Three hundred wealthy guests watched a maid stop Vanessa’s attack with one hand, never realizing the woman in the gray uniform had once been trained to dismantle dangerous threats. / Chapter 35 / 130

Chapter 35 - The Phantom Highway

The subterranean passage opened beneath an abandoned grain silo miles from the burning ruins of Whitmore Manor. The Aston Martin roared out into the torrential pre-dawn gloom, its specialized tires biting into the gravel before launching onto the empty, winding asphalt of the M4 toward the southern coast.

The rain beat down in relentless sheets, disguising their visual profile from high-altitude satellites, but Naomi kept one eye glued to the dashboard's passive radar detector.

"They're pinging the cellular towers," Naomi warned, her hands steady on the leather-wrapped steering wheel as she accelerated through a sweeping bend at over a hundred and ten miles per hour. "Turn off your phone, Ethan. Pull the battery out if you can."

Ethan fished his smartphone from his pocket, snapping the casing and discarding the SIM card into the footwell. "Done. How do we reach a North Sea oil rig without being shot out of the water?"

"We don't use water," Naomi said, shifting into sixth gear. "Julian had an old ally stationed at RAF Lydd—a former transport pilot who owes me a debt from the Warsaw evacuation six years ago. We have a twin-engine turboprop waiting with non-reflective radar coating."

Ethan looked sideways at Naomi. The faint blue pulse beneath her skin had subsided to an imperceptible shimmer, but the sheer tension in her jaw showed the agony she was suppressing. "That tracker... does it hurt?"

"Like liquid glass flowing through my veins," Naomi said without emotion. "The Division's Cleaners have a proximity beacon. When we get within five miles of Marcus Sterling's network, it will triangulate automatically. They'll know I'm coming."

"Then you're walking into a slaughterhouse," Ethan protested.

"No," Naomi countered, her lips curling into a grim, razor-thin smile. "I am walking into an ambush they think they're prepared for. Vanessa thinks of me as a maid who got lucky in a ballroom. Marcus thinks of me as a rogue prototype with a hard drive in her head. Neither of them realizes that the Division didn't build me to store data."

"What did they build you for?"

"To eradicate the people who thought they could control it."

Behind them, through the rain-streaked rear window, two pairs of blinding high-beam halogen lights erupted in the dark highway behind them. Two heavy armored SUVs had matched their velocity, tearing through the mist at breakneck speed.