I don't care about forgiveness, Sarah!" Julian sobbed, the desperation raw and unfiltered. "They're just babies! Tell me where to take them!"
