Chapter 30 - The Fall at Hangar Nine
*00:00:07.*
*00:00:06.*
Daniel looked Evelyn dead in her cold, beautiful blue eyes. "You forgot one thing, Evelyn."
Her brow twitched with the faintest flicker of irritation. "And what would that be, Daniel?"
"You forgot who built this building."
*00:00:00.*
*CLICK.*
The entire penthouse plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness.
The building’s primary transformer shrieked as Claire severed the junction lines three floors below. The hum of the climate control died. The blue UV light on the pod flickered and vanished. The loud, hydraulic hiss of the magnetic emergency seals releasing echoed through the cavernous living room.
"Kill him!" Evelyn’s voice shattered the darkness in a feral scream.
Muzzle flashes strobed through the black room as the two private contractors opened fire. The deafening cracks of gunfire shattered the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, letting in the howling Atlantic wind and torrential rain.
Daniel didn't run away. He lunged forward.
He didn't aim for the guards. He aimed for the pod.
His body hit the reinforced glass lid with the force of a battering ram. The unlatched seal tore open, the emergency hinges groaning under the strain. Daniel shoved his arm into the freezing chamber, his fingers wrapping around Emma’s tiny, warm chest. With a single, violent motion, he tore the IV lines free from the dialyzer, shielding the screaming infant against his ribs with his left arm.
A bullet ripped through Daniel’s right shoulder, the impact spinning him around and sending him crashing against the marble floor. Warm blood instantly soaked his sleeve.
Through the rain blowing into the room, the emergency backup lights kicked on with an amber strobe.
Evelyn was standing five feet away, her cashmere suit splattered with rain and flying glass. The perfection had vanished. Her face was contorted into a mask of demonic fury. In her right hand, she wasn't holding the detonator anymore.
She was holding a matte-black semi-automatic pistol, aimed directly at Daniel’s head.
"Give me the child, Daniel," she shrieked, the wind whipping her blonde hair across her eyes. "Give her to me or I will paint this room with your brains!"
Daniel rolled onto his back, pulling Emma completely beneath his chest, using his own flesh and bone as a human bunker. He looked up at Evelyn, his teeth bared in a bloody grin.
"You're too late, Evelyn."
Behind Evelyn, emerging from the service stairwell like an apparition summoned straight from the depths of hell, stood Claire.
She was covered in soot and black transformer oil, her eyes burning with an unholy light. In her hands, she carried the heavy steel crowbar.
"Get away from my children," Claire roared.
Before Evelyn could turn, Claire swung the steel bar with every ounce of maternal fury left in her broken body. The bar struck Evelyn’s wrist with a sickening crunch. The gun flew out of Evelyn’s hand, skidding across the wet marble and tumbling over the shattered edge of the penthouse, plunging forty stories down into the churning harbor below.
Evelyn screamed, clutching her shattered wrist, stumbling backward toward the open expanse where the glass window used to be. The wind screamed through the breach, sucking loose papers, curtains, and rain into the vortex.
"Claire!" Daniel yelled, clutching the crying baby Emma to his chest, struggling to drag himself up from the bloody floor.
Evelyn stood on the precipice, forty stories above the concrete pier. The rain plastered her designer clothes to her skin. She looked at Claire, then at Daniel, then at the baby in Daniel’s arms.
Even with her wrist broken, even with her empire turned to ash, a terrifying, triumphant smile spread across Evelyn’s blood-flecked lips.
She reached into her jacket pocket with her left hand and pulled out a small, black remote transmitter.
"You think this penthouse is the nursery, Daniel?" Evelyn laughed, the sound whipped away by the roaring hurricane wind. "Did you really think I would keep my most valuable asset in the place you could find her?"
Daniel’s blood turned to ice. "What did you do?"
"Noah was never the primary donor," Evelyn whispered, her eyes wide with psychotic glee. "Emma was the distraction. The plane at Hangar Nine... it didn't take off empty. Who do you think was in the transport incubator they loaded twenty minutes ago?"
Daniel’s heart stopped.
Downstairs. The black SUV Noah had seen.
"No..." Claire screamed, falling to her knees. "No! NO!"
"See you in Zurich, darling," Evelyn whispered.
May you like
And with that final, mocking smile, Evelyn Vance threw herself backward into the abyss, vanishing into the howling gray clouds of the Atlantic storm.
At that exact second, from the harbor runway three miles to the east, the deafening, twin-turbine roar of a Gulfstream G650 tore through the rain, banking hard toward the open ocean, carrying a secret that was about to blow the Whitmore family into a million pieces.
