Chapter 10 - Mutiny on the Bridge
Victoria's composure shattered entirely. "Marcus! Tell the captain to engage maximum thrusters! Ram through them! We are in international waters!"
"Ma'am, we're four miles within sovereign territorial limits," Marcus said, his voice muffled by the thick bandages covering the lower half of his steam-burned face. He held his service pistol with a trembling hand, looking out at the three federal cutters closing the gap, their bow-mounted autocannons tracking the yacht’s bridge. "If we run, they have authorization to fire on our hull."
"I don't care!" Victoria shrieked, her voice cracking into madness. "I will not spend my life rotting in a federal penitentiary! I will not die of renal failure in a prison hospital! Kill the crew if they refuse to steer! Move!"
She grabbed Mia by the arm, violently ripping the child from Elena's grasp. The little girl shrieked in pain, her tiny feet kicking against Victoria's cashmere sweater.
"Get off her!" Elena lunged.
Marcus leveled his weapon at Elena’s forehead, but before he could fire, Leo leaped. The ten-year-old boy tackled the wounded security chief around the knees, dragging his center of gravity backward. Marcus’s head struck the brass mooring cleat with a sickening crack, the pistol flying from his limp fingers and skittering across the deck.
Elena didn't waste a heartbeat. She drove her shoulder into Victoria’s ribs, knocking the wealthy heiress to the teak deck. Mia tumbled free, scrambling immediately behind a bench.
Victoria scrambled across the deck like a wounded animal, her manicured hands snatching Marcus’s dropped gun. Her manicured veneer was completely gone—her blonde hair wild, her expensive clothes stained with seawater and diesel grime. She pointed the barrel directly at Elena’s chest, her finger trembling against the trigger.
"You ruined everything," Victoria hissed, her voice vibrating with venomous hate. "You were supposed to clear plates. You were a zero. A nobody."
"Drop the weapon!" a sharp voice barked from the forward stairs.
A team of FBI tactical agents in heavy body armor swarmed the aft deck, their carbines raised. "Drop the gun, Mrs. Van Doren! Drop it now!"
Victoria looked at the federal agents, then at the black ocean churning below the railing, and finally at Elena, Leo, and Mia huddled together. A twisted, bitter smile touched her lips.
"If I don't get to live," Victoria whispered, her eyes locking with Elena's, "nobody gets the truth."
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She didn't aim the gun at the agents, nor did she fire at Elena. Instead, she spun the weapon toward the digital terminal mounted to the salon bulkhead—the central server containing the master encryption keys, offshore accounts, and the complete identity records of the black-market clinic network. She pulled the trigger three times.
Sparks showered the deck as the hard drives shattered into smoking silicon debris. Before the federal agents could tackle her, Victoria stepped backward off the yacht’s low stern railing, falling backward into the pitch-black, boiling slipstream of the churning ocean propellers.
