Chapter 17 - Emma’s Nightmare Comes Alive: The Kidnapping at Saint Jude’s
The highway heading south toward Rhode Island was a blur of gray asphalt and driving rain.
Marcus drove with one hand on the wheel, while his other hand used a pair of sterile surgical tweezers from the vehicle’s first-aid kit. Elena held Emma’s hand gently in the backseat, speaking to the little girl in soft, soothing tones that Marcus had never heard from her during her reign as Manhattan’s socialite mistress.
"You're very brave, Emma," Elena murmured. "Just a little pinch, okay?"
Emma didn't cry. She bit her lower lip as Marcus sliced a half-inch incision behind her left earlobe under local antiseptic spray. With the tweezers, he extracted a metallic capsule no larger than a grain of rice—Julian’s tracking chip.
Marcus rolled down his window and flung the bloody capsule into the bed of a commercial flatbed truck passing in the adjacent lane, sending their electronic ghost eighty miles per hour north toward Canada.
"The facility," Marcus said, his eyes meeting Elena’s in the rearview mirror. "Where is it?"
"Prudence Island, Narragansett Bay," Elena replied, leaning forward against the console. "It’s disguised as a marine biological research center. On paper, it’s funded by an oceanic foundation. Underground, it’s a high-grade cryogenic storage facility and surgical suite. Julian keeps Sophia in Level 2—the pediatric containment unit. She’s guarded by private paramilitaries."
"How do we get on the island without alerting radar?"
"We don't avoid radar," Elena said, a dark smile touching her scarred lips. "We use Julian’s own yacht. He keeps the *Astraea* docked at the Newport Yacht Club. The crew recognizes me. The biometric security recognizes my retinal scan. They don't know I escaped the prison fire yet—Julian thinks I'm ash in a New York morgue."
Two hours later, under the cover of a torrential coastal squall, the trio arrived at the Newport Marina.
The harbor was deserted, lashed by forty-knot gale winds. Moored at the end of Pier 4 sat the *Astraea*—a 120-foot carbon-fiber superyacht registered to Sterling Bio-Ventures.
Marcus left Emma in a locked, private marina office under the care of a trusted retired Navy SEAL colleague he had contacted via encrypted radio—a man named Dutch who owed Marcus his life from an overseas security extraction a decade prior.
"If I am not back by midnight, Dutch," Marcus said, gripping the veteran’s shoulder, "take Emma to the embassy in Zurich. Use the cipher in this envelope. Don't trust anyone with a Vance or Sterling last name."
"On my life, Marcus," Dutch nodded, checking the chamber of an automatic shotgun. "No one touches the kid."
Marcus knelt before his daughter one last time. Emma reached out, her small fingers touching the hollow of his cheek.
"Find my sister, Daddy," Emma whispered, her eyes clear, filled with an eerie, transcendent wisdom. "Mommy told me in my dream. Sophia is crying in the dark. She needs us."
Marcus swallowed the lump in his throat, kissed her forehead, and turned toward the yacht.
May you like
"Let’s go kill a doctor," Marcus said to Elena.
***
