I couldn't fight Julian in a courthouse from three miles away while Frank was drowning sixty feet below the lobby.
I looked at Eleanor. Her knuckles were white against her skirt, but her eyes were fixed on the master safe key resting inside Julian’s open desk drawer.
"Eleanor," I said quietly. "Where is the hard-copy master duplicate of the 2022 foundation schematic? The blueprint Arthur Pendelton drew by hand before his firm was dissolved?"
Julian moved to block her, but Eleanor didn't flinch. "It’s in the storage vault behind the linen depot," she whispered. "Cabinet seven. Arthur Pendelton kept his original surveyor's elevations on linen vellum, with the county seal pressed directly into the cloth. You can't alter vellum with a digital override."
"You touch that vault, Eleanor, and you leave this building without thirty years of accrued pension," Julian warned, turning on her with a vicious snarl.
"My pension won't buy me a clean conscience if Frank drowns under this floor, Mr. Cross," she answered, stepping cleanly out of his reach and holding the master brass key ring out toward me.
I took the keys, shoved the three carbon check drafts inside my oil-stained utility vest, and zipped the heavy canvas shut against my chest.
"Where are you going, Dominic?" Julian demanded, panic cracking his voice as I turned toward the exit. "The fire stairs are already taking water! You won't reach the vault and get back before the tide gate collapses!"
"I'm not going to the vault first," I said, gripping the fire axe from the emergency wall cradle by the door. "I'm going down to pump room two to cut Frank off that catwalk. And when I bring him back up through this lobby, Julian, every guest in the west wing will see exactly what you tried to drown beneath their beds."
CHAPTER 3: The Ballroom Floor Began To Buckle
The iron service stairs vibrated through the soles of my boots as I dropped down three flights into the sub-basement. Saltwater was already boiling up through the lower risers, churned into a dirty gray froth by sixty miles of gale-force wind pushing the bay into the foundation cribbing. The smell was suffocating—rank intertidal mud, decaying kelp, and thirty years of accumulated furnace fuel washed loose from the boiler pits.
"Frank!" I shouted into the black stairwell, shifting the heavy flathead fire axe into my right hand.
The lower landing was submerged past my knees in freezing surge. Every electrical conduit along the concrete wall hissed with grounding hums, the green supervisory breaker I had forced upstairs feeding emergency current into the auxiliary pumps. At the end of the narrow corridor, past the cast-iron brine intake manifolds, pump room two was an echo chamber of grinding steel.
A six-foot section of the overhead catwalk had pitched sideways when the anchor bolts sheared out of the spalled masonry. Frank was clinging to the emergency safety cable eight feet above the churning swirl, his canvas dungarees soaked through and his face gray with shock. Below him, the primary five-inch cast-iron trash pump was cavitating, its intake screen buried under a tangled mass of splintered timber and rotted pilings washed up from the pier bed.
"The gate jammed!" Frank yelled over the roar of the water, coughing violently as spray hit his face. "The counterweight dropped when the hydraulic line blew! If that gate stays pinned, the whole bay is coming through the south culvert!"
"Let go of the cable, Frank! Drop to the pipe casing—I've got you!"
He hesitated for half a second, his calloused hands clawing into the galvanized wire rope, then released his grip. He hit the submerged pump casing with a heavy splash. I lunged forward into the waist-deep tide, caught him under the armpits before the suction could pull him toward the churning impeller, and dragged him up onto the dry rise of the secondary boiler pad.
He collapsed against the concrete curb, gasping for breath, coughing up foul, brackish water. His left arm hung limp from a dislocated shoulder, but his right hand was clamped in a death grip around his inspection flashlight.
"He tried to drown us, Dom," Frank wheezed, his knuckles bloodied from fighting the jammed steel. "The lockout tag... Julian came down the catwalk twenty minutes before the surge hit. I saw his overcoat on the landing. He pulled the manual breaker himself and chained the counterweight."