Chapter 45 - THE FLIGHT TO NEUCHÂTEL
The small private airstrip outside of Newark smelled of aviation fuel and rotting autumn leaves. We arrived at three in the morning under a driving rainstorm, the stolen laundry van abandoned in an industrial ditch five miles back.
Standing beneath the halogen lights of an open hangar was a battered, twin-engine turboprop plane with unmarked registration numbers. Beside it stood an elderly man in a grease-stained flight jacket, smoking an unfiltered cigarette down to the butt. His name was Victor; he was an old contact from Hayes’s days with the DEA, a man who asked no questions as long as the cash was delivered in clean, unmarked hundred-dollar bills.
"You're late, Clara," Victor said, flicking the cigarette butt into a puddle where it sizzled and died. "The radar sweep over the North Atlantic is tightening up. If we don't take off before the FAA logs an anomalous transponder trace out of New Jersey, we'll have F-16s escorting us to McGuire Air Force Base."
"We had company in Scranton," I said, handing him an envelope containing ten thousand dollars—the entirety of Hayes's emergency cash reserve retrieved from a lockbox behind the radiator in his off-grid cabin. "Does this bird have the range to reach the Azores?"
"She'll make Santa Maria Island if the tailwinds hold," Victor grunted, pocketing the envelope without counting it. "From there, you're on your own to charter a hopper into southern France or the Swiss border. Get the kid inside. We leave now."
Mia climbed into the cramped, cold cabin of the plane without a word. Her face had hardened over the past four hours. The terror that had paralyzed her in the gym when Vanessa’s bullies tore her dress, the trembling shock of discovering her true identity—it had all hardened into a cold, diamond-sharp resolve.
As the turboprop bounced down the wet runway and lifted into the dark, turbulent cloud cover, Mia pulled the heavy wool blanket around her shoulders and spread the Sinclair documents across the folding table between us.
"Tell me about Vanessa Sinclair," Mia commanded quietly, looking directly into my eyes. "Not what Julian Vance said. Not what the newspapers printed. Who was she really?"
I leaned back against the vibrating bulkhead, the steady drone of the twin engines vibrating through my skull.
"She was the daughter of an industrialist who built weapons systems during the Cold War," I began, my voice steady despite the turbulence shaking the cabin. "When the Berlin Wall fell, the Sinclair family privatized biological research facilities across Eastern Europe. They operated beyond the oversight of international treaties. In the late nineties, Vanessa took control of the syndicate. She didn't view people as family or citizens. To her, blood was merely proprietary intellectual property."
"And Julian Vance?"
"Julian was her head of security," I replied. "He was a former intelligence contractor. When Vanessa realized she was pregnant with twins who carried the genetic flaw that plagued her family line, she set up the clinic in Pennsylvania under a false charter. She intended to raise one child—the strongest one—in absolute luxury, while keeping the second child hidden in an isolated environment as a genetic failsafe. An emergency organ donor."
Mia looked down at her hands, turning them over. Her skin was pale, marked by small scars from her childhood in the rural mountains—a scraped knuckle from climbing trees, the burn scar on her forearm, the faint white line across her palm from an old kitchen accident.
"Julian stole me," Mia murmured. "Not to save me. To rob her."
"Exactly," I said. "He realized that if he controlled the failsafe, he controlled Vanessa. If the favored child got sick, Vanessa would have to pay whatever ransom Julian demanded to get the donor back. But Julian got greedy. He waited too long. Vanessa's private intelligence traced him to your high school. The bullying, the public shaming... it was Vanessa's operatives testing your psychological resilience. They wanted to see if you were broken, or if you were strong enough to withstand the extraction procedure."
"And the girl in the photograph?" Mia asked, her voice cracking slightly. "My sister. What's her name?"
"Genevieve," I said, tapping the corner of the medical ledger. "Genevieve Sinclair. She has never stepped outside a climate-controlled compound in her entire life. She doesn't know who she is, Mia. She doesn't know she has a sister. She only knows she is dying."
Mia looked out the small scratched window of the plane. Below us, the pitch-black void of the Atlantic Ocean stretched endlessly into the night.
"She tore my dress in front of everyone," Mia whispered, her eyes reflecting the dim red cabin light. "Vanessa made sure I knew what it felt like to be stripped naked and mocked before the whole world. She wanted me to feel worthless so I wouldn't fight back when they put me on the operating table."
Mia reached down and tightened the laces of her work boots, her fingers remarkably steady.
May you like
"When we land in Switzerland, Clara," Mia said, looking up with a gaze that sent a shiver straight down my spine, "I'm not going to be the donor. I'm going to take back everything they stole from me."
***
