Chapter 14 - The Price of Willful Blindness
I pressed my back against the damp concrete wall, pulling Elena down behind the rusted stainless steel gurneys.
The beam of a high-powered tactical flashlight cut through the hole above, sweeping across the abandoned laboratory.
"Vance is dead, Dr. Whitmore," the voice above announced, without a shred of emotion.
"He bled out on the chapel steps twenty seconds ago."
"You shouldn't have trusted a retired cop whose gambling debts were higher than his loyalty."
Elena clutched my jacket, her breathing rapid and shallow.
"Sarah, what do we do?" she whispered into my ear.
"If they drop phosphine gas, our lungs will liquefy in forty seconds."
My mind, trained in emergency trauma and battlefield triage under the harshest conditions, went completely cold.
I looked at the iron crowbar in my right hand and the heavy halogen lamp battery pack on the floor.
Beside the data console sat three decommissioned oxygen cylinders, their pressure gauges rusted at halfway.
They were old, volatile, and packed with medical-grade oxygen that had sat undisturbed for two decades.
"Elena, give me the matches from your emergency kit," I whispered.
"Sarah, that's suicide," she breathed.
"They want the drive," I said, sliding the magnetic drive into the inner pocket of my reinforced surgical jacket.
"They don't know the layout of this sub-basement."
"When I yell, you run toward the back storm drain beneath the altar."
"There's an old coal chute that exits near the cliff edge."
"Ten seconds, Sarah!" the voice shouted from above.
"Five seconds!"
I didn't answer with words.
I jammed the tip of the iron crowbar into the valve stem of the nearest oxygen cylinder and threw my full weight against it.
The rusted brass valve snapped with an ear-splitting hiss.
Pressurized gas roared out into the enclosed concrete room, kicking up decades of toxic dust and mold.
I struck the road flare from Elena's trauma kit against the rough fieldstone.
The red phosphorus sparked into a blinding, crimson flame.
I didn't throw it at the cylinder.
I threw it straight up through the ceiling breach, directly into the face of the operative peering down.
The man screamed as the burning flare struck his tactical visor, blinding him.
"Run, Elena!" I roared.
I kicked the leaking oxygen tank over, sending it rolling toward the center of the room, and bolted toward the rusted iron grate of the coal chute.
Behind us, a burst of automatic gunfire tore through the darkness, the bullets ricocheting wildly off the stainless steel tables.
A spark from a ricochet hit the high-oxygen atmosphere.
The air in the room ignited with a deafening, concussive *CRACK* that threw me forward into the mud of the coal chute.
The shockwave tore the heavy oak chapel doors from their hinges above, sending a plume of black smoke and orange fire into the grey morning sky.
Elena pulled me through the narrow, slime-covered stones of the chute until our heads broke through into the freezing sea spray.
We tumbled out onto a ledge of slippery black slate fifty feet above the crashing waves of the Atlantic.
Behind us, the historic stone chapel of St. Jude’s collapsed inward upon itself, burying the secret laboratory under fifty tons of smoking rubble.
I coughed violently, spitting black soot and blood onto the rocks.
Through the smoke on the cliff path above, two black SUVs were already speeding away along the coastal highway toward Boston.
The operative who had blinded himself was dead, crushed in the cave-in.
Vance lay motionless on the gravel, a clean red hole in his forehead.
My hands were shaking, my skin blackened with carbon, but inside my breast pocket, the magnetic drive and the blood-stained infant bracelet remained intact.
I looked at Elena, whose face was streaked with soot and salt water.
"They know we have the records," I said, my voice dropping an octave into pure, unadulterated resolve.
"They know I'm coming."
"Where do we go, Sarah?" Elena asked, clutching her bruised ribs as she pulled herself up against the cliff face.
"Every police department in this state is connected to the Whitmore political machine."
"We can't go to the authorities."
"We don't need the police," I replied, staring out over the black, churned water toward the north.
"We need the only person who hates Evelyn Whitmore more than I do."
Elena looked at me in horror as she realized what I was thinking.
"Sarah... no."
"Not him."
"Ethan," I said, the name tasting like ash on my tongue.
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"He is rotting in the federal detention wing in Concord."
"And he is about to find out that his mother made him a murderer for a lie."
