Chapter 58 - The Cipher in the Veins
The descent down the granite face was a blur of freezing spray and screaming wind. The friction brake smoked against my gloves as I controlled our fall, landing with a heavy thud onto the inflated pontoons of the zodiac boat. The craft pitched wildly on a six-foot swell, but I held my footing, immediately unhooking and securing Noah inside the protective storm capsule built into the hull.
Seconds later, Marcus hit the deck beside me, followed immediately by Arthur, who landed in a heap, crying out as his injured shoulder slammed into the fiberglass transom.
Above us on the cliff platform, flashlights suddenly pierced the rain. The remaining Syndicate operatives had cleared the tunnel collapse.
"They're on the ledge!" I yelled.
Marcus didn't waste a second. He fired up the muffled multi-fuel outboard engine, spinning the throttle. The boat surged forward into the dark waves just as high-caliber sniper rounds began smacking into the water around us like falling meteorites. One round punched cleanly through the port pontoon, but the self-sealing tactical rubber expanded instantly, holding the chamber's air.
We cleared the headland, plunging into the deep fog where their visual tracking failed.
Inside the small shelter cabin of the zodiac, I knelt over Noah, pulling out Arthur’s recovered data pad. I connected the bio-sync cable from Noah's monitoring pad into the terminal.
Lines of green and amber code cascaded across the screen, parsing through millions of base pairs of genetic data.
"Arthur, read this," I commanded, pulling him by his collar toward the screen. "What is this countdown?"
Arthur wiped rain and blood from his eyes, staring at the complex chromosomal lattice displayed on the terminal. His jaw went slack.
"It’s... it’s not forty-eight hours," he whispered, his voice trembling. "The shock of the escape accelerated the metabolic chain. Noah's telomerase synthesis is going into systemic runaway. Clara... we don't have two days. We have fourteen hours."
May you like
"Fourteen hours to get to Manhattan," Marcus said grimly from the helm, staring out at the compass heading. "By sea and road, even under emergency priority, that’s an eight-hour run minimum. And Manhattan is Eleanor Vance’s backyard. It’s fortified like a military installation."
"Then we don't sneak in," I said, looking down at my son’s pale, sweat-slicked face. My heart felt like cold, tempered steel. "We go straight through the front door."
