Chapter 5 - Lockdown at Whitaker Hall
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The screaming wail of the estate’s emergency klaxons echoed off the Greenwich hills as half-inch-thick titanium storm shutters slammed shut across the French doors of the mansion, sealing the interior of Whitaker Hall like a bank vault.
Around the terrace, panic erupted among the fifty wealthy guests. Women in pastel designer dresses knocked over chairs as they rushed toward the side wrought-iron gates leading to the front driveway—only to find the heavy electromagnetic locks glowing solid red, trapping everyone inside the high stone walls of the rear garden.
"My cell phone has no service!" shouted Arthur Vance’s wife, holding her phone high in the air. "All the bars just vanished!"
"It’s a localized military-grade signal jammer," Grace shouted over the deafening wail of the sirens, stepping close to Evan’s side while keeping her eyes fixed on the two dark-suited guards standing by the sealed terrace doors. "It was wired into the estate’s router box in the basement four days ago!"
Evan held Caleb against his left hip and kept Sophie pressed safely behind his leg, staring across the overturned brunch table at Vanessa.
His fiancée wasn't trembling anymore. She stood calmly wiping a drop of orange juice from her wrist with a linen napkin while the two armed guards—Marcus and his partner—stepped forward and drew compact nine-millimeter pistols equipped with suppressors from beneath their suit jackets.
"Nobody move!" Marcus barked, firing a single suppressed round into a marble planter beside the wrought-iron gate. Porcelain shards exploded into the air, and the screaming guests instantly dropped to their knees behind the white-linen tables.
"You really shouldn't have come home early, Evan," Vanessa said, her sweet society voice gone, replaced by something flat, mercenary, and ice-cold. "If you had stayed at the Savoy until Tuesday like a good workaholic widower, the papers would have simply reported a tragic electrical fire in the west wing while you were across the Atlantic. You would have inherited the insurance payout, signed the blind trust transfer in your grief, and never known a thing."
"Who is inside my house right now, Vanessa?" Evan demanded, every muscle in his body coiled as he shielded his children.
"Someone you trust much more than me," Vanessa smiled. "And since you’re standing right here in front of fifty witnesses who are about to have their phones confiscated, I suppose we’ll just have to accelerate the timeline."
She pointed a manicured finger at Evan’s chest.
"Marcus, take the boy and the girl inside through the biometric service keypad," Vanessa ordered coldly. "Once we have the children in the nursery, Mr. Whitaker is going to walk down to the vault and type in his master encryption code—or he can watch what happens when we stop asking nicely."
Marcus lunged across the patio to grab Sophie’s arm.
He never touched her.
Grace Miller moved with a terrifying, lethal speed that no housekeeper on earth possessed. She caught a heavy silver champagne bucket off the nearest table, swung it full-force into the side of the second guard’s knee, and pivoted inside Marcus’s reach before he could bring his pistol barrel around. With two brutal, textbook krav maga strikes to his radial nerve and throat, she stripped the nine-millimeter pistol from Marcus’s hand and drove the steel butt into his temple, dropping him unconscious onto the spilled orange juice.
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Before the second guard could scramble up from the flagstones, Evan kicked the brass leg of the buffet table out from under it, sending two hundred pounds of oak and silverware crashing down across the man’s back.
"The greenhouse tunnel!" Grace yelled to Evan, raising the captured pistol to cover the upper balcony where another guard had just appeared behind the parapet. "Run! Now!"
