Chapter 62
CHAPTER 62 — THE WATERWAYS OF THE SYNDICATE
The escape through the klongs—the narrow, labyrinthine canals of Bangkok—was a calculated exercise in survival. Victoria Lane steered the low-profile tactical boat through the black water with aggressive precision, the twin muffled engines purring like a cornered predator. The city around them was dead, lit only by the occasional flash of a civilian flashlight or the distant, orange glow of localized fires.
Alexander sat near the bow, a high-frequency scanner in his lap, watching the digital noise bounce across the monitor.
"The signal is originating forty miles out, in the Gulf of Thailand," Alexander reported, his teeth chattering slightly as his pacemaker adjusted to another wave of magnetic interference. "But the data isn't traveling through satellites. It’s traveling through the old underwater telephone cables laid down during the Vietnam War. The ones our father’s foundation allegedly spent twenty million dollars 'decommissioning' in the nineties."
"They didn't decommission them," Claire said, leaning against the gunwale as she watched the silhouettes of abandoned houses slide past. "They retrofitted them with fiber-optics. They built a private nervous system beneath the ocean floor while the rest of the world was transitioning to the cloud. They knew the cloud could be hacked. They wanted something physical they could control from the depths."
Suddenly, the water ahead of them exploded in a geyser of white foam.
A sleek, autonomous security drone—shaped like a metallic manta ray and bearing the white corporate star of Aegis Life Sciences—breached the surface, its automated twin-barrels instantly locking onto their hull.
"Down!" Anna yelled, raising her tactical shield as a hail of armor-piercing rounds shredded the bow of the boat.
Victoria Lane didn't cut the throttle. She slammed the wheel to the left, drifting the boat sideways into a narrow wooden pier, crushing a row of docked longtail boats. As the drone adjusted its trajectory, Claire stood up, bracing her shoulder against the console, and fired a single, high-intensity magnesium flare directly into the drone’s optical sensor array.
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The drone veered wildly, its targeting computers blinded by the thermal overload, before slamming into the concrete foundation of a riverside temple, detonating in a ball of green chemical fire.
"They know we’re on the water," Victoria Lane spat, wiping river silt from her scar. "The perimeter isn't forty miles out anymore. The Enclave is moving inland."
