Chapter 15 - Subterranean Warfare
The archive room erupted into absolute chaos. The second operative dropped his shredder feed and lunged forward, drawing a combat knife from his tactical vest, but before he could close the distance, I stepped out from the alcove, raised the heavy revolver, and fired a warning shot into the concrete floor inches from his boots.
"Freeze! Drop the weapon!" I screamed, my voice echoing with a raw, authoritative fury that surprised even myself.
The operative hesitated, glancing between the smoking barrel of my gun and the scuffle where Lucas was currently subduing the first guard against a heavy filing cabinet. Seizing the momentary distraction, the scarred commander didn't hesitate—he grabbed a heavy iron briefcase from the sorting table, spun on his heel, and bolted through the open eastern exit stairwell, slamming the heavy steel door behind him with a resounding boom.
"Lucas, he's getting away!" I shouted, keeping my gun trained on the remaining operative who slowly raised his empty hands and dropped to his knees.
Lucas shoved the pinned guard onto the floor, slapping a pair of heavy-duty zip-ties around his wrists with practiced efficiency before sprinting toward the exit door. "Cover him!" he yelled back to me, disappearing through the heavy steel threshold into the stairwell beyond.
I stood alone in the dim, humming archive room, the industrial shredders still grinding away at the edge of the space, chewing up irreplaceable fragments of history. I rushed over to the nearest shredder, hitting the emergency stop button with the palm of my hand. The machine groaned and whined to a halt, leaving a thick cloud of paper dust hanging suspended in the fluorescent light.
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I reached blindly into the hopper, pulling out a handful of partially shredded documents. As my eyes scanned the mangled text, my breath hitched.
It wasn't just my birth certificate. It was an entire manifest of children—dozens of them—rerouted through fraudulent adoption agencies across the country during the late eighties and early nineties, all overseen by a single signature at the bottom of each page: Frank Miller.
