My leather boots left dark, geometric tread marks across the greenstone floorboards: crunch… tack… crunch.
Colonel Aaron Carter walked beside me, his jump boots striking the stone in synchronized cadence.
We stopped at the head of the black granite table, two paces from the Chief Justice’s leather throne.
I did not draw a weapon.
I reached inside my grandfather’s tweed jacket, pulled out the thick, faded blue vellum envelope containing the original 1944 Bennett Sovereign Charter, and slammed it flat atop the Chief Justice’s four-hundred-million-dollar Swiss conveyance deed:
THUD.
The heavy granite table seemed to absorb the blow with a dull, subterranean groan:
“Look at the vellum, Arthur,” I said softly:
“Look at the signature on line four.”
Chief Justice Arthur Vance’s face calcified into an apocalyptic, curdled shade of un-cured limestone.
His pupils dilated until the slate-gray of his irises was swallowed completely by black.
His large, manicured hands, flat on the granite table, began to tremble with that spastic, involuntary tremor of an embezzler whose vault door has just been blown off its hinges by an artillery shell:
