Chapter 2 - The Red Line Escape
"What are you doing?" Elena gasped as Maxwell grabbed his leather briefcase and shoved the faded debit card into his inner coat pocket.
"I'm saving our lives, and possibly making the greatest deal in human history," Maxwell said, his voice a frantic whisper. He grabbed Arya’s small shoulder, pulling her gently but firmly toward a side door behind his desk. "This office has a private elevator that leads directly to the executive parking garage. If those men find us with this card, we won't just be arrested. We will disappear."
Arya looked between the two adults, her eyes wide with terror. "Are those the bad men? The ones who visited my mommy in the hospital?"
Maxwell froze, his hand on the elevator keypad. "What did you say? Men in suits visited your mother?"
"They wanted her to sign a paper," Arya sobbed, her voice trembling. "Mommy told them she burned it. But she didn't. She told me the paper was inside the card. She told me to run."
"The cryptographic keys," Maxwell muttered, typing in his private bypass code. The heavy metal elevator doors slid open with a soft hiss. "Elena, get in. If you stay here, they will interrogate you until you don't remember your own name."
Elena looked back toward the glass office. Through the frosted pane, she could see the silhouette of the man in the charcoal overcoat approaching the desk. He was holding a handheld tracking device that was pulsing with a bright blue light—tracking the signal from the card Maxwell had just pockets.
"Fine," Elena whispered, stepping into the elevator. She pulled Arya close, wrapping her arms around the shivering girl. "But if you try to hurt her or take her money, Maxwell, I swear to God I will ruin you."
"Right now, my priority is keeping us all breathing," Maxwell said as the elevator doors slid shut, cutting off the sound of heavy tactical boots shattering the glass partitions of the lobby.
The elevator descended rapidly, bypassing the standard office floors and dropping straight into the sub-basement executive garage. The air down here was cold, smelling of concrete dust and damp oil. Maxwell’s black customized armored SUV sat under a single fluorescent light, looking like a sleeping beast.
"Get in the back!" Maxwell ordered, pulling out his key fob.
But as the SUV’s lights flashed to signal the doors unlocking, a shadow stepped out from behind a concrete pillar.
It was one of the tactical men in gray. He didn't hesitate. He raised his silenced weapon, aiming directly at Maxwell’s chest.
"Drop the briefcase," the man said, his voice flat. "Hand over the child and the asset."
"Maxwell!" Elena screamed, pulling Arya behind her.
Maxwell held his hands up, his briefcase dangling from his left index finger. "Look, friend, I don't know who you work for, but I’m Maxwell Grant. You can't just shoot me in my own garage. The police—"
"The police do not have jurisdiction over Project Aethelgard," the man said, stepping forward. His finger tightened on the trigger.
CRACK.
It wasn't a gunshot. It was the sound of a heavy iron pipe slamming into the side of the tactical man’s helmet.
The soldier stumbled, his gun firing wildly into the concrete ceiling, sending chips of stone raining down. Behind him stood Marcus, the bank’s night janitor, a burly former marine who had just finished his shift.
"Get in the car!" Marcus roared, swinging the pipe again and catching the soldier square in the ribs, sending him crashing to the floor.
Maxwell didn't need to be told twice. He threw himself into the driver's seat, while Elena and Arya scrambled into the back. He slammed his foot onto the accelerator before the passenger doors were even fully closed. The heavy SUV roared to life, its tires screeching against the painted concrete as it rocketed toward the exit ramp.
Behind them, the garage doors began to slide shut—a remote override from the men upstairs.
"Hold on!" Maxwell yelled. He didn't slow down. He rammed the heavy, reinforced steel bumper of his SUV straight into the descending metal gate.
The impact was deafening. Sparks exploded across the windshield as the metal buckled and tore. The SUV burst through the barrier, airborne for a split second, before slamming down onto the wet asphalt of the Chicago alleyway.
Maxwell spun the wheel, sending the vehicle slipping onto the main street. In his rearview mirror, he saw two black, unmarked vans pull out of the bank’s main parking entrance, their engines roaring in pursuit.
"They're tracking us," Elena panicked, looking out the back window. "How do they know where we are?"
"The card," Arya whispered from the floorboards, where she was curled into a ball. "Mommy said the card talks to them if it’s near a machine."
Maxwell pulled the faded debit card from his pocket. The tiny gold contact chip on the front was glowing with an incredibly faint, pulsing blue LED—a feature no standard debit card possessed. It was a self-powered beacon.
"We have to get rid of it," Elena said.
"No!" Maxwell shouted. "If we throw this card away, we lose the four billion dollars, and we lose our only leverage! Without this card, we are just witnesses who know too much. We’d be dead within an hour."
He looked ahead. The traffic on Michigan Avenue was bottlenecked. They were sitting ducks.
"We need to go on foot," Maxwell said, his mind working through the geography of the city. "The subway. The Red Line is right below us. The underground tunnels will block the GPS signal, and the crowd will make it impossible for them to shoot without drawing eyes."
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He slammed the SUV onto the curb right outside the Monroe station entrance. "Out! Out!"
They tumbled out of the vehicle just as one of the black vans rammed into the rear of his abandoned SUV. Maxwell grabbed Arya by the arm, hoisting her up, while Elena led the way down the concrete stairs, plunging into the dark, noisy depths of the Chicago transit system.
