Chapter 20 - The Dead Man's Horizon
The federal tactical team fanned out across the laboratory, their carbines trained directly on Julian Holloway’s chest.
"Drop the tablet! Step away from the console!" the team leader bellowed.
Julian did not move an inch.
He kept his thumb hovering over the red execution icon on the touch screen.
"If I depress this button, gentlemen, the master quantum servers in Zurich will execute a thermal self-destruct," Julian said with chilling calm.
"The entire digital record of *PROJECT CHRYSALIS* will evaporate into slag."
"The cellular synthesis map that allows your physicians to replicate the cure inside my grandson will be lost forever."
"Without that data, the synthetic antibodies in Leo's body will inevitably decay within eighteen months, and he will die of systemic marrow failure."
My breath hitched in my chest.
I stepped forward past the line of tactical shields, my eyes burning into the patriarch’s cold, ancient face.
"You are lying," I said, fighting to keep my voice from cracking.
"Gertrude sequenced his blood. The mutation is permanent."
"The initial mutation is permanent, my dear," Julian replied, offering a terrifying, fatherly smile.
"The secondary cellular stability requires a synthetic maintenance enzyme."
"A maintenance enzyme that only exists inside this server bank."
"You thought Tristan was the only one who had a secret?"
"Tristan was an infant playing with matches."
"I designed this protocol before you were even born."
"Stand down, Julian!" Marcus Hayes shouted, stepping into the lab with his credentials displayed.
"Federal agents have already seized your estate in Greenwich."
"Victoria has been taken into custody in Seattle."
"Your empire is finished!"
Julian chuckled, a low, dry rasp that sounded like dead leaves scraping across concrete.
"Empire is an idea, Mr. Hayes. Ideas do not go to prison."
Julian slowly turned the satellite tablet toward us.
Displayed on the screen was a live video feed from a thermal surveillance drone hovering over an isolated stretch of coastline near Bremerton.
The target displayed on the crosshairs was the underground naval shipyard at Dock Fourteen.
The exact room where Matron Gertrude had been left under federal guard to watch over Leo.
On the screen, four black tactical vans were already breaching the security perimeter of the shipyard.
Masked men carrying heavy breaching charges were descending the stairwell toward the medical bunker.
"Did you really believe I would come to Puget Sound with only one extraction team?" Julian asked softly.
"My private contractors have already breached Dock Fourteen."
"They do not need the child alive anymore, Reese."
"They only need four vials of his fresh marrow."
"No!" I screamed, lunging toward the console.
Before I could take three steps, Julian’s thumb pressed firmly down onto the red screen.
A sharp, high-pitched electronic whine pierced the server room.
The server racks behind the acrylic glass suddenly burst into blinding white sparks, dense acrid smoke pouring from the cooling vents as the hard drives melted under chemical thermal charges.
At the exact same instant, a monstrous explosion ripped through the hull beneath our feet.
Julian had not just triggered the data purge.
He had detonated the yacht’s scuttling charges in the lower engine room.
The entire two-hundred-and-eighty-foot vessel bucked violently upward, throwing me, Vance, and the federal operators across the polished marble floor.
The laboratory lights plunged into blackness, replaced by the deafening scream of the yacht’s hull alarms and the roar of incoming seawater.
Through the shattered reinforced windows, the black, freezing waters of Puget Sound came rushing into the lower deck with catastrophic force.
I scrambled across the slanting, violently shaking floor, my hands desperately grasping for the console.
On the cracked tablet screen lying in the pooling seawater, the live drone feed flickered wildly.
The screen showed the iron door of the Bremerton underground lab blowing outward in a cloud of dust and fire.
A man in a black tactical helmet walked into the smoke, his rifle raised.
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Then, the satellite screen went completely dead.
Seawater hit my chest like a wall of solid ice, tearing me away from the bulkhead and dragging me into the churning, pitch-black vortex of the sinking ship.
