Chapter 55 - The Black Market Scalpel
"Out the back dock! Now!" Beatrice shouted, racking the slide of her submachine gun.
She shoved Julian toward a rusted emergency exit that led out onto a rotting timber pier jutting into the foggy bay. Lily followed without hesitation, her movements eerily coordinated, never tripping on the uneven, slippery boards.
Behind them, the cannery’s front doors blew inward with a deafening percussion. Flashbang grenades ignited the interior in blinding strobes of white magnesium light. Black-clad operators wearing full-face carbon-fiber ballistic helmets and synchronized night-vision arrays breached in three-man tactical stacks. They didn't shout commands. They fired suppressed, armor-piercing sub-caliber rounds that stitched through the wooden pallets, splintering the aged cedar into deadly shrapnel.
Beatrice wheeled around at the threshold of the back door, dropped to one knee, and unleashed a sustained burst of nine-millimeter fire. Two of the lead operatives crumpled to the floor, their ceramic breastplates sparking under the impact, buying them three seconds.
"Jump!" Julian yelled as they reached the end of the pier.
Tied to the pilings below was a battered, twin-engine Boston Whaler—the cannery watchman’s boat Beatrice had scouted two hours earlier. Julian hit the deck hard, his broken ribs driving the breath out of him with a strangled gasp. Beatrice caught Lily by the waist, dropped her onto the boat's cushioned bench, and vaulted over the gunwale.
Julian reached the ignition console, ripped the wire shroud apart with his bare, bleeding fingers, and jammed the bare leads together. The twin two-hundred-horsepower outboards roared to life with a ferocious, oily bark, churning the black bay water into white froth.
Bullets stitched across the boat's fiberglass stern as Julian slammed the throttles forward. The Whaler surged out into the pitch-black, fog-bound waters of Tillamook Bay just as an explosive grenade detonated on the pier behind them, sending flaming timbers cartwheeling into the surf.
Twenty minutes later, lost in the impenetrable sea fog three miles offshore, Julian cut the engines to an idle. The silence of the open ocean rushed in, broken only by the lap of cold waves against the hull and Julian’s ragged, wheezing breath.
"Julian, you're bleeding through your tactical vest," Beatrice said, her hands shaking as she pulled a field trauma kit from beneath the boat's console. "Sit down. Let me cut that off."
She sliced through the straps of his shirt. As she pulled the fabric away from his left pectoral muscle, her breath hitched.
"What is that?" Beatrice whispered.
Julian looked down. Embedded beneath his collarbone, adjacent to his heart, was a dark, purple surgical scar—three inches long, healed long ago. But now, reacting to the proximity of Lily and the electromagnetic field of the pursuers' drones, a faint, subdermal glow was pulsing beneath his own skin.
A red light.
*Blink.*
*Blink.*
Julian stared at his own chest, his mind reeling into the abyss of his past. The car accident four years ago. The one in Zurich. Claire had been the one who arranged the emergency surgery at the private clinic in the Alps. Claire had sat by his bedside, stroking his hair, whispering that everything was going to be fine.
"She didn't just operate on Lily," Julian whispered, the horror rising in his throat like bile. "She chipped me. I’m the relay. That's how they found us at the manor. That's how they found us at the cannery."
"Julian... we have to cut it out," Beatrice said, reaching for a sterilized scalpel from the trauma pack. Her eyes were wide with dread. "We’re in the middle of the ocean. If that transponder keeps pinging, their gunships will paint us on radar in five minutes."
"Do it," Julian said, leaning his head back against the fiberglass console and staring up into the fog. "No anesthesia. Just cut it out."
Beatrice gripped the scalpel. Her hands, steady through a dozen black operations, trembled for a fraction of a second. She pressed two fingers against the pulsing red light beneath Julian's collarbone, felt the hard, rectangular micro-casing embedded between his muscle fibers, and sank the blade into his flesh.
Julian didn't scream. He bit his own arm, tasting his own copper blood, his muscles locking like iron cables as Beatrice dug the surgical steel into the incision, prying the black, blood-slicked titanium microchip free from the tissue surrounding his subclavian artery.
With a final, sickening pull, the chip came out.
Beatrice threw the bloody device onto the metal deck. The tiny red LED continued to pulse furiously.
*Blink. Blink. Blink.*
Lily stepped forward, picked up the bloody transponder in her small hand, and looked down at Julian.
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"They know we took it out, Daddy," she said softly. "The woman on the frequency says she's waiting for us at Haneda Airport. She says if we don't bring my body to Tokyo, she’s going to turn the baby's light off forever."
***
