Chapter 15 - The Trap at Pier 54
Fog rolled off the East River like poisonous steam, swallowing the rusted hulls of abandoned cargo ships docked along the Brooklyn waterfront.
Pier 54 was a derelict expanse of corrugated iron, rotting wooden piers, and shadowed shipping containers. But beneath the facade of urban decay, Evelyn’s thermal scanner—running off Sarah's laptop—revealed high-voltage perimeter fences, infrared cameras, and at least a dozen armed mercenaries patrolling the perimeter.
Evelyn moved through the shadows like a wraith. Dressed in matte-black tactical gear, she cut through the chain-link fence behind an abandoned transformer station, slipping past the patrol blind spots mapped out by her mother’s software.
She climbed an iron fire escape to the roof of Warehouse 7. Peering through a grimy skylight, she saw the interior.
It was a state-of-the-art medical operating theater constructed inside the hollow warehouse. Massive glass isolation tanks hummed with pressurized oxygen. High-tech surgical equipment gleamed under harsh fluorescent lights.
And in the center of the room, strapped into a pediatric medical bed surrounded by monitoring screens, was Lily.
The baby was crying, her tiny hands reaching out for nothing, a clear IV line taped to her fragile forearm.
Standing over the bed was a figure in a motorized wheelchair, connected to a mobile life-support unit. His skin was translucent, stretched tight over a skeletal skull, his eyes milky and sunken from terminal neurodegeneration.
Julian Vance.
Beside him stood four private military contractors armed with suppressed submachine guns, and an imposing female doctor holding a titanium bone-marrow extraction needle.
"Commence the baseline harvest," Vance’s voice rasped through an artificial larynx, hollow and robotic. "Every hour we delay, my spinal cord deteriorates further. Extract the spinal fluid now."
The doctor raised the needle toward Lily’s back.
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Evelyn didn't hesitate. She drew two flashbang canisters from her tactical belt, smashed the skylight with the butt of her rifle, and dropped them directly into the center of the operating theater.
***
