The black water of the Chatham Sound was a churning, obsidian mirror under the freezing sleet of November 15th, 2006. The temperature was a brittle -3°C, and the wind, whipping off the Hecate Strait, carried the scent of salt, diesel, and the metallic tang of an impending disaster. Two kilometers off the coast of Digby Island, the S.S. Lazarus—a rusted, seventy-foot fishing trawler—wallowed in the troughs of the four-meter swells, its lights extinguished to evade the "Mercenary Grid."
Inside the "Bit-Rot" basement in Vancouver, Elias Thorne was hunched over his terminal, his skin the color of wet ash. His 40.5°C fever had left him, but the metabolic debris of the transition felt like glass shards in his joints. He watched the digital countdown of the Bermuda Wire.
00:45... 00:44... 00:43...
"The Trojan is live," Elias whispered, his voice a dry, papery rasp. "He's accessing the 'Palo Alto' mirage. His processor is spiking. He's blind for forty seconds, Witt. Go! Go now!"
"Copy that. Initiating extraction," Bryan Witt's voice crackled through the satellite encrypted link.
In the dark waters of Port Edward, a high-speed, black-hulled Zodiac Hurricane—manned by four ex-Special Boat Service contractors Elias had hired for $150,000 in cash—roared to life. It didn't have lights. It had $80,000 of 2006-era forward-looking infrared (FLIR) sensors. The boat cut through the swells at fifty knots, a ghost of carbon fiber and high-octane fuel.
A sharp, electric thrum started behind Elias's left ear. The Memory Migraine hit him with the force of a physical strike. He saw a flash of a news report from 2014—the "Digby Island Massacre."
"The hull was rigged... he didn't want to escape... he wanted to drown the rescue..."
Elias gasped, his forehead hitting the cold CRT monitor. He vomited into a plastic bin, his body shaking with the paradox of his two lives. The universe was punishing him for the overlap. He was a millionaire trying to buy the past, and the past was fighting back with a vengeance.
"Witt! Stop the boat!" Elias screamed, his voice breaking into a violent, hacking cough. He spat a thick, metallic-tasting phlegm onto the floor. "It's a trap! The Lazarus is a lure! He's rigged the hull with nitroglycerin!"
"We're fifty meters out, Elias! We can't stop the momentum!" Witt roared back over the sound of the wind and the engines. "We have a visual on the target! He's on the bridge! He's holding a trigger!"
On the bridge of the S.S. Lazarus, Julian Vane was not looking at the approaching Zodiac. He was looking at the mechanical kitchen timer he'd taped to a six-kilogram charge of stabilized nitroglycerin, wedged against the rusted fuel lines of the trawler.
00:05... 00:04... 00:03...
Julian's left leg was a throbbing, necrotic pillar of lead, but his hands were steady. He had Sarah and Mia Thorne tied to the heavy, cast-iron steering pedestal behind him. They were awake, their eyes wide with a primal, salt-sprayed terror.
"Do you hear that, Mia?" Julian whispered, his voice melodic and perfectly calm. "That's the sound of your brother's gold coming to save you. He spent a fortune on that boat. He spent a fortune on those men. He thinks he can buy his way out of the abyss."
Julian reached out and manually stopped the "Palo Alto" download on his stolen ThinkPad. He didn't need the keys anymore. He had already used the forty-five-second "window" to trace the incoming signal back to the East Vancouver basement.
"The Bermuda Wire is a bridge, Elias," Julian murmured to the empty bridge. "And I'm blowing it up from both ends."
Julian didn't wait for the mercenaries to board. He didn't wait for the negotiation. He dived over the starboard rail into the freezing 4°C water, clutching a small, inflatable life-raft and a waterproof medical bag.
A split second later, the S.S. Lazarus ceased to exist.
The explosion was a white-hot pillar of flame that turned the black night into a blinding, orange noon. The nitroglycerin ignited the trawler's three thousand liters of diesel fuel in a massive, subsonic pressure wave that shredded the Zodiac Hurricane like it was made of balsa wood.
Elias Thorne watched the thermal feed on his monitor turn a violent, saturated white. The signal vanished. The "Mercenary Grid" went dark.
"No!" Elias screamed, his voice lost in the hum of the "Bit-Rot" basement.
He fell to his knees, his nose erupting in a sudden, violent spray of blood. The Memory Migraine hit him so hard he felt his consciousness fracturing. He saw the ocean, the fire, and the face of Julian Vane—not the 2006 face, but the 2026 face, smiling as they fell from the cliff.
"Gold can't swim, Elias," the future-Julian whispered in his mind.
Julian Vane bobbed in the freezing swells, a kilometer away from the inferno. He was shivering, his body approaching the first stages of hypothermia, but his eyes were bright with a manic, intellectual joy. He watched the burning wreckage of the Lazarus sink into the depths of the Chatham Sound.
He was alone. Sarah and Mia were gone—consumed by the fire Elias had paid to send to their rescue.
Julian pulled himself into the small, black life-raft. He reached into his bag and pulled out the RFID receiver. He looked at the screen.
The red light was still blinking.
Julian's eyes narrowed. He looked back at the fire. The signal was coming from the water. Two hundred meters away from the wreckage. A buoyant, orange survival capsule he'd stolen from a Coast Guard depot and hidden in the trawler's hold, rigged to eject upon the primary blast.
"The Anchor survives," Julian whispered, his teeth chattering.
He began to row toward the signal. He was broke, he was wounded, and he was a fugitive in two different timelines. But as he looked at the red pulse on the screen, he realized he had just won the first major engagement of the 570-chapter war.
The "Prince Rupert Extraction" was a massacre. The millionaire had lost his family to his own gold. And the butcher was the only one left to pull them from the sea.