CHAPTER 3: THE TRANSIT AT THE CATACOMB
Standing in the center of the funeral home’s grand receiving rotunda…
Surrounded by sixty thousand dollars of hand-carved Italian marble pedestals, antique silver candelabras, and bronze display caskets…
Was not a florist.
Standing on the black-and-white marble tiles, wearing my grandfather’s twenty-ounce Scottish tweed hacking jacket, my hands resting easily in the deep patch pockets, my unpolished bronze transit pin gleaming beside my lapel…
Was Coraly.
Me.
The woman he had left in Room 414 ninety minutes ago.
I was not wearing a hospital gown. I was not hooked to an IV drip. I was not bent double over a surgical incision, gasping for breath through a cloud of synthetic opioids.
My posture was four inches taller than Thaddius had ever seen it. My spine was straight, reinforced by thirty-four years of generational bedrock. My hazel eyes, completely clear, completely dry, swept up the length of the grand mahogany staircase and locked onto my husband’s face with forty decibels of compressed polar diamond.
And standing on my right flank…
Wearing his full service dress blue uniform bearing the four silver stars of the **Chief of Naval Operations**, his service bridge coat unbuttoned to reveal ten rows of decorations including the Navy Cross and the Silver Star…
Was my great-uncle.
**Vice Admiral David Mercer**.
Beside Admiral Mercer stood **United States Attorney Marcus Cooper**, Chief Federal Prosecutor for the Southern District of Georgia, holding an unsealed, four-hundred-page federal grand jury indictment bound in dark-crimson silk ribbon:
`CRIMINAL DOCKET: 2026-CR-00914-TREASON`
`THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA & THE MERCER SOVEREIGN ESTATE`
`v. THADDIUS ARTHUR BROMEL, ADELAIDE VANCE-BROMEL,`
`MARISOL BROMEL, AND CHIEF JUSTICE ARTHUR M. STERLING-VANCE.`
`CHARGES: EIGHTY-FOUR COUNTS OF CAPITAL HIGH TREASON UNDER ARTICLE THREE,`
`TRANSNATIONAL TRAFFICKING OF CONTRABAND BIOLOGICAL SPECIMENS,`
`PREMEDITATED SABOTAGE OF CLASSIFIED STRATEGIC NUCLEAR DEFENSE ASSETS,`
`AND SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY TO USURP SOVEREIGN ADMIRALTY ESCROWS.`
`EXTRAORDINARY CAPIAS BENCH WARRANT: IMMEDIATE ARMED ATTACHMENT.`
And standing on my left flank…
Wearing her sterile navy surgical scrubs beneath an un-ironed white lab coat, holding a ruggedized Panasonic Toughbook terminal…
Was Dr. Priyanka Oay.
And sitting between my boots on the terrazzo floor, his fangs bared, his amber eyes locked onto Thaddius Bromel’s throat with silent, synchronized fury…
Was Barnaby—the eighty-pound Belgian Malinois whose instincts had never wavered in the dark.
Thad’s tumbler of Pappy Van Winkle did not fall from his hand; the glass simply shattered between his spasming fingers:
*CRACK-SHATTER.*
Amber bourbon and twenty-three-year-old oak-barrel alcohol exploded across the front of his bespoke charcoal trousers, splashing over his polished calfskin oxfords:
“Coraly…?” Thad whispered.
The modulated, gentle pastoral voice he had used to comfort weeping widows for fifteen years was gone.
The word was paper-thin. It was the dry, whistling rasp of an ancient embalming pump sucking air in an empty cistern:
*k-k-k.*
“You’re… you’re in the transplant recovery ward! You had your kidney removed eighteen hours ago! The surgeon signed the operative certification!”
“Dr. Oay signed an operative certification under Title Fifty National Security Secrecy, Thad,” I spoke across the rotunda.
My voice had no microphone.
Yet it filled that cathedral-ceilinged mortuary with forty decibels of pure, unyielding, polar diamond:
“My kidneys are precisely where my grandfather Arthur Mercer placed them thirty-four years ago.”
“Intact.”
“Functional.”
“And completely sovereign.”
Talia Brennan scrambled backward from the balcony railing, her leather litigation brief dropping from her grip:
*THUD.*
The four hundred pages exploded across the upper stairs, scattering white leaves of legal text through the air like a paper blizzard:
“Thad!” Talia shrieked, her voice cracking into pure, unfiltered terror: “That’s Vice Admiral Mercer! That’s the Chief of Naval Operations! Why is the military command standing in your receiving parlor?!”
“Because this funeral home is not commercial real estate, Talia,” Vice Admiral David Mercer answered, stepping forward until his bridge boots struck the first tread of the grand staircase:
*KABOOOOM.*
The four-inch-thick carved oak carriage doors behind us were cleaved off their structural brass hinges by an eighty-pound linear hydraulic tactical breaching ram deployed by an active direct-action assault element from the **United States Marshals Service Special Operations Group (SOG)** and the **United States Navy Board of Harbor and Subterranean Security**:
*CRASH-ROAR-SHATTER.*
A concussive shockwave of freezing winter sleet, pulverized heart-pine framing, and tactical propellant blew through the room, extinguishing twelve silver memorial candelabras, shattering the stained-glass transom over the viewing chapels into a blizzard of blue and crimson glass, and throwing two junior mortuary apprentices flat onto their backs across the velvet runners:
*SCREAMS-PANTING-TERROR.*
Through the billowing clouds of tactical exhaust…
Illuminating the two-story rotunda in forty thousand lumens of clinical, blinding white tactical halogen…
Advanced twelve SOG operators.
They wore sterile dark-charcoal Nomex drysuits, Level IV boron-carbide plate carriers, and Ops-Core ballistic helmets fitted with panoramic night-vision brackets folded onto their foreheads. Across their chests hung suppressed SIG Sauer MCX Rattlers, their weapon-mounted PEQ-15 infrared lasers cutting through the drifting smoke in twelve razor-sharp needles of incandescent crimson light:
“FEDERAL INQUEST! REMAIN STATIONARY! SPREAD YOUR HANDS FLAT OVER THE BALCONY RAILING! DO NOT REACH FOR BRIEFING FOLDERS OR WEAPONS!”
