Chapter 34 - Bloodline Resonance
"Get to the bunker under the carriage house!" I screamed into the mic, surging to my feet and ignoring the blinding spike of pain in my shattered ribs. "Sarah, do not engage! Lock the blast seal and wait for extraction!"
"It’s not Vance’s regular contractors!" Sarah’s voice was breaking up, assaulted by heavy acoustic interference. Over the channel, I could hear the rhythmic, bone-chilling *thwack-thwack-thwack* of suppressed automatic weapons and the wet, heavy thud of breaching charges. "They aren't taking cover! They're taking rounds to the chest and they keep walking! Daniel—they have purple eyes!"
The line went dead.
A flat, electronic whine filled the room, followed by the automated disconnect tone: *Signal terminated by remote electromagnetic pulse.*
"No!" I slammed my fist onto the metal console, splintering the casing of the radio transceiver. "No, no, no!"
"Dan, look at the monitor," Miller said, his voice dropping into a deadly, razor-sharp calm.
I whipped around. Miller had patched the titanium drive into a sandbox terminal, and the brute-force protocol had bypassed the outer shell. A single geographic tracking node had illuminated on a global digital map.
It wasn't pinging Scotland. It was pinging the Mediterranean.
Specifically: the territorial waters off the coast of Monaco.
"That’s Vance’s command flagship," Miller said, his fingers dancing across the mechanical keyboard. "The *Leviathan*. A three-hundred-foot converted icebreaker registered under a Panamanian shell company. He’s running his tactical relays through their marine satcom. But look at the secondary telemetry line."
A second crimson dot had appeared on the screen. It was moving across northern Italy, traveling at over one hundred and twenty miles per hour along secondary mountain highways.
"That’s not an aircraft," Miller muttered, zooming in on the Italian highway system. "It’s a ground vehicle. Stolen military transport out of the Swiss cantonment border depot twenty minutes ago."
"It’s Claire," I whispered.
"She’s heading for Monaco," Miller realized, glancing up at me. "Why? If her brain is frying and she’s running on instinct, why the hell is she driving toward the lion's mouth?"
"Because she’s not running to escape," I said, the truth crystallizing in my mind with terrifying clarity. "She knows what Vance is. She knows he’s gathering his buyers. When Vance ran out of Switzerland, he didn't just flee—he initiated the final phase. He’s taking the Lazarus technology to the international black market before the European intelligence agencies can lock down his assets. And the demonstration platform..."
"Is Lily," Miller whispered in disgust.
"Lily wasn't captured in Scotland to be hidden away," I said, cold fury replacing the panic in my veins. "Vance sent his strike team to bag her so he could put her on display on that yacht. A three-year-old child who survived a lethal oceanic plunge, carrying the perfect, stable, immortal genome. It’s an auction, Miller. The wealthiest despots, arms dealers, and private security cartels in the world are meeting on that ship to buy the blueprint to eternal life and private armies."
"And Claire knows where the yacht docks," Miller added.
"Claire was kept on that ship for six months before they moved her to the Alps," I said, remembering the micro-details of the files I had recovered from Zurich. "She’s going there to kill Vance before her body shuts down. But she doesn't have the biological stabilizer. If she attacks that ship alone, she’ll burn out halfway through the assault, and they’ll dismantle her."
"We can’t reach Scotland in time to stop the extraction team," Miller said, grabbing his tactical sidearm and checking the chamber. "Sarah’s bunker will buy them time—it’s reinforced cold-war armor—but they’ll cut through it eventually. Vance’s transport will fly Lily straight to the Riviera to rendezvous with the *Leviathan*."
"Then we beat them to the harbor," I snarled, buckling a new combat harness over my bandaged ribs. "We don't go to Scotland. We go to Monaco. We find Claire before she initiates her suicide run, we get the stabilizer from Vance’s floating laboratory, and we burn that ship down to the waterline."
"You look like walking roadkill, Mercer," Miller noted dryly, though his hands were already packing submachine guns, thermite grenades, and aquatic rebreathers into two heavy duffle bags.
May you like
"I’ll rest when my wife is sane and my daughter is safe," I replied, chambering a round into my .45 tactical. "Get the jet ready. We have six hours before the sun goes down over the Mediterranean."
***
