“Laura...” Diego groaned, his voice breaking in a sharp, rough snoring that sounded like dried leaves scraping the cement. Laura, please! Tell them you brought the files! Uncle Arthur promised he would let us fly to Zurich if you delivered the ciphers!
Arthur Caldwell didn't look at Diego.
He raised his left hand and, without turning his head, one of the mercenaries nailed the steel cylinder head of a rifle directly into Diego’s kidneys.
*SUNNY NOISE. *
Diego collapsed to his knees on the cement with a drowned, breathless groan, spitting saliva on his shoes.
“Silence the fool,” Caldwell said quietly. His deep, resounding baritone resounded on the silent dock like a bronze bell.
Caldwell went down the last three steps of the runway, stopping ten steps from where Marcus and I were.
A warm aristocratic smile drew on the general’s face: the smile of a monarch greeting a lost princess long before his execution.
“Laura,” Arthur Caldwell said, opening his arms in a theatrical gesture of family affection. My beautiful, bright niece. You have your mother's eyes. And your grandfather's stubborn and foolish pride.
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I didn't flinch. I didn't back down.
I stood, with my back straight, in a manual posture, looking at the man who had orchestrated thirty years of betrayal against my family.
“Arthur Caldwell,” I said, with a soft voice like the surgical and icy crystal until it reaches a low zero density. You look surprisingly healthy to be a man who died in a burning helicopter in 1996.
Caldwell released a dry, chilling chuckle that resounded in the steel hulls of the container stacks:
