Chapter 16 - BLOOD IN THE WATER AGAIN
The drive back to Connecticut wasn't a journey; it was an uncontrolled descent into madness. The highway was a blur of black asphalt, sleet, and the red glare of brake lights that I passed on the shoulder at ninety miles an hour.
Saint Jude’s Cemetery didn't look like a resting place for the dead. It looked like an abandoned military encampment.
Perched on a high granite ridge overlooking the Long Island Sound, the cemetery was surrounded by ten-foot wrought-iron spires, now choked with dead ivy. Fog rolled off the black ocean below, blanketing the rows of Victorian headstones in a thick, suffocating mist.
I killed the SUV’s headlights half a mile down the access road, coasting to a halt against a ditch.
The rain had stopped, replaced by a wet, freezing wind that carried the metallic tang of salt and something else—burning diesel.
I crept through the rusted iron gates, my boots sinking into the saturated turf. The snub-nosed revolver was slick in my palm, the hammer cocked. My thumb throbbed with a dull, sickening heat where the ring’s lancet had penetrated the tissue.
At the center of the cemetery stood the Vance Family Mausoleum—a neo-Gothic cathedral in miniature, carved from dark gray barre granite. Its bronze doors were flanked by two life-sized statues of blindfolded angels, their marble faces stained with green copper runoff that looked like tears.
The bronze doors were ajar. A heavy industrial power cable snaked out from the darkness of the tomb, trailing toward a silent, muffled generator hidden behind an overgrown row of yew trees.
Inside, the air was warm, stagnant, and smelled of undisturbed earth and dry rot.
I stepped through the portal. Recessed halogen work lights had been mounted to the stone columns, casting long, grotesque shadows against the marble niches where five generations of my ancestors were interred.
At the back of the crypt, the massive floor slab bearing my father’s name had been levered upward on hydraulic jacks, revealing a narrow, spiraling flight of stone steps leading down into the subterranean bedrock.
I descended, each step cold beneath my boots, the silence broken only by the steady *drip-drip-drip* of condensation dripping from the vaulted limestone ceiling.
At the base of the stairs, the architecture changed.
The rough-hewn stone gave way to smooth, poured concrete from the late nineteen-fifties—a forgotten Cold War bunker converted into a private laboratory. Rusting surgical tables sat along the perimeter. Empty glass specimen jars lined industrial steel shelving, their preservation fluids long evaporated, leaving only white crystalline residue against the glass.
And in the center of the room sat an above-ground immersion tank, eight feet long, constructed of industrial acrylic and reinforced brass fittings.
It was filled with crystal-clear water.
Suspended inside the tank, tied to a weighted stainless-steel chair with heavy nylon straps, was Claire.
Her head was tilted back, her eyes wide, staring blankly through the acrylic wall. Her pale hair floated in the water like an aura of frayed silk. Bubbles were still escaping from the corner of her blue-tinged lips, rising one by one to pop against the surface.
"Claire!" I screamed, lunging toward the tank, slamming the butt of the revolver against the reinforced glass.
The heavy glass didn't even scratch. It was three inches of bulletproof polycarbonate.
"The seal is pressurized, David," a voice said from behind me.
I spun around, leveling the revolver.
Standing in the shadow of a steel archway was a man wearing a bespoke charcoal wool overcoat, his hands resting casually inside his pockets. He had silver hair cropped close to an aristocratic skull, skin stretched tight over sharp, elegant cheekbones, and eyes so light gray they appeared almost colorless in the halogen glare.
Beside him stood two men in sterile gray tactical uniforms, their submachine guns raised, their barrels aimed dead center at my chest.
"Victor?" I whispered, my voice cracking in disbelief.
The man smiled thinly. "Victor is in an orange jumpsuit in a maximum-security cell in Wallkill, David. I am his father. Your uncle Julian."
"Julian died," I stammered, my mind fracturing. "Julian died in a plane crash in the Alps twenty years ago."
"Julian had to disappear when the first trial sequence collapsed," the man said smoothly, stepping into the light. "My brother Arthur was always too sentimental. He wanted to cure diseases. He wanted to save lives. He didn't understand that the true power of the Lazarus sequence wasn't medicine—it was sovereignty. The men who control cellular immortality do not answer to governments, David. We *are* the government."
He glanced casually at the acrylic tank behind me.
"Claire was a disappointment," Julian continued, his voice devoid of even a trace of malice, which made it infinitely more terrifying. "She couldn't bear the weight of what she was bred to do. She contacted the federal authorities after your daughter survived the pool. She was going to trade the entire archive for witness protection."
"She’s Emily’s mother!" I roared.
"And you are Emily’s father," Julian replied calmly. "Which is the only reason your heart is still beating in this room. You have the decryption key. You validated the sequence with your blood thirty minutes ago in Boston."
He extended a gloved hand.
May you like
"Give me the signet ring, David. And I will give you the access code to drain the tank before Claire’s lungs fill with water. You have about ninety seconds. Choose."
***
